I’d tell Calgary beforehand, and I’d put my fourth line on the ice for the first shift, as a gesture of solidarity. Tortorella is the best thing to happen to the Canucks for a while, but sending his troops in for an all-out brawl before the puck had time to hit the ice is going a little too far. Sure, he has to protect the Sedin sisters, but I think he could have found some balance.
I have just read the sixty-fourth virtual page of the 400+ virtual pages of the first volume of a series of ten (and counting!). I have just met the Sword of Destiny. I have some predictions.
First there’s Thor. No, not the Norse God of Thunder, but a farm boy less strapping (and less loved) than his brothers. Let’s give the author credit for not even trying to hide the fact that Thor is the Chosen One. Argon the kick-ass druid told us so, in that wizard-not-revealing-things-that-will-break-the-plot kind of way, before vanishing. Thor seems like a good kid.
Interesting wrinkle: When Thor first discovers his power, it’s after praying (at a time of distress) to Big-G God. Not very druid-like; it remains to be seen if that’s going to be a theme or if that was just the writer accidentally slipping monotheism into the text.
And yes, the Top Druid in this story is named after an element. I’m waiting for Xenon to show up and challenge him. But while that remains unknown, there are many certainties.
Thor is a loyal subject of Good King. The lands of Good King have known peace for a long time; geographically, the kingdom is well-protected. Good King rules half of a circle of territory surrounded by a circular valley and a magical barrier, which keeps the unwashed barbarians without at bay. Inside, Good King has only one rival: Bad King. In the story they have different names (Scottish ones, actually).
I’ve read to the point in the story where the King is regarding the Sword of Destiny, which is almost literally the sword in the stone of Arthurian legend. Good King hoped to be the guy to lift it from the spikes or whatever-the-hell is restraining it. No dice.
So here’s what’s happening right now: Good King’s elder daughter is getting married to Bad King’s son. It’s happening in the capital city of Good Kingdom. Lots of Bad King’s people will be in Good City. Barbarians seem to be gathering for an attack outside the magical barrier. Somewhere far away, Thor has decided to say “Fuck you, dad! I’m going to force the army to take me!”
So, the predictions: Treachery! Bad King uses the happy occasion to overwhelm Good City! Somehow, his Evil Druid (Xenon?) finds the magical switch that turns off the barrier that protects both their kingdoms from the hordes outside. Our kid Thor arrives to find the city in turmoil. Events, fortitude, and whatnot bring Thor to the palace.
Good King will be killed. He will die with honor.
Remember when I said Good King’s elder daughter is getting married? That implies a younger one. There has been no hint of her in the narrative so far, but it’s a slam dunk that Thor will be in the palace, assholes will be sniffing around her ankles, and the Sword of Destiny will come to hand. And shit will go down. A princess will be impressed.
All of which has me ready to be a little disappointed. You see, Thor’s brothers are all about living by the sword, while Thor has developed a near-supernatural skill with the sling. I’m going to be a little sad when Thor surpasses his brothers by being better at the sword rather than rendering the sword obsolete.
I might hope that the writer could surprise me, but a key formative moment has already been lost. Thor doesn’t like killing things. He’s a gentle soul. When a terrible creature has one of Thor’s sheep in its jaws, Thor’s first bullet is to kill the sheep, to end her suffering.
So then it’s ON between Thor and this huge-ass killing machine. Thor’s taking a right beating until he prays to big-G God and finds the power he needs to survive. This was a pivotal moment for me, as a reader. “How much do you value life?” I asked through the text. Thor killed the thing. Given the time and context, an obvious decision. Not even a decision, really, just the way things are done. Mankind asserting its dominance over the world.
But in that context, how powerful would it have been if Thor had let the predator go free?
It’s not fair, really, to ask those questions of someone else’s work. It’s just that Thor has been presented as a champion of life, and when faced with the ultimate predator he has to accept that most lives feed on others.
____
Time has passed, pages have turned, and while structurally things are moving in the inescapable grooves reserved for fantasies like this, grooves that have been gouged in the rocky soil of storydom over the years, etched in the very bedrock by the passage of countless interchangeable plots, many of my predictions above proved, while not wrong, to be impatient. Bad King and Outer Hordes are definitely going to attack. Sword of Desitny will end up in Thor’s hand. Younger princess (who has been chosen to rule the land when Good King dies) has arrived and is definitely sweet on Thor.
The story reads like a novel aimed at middle-school kids; the sentence structure is very basic and the vocabulary is limited. More than that, the plot seems more geared toward gratification than conflict. Thor’s trajectory has been steadily upward, and he’s started to collect plot tokens.
Ojects appear out of nowhere when needed and disappear again when inconvenient. One of Thor’s mystical plot-token pets, a white leopard cub, has only been fed a mouthful of beer as far as I can tell, despite Thor worrying about caring for the beast.
Then there’s the second sun, which doesn’t seem to have a name, and doesn’t affect the world much at all. It may be some sort of variable star, because plenty of times, the day is delimited by the position of ‘the sun’. Singular. Note to the writer: if you’re going to add a romantic detail like two suns, you need to work it. For instance, some days Big Sun (man sun?) will rise before Little Sun (woman?). Other times, it will be the other way around. In a world bound by prophesy and destiny, you can get a lot of mileage out of stuff like that.
Despite those warts, I’ve been enjoying the read, up until last night. What can I say? Sometimes I like an easy read geared toward gratification. But last night…
This is going to be a spoiler, if such a thing can possibly happen when discussing a story like this.
… last night as I read, Thor learned that Good King was going to be poisoned. Thor must warn GK! He goes to the castle, but Good King is out. The warning will have to wait.
Not long after that, Thor is talking to Good King’s youngest son. Thor doesn’t mention his fears to someone particularly well-suited to help prevent the catastrophe. Then Thor talks to another guy who could help, but doesn’t bring it up. Instead, Thor volunteers to spend the entire fucking day riding far from the castle – so far he might not get back in time to deliver his warning.
Oh, and he easily could have passed word to Good King’s Eldest Son somewhere along the way.
In exchange for this horrible plot contrivance, we do get a very good treatise on the nature of chivalry and heroism. Rough paraphrase: “Don’t work to be better than the other guy, work to be a better person than you are now.” I liked that part. The titular Quest, it turns out, is more internal — the quest to always be better than you were yesterday. That, kids, is how you turn the theme of your story.
But then I thought about the context. While Thor is hearing this lecture, he’s being incredibly derelict. When he learned the King was not in the castle, did Thor go and try to find him? Nope. Sure, ditching his training might have got him kicked out of the army, but that’s exactly the kind of sacrifice he should be willing to make.
I’d actually talked myself into paying for the second installment of this escapist fluff, but now I’m not so sure. It’s the convenient forgetting-of-things that’s undermining my pleasure. The last one, forgetting that Good King is in deadly peril and that Thor’s every act should be to thwart the plot, is the killer.
Google just asked to be allowed access to fairly low-level functionality on my computer. There’s a chance I might have benefitted from saying yes, but there was no explanation at all given for why the Goog should have that access. No value proposition whatsoever, just “Google wants to use the accessibility interface”. (That’s not the exact quote, which I now regret not saving.)
Honestly, I don’t even know how to prove the request came from Google. So if you get something like that, do like I did. Say no.
We all know that turning off lights in unoccupied rooms is not only economically smart, it’s good for the planet. Lightbulbs use electricity. Electricity costs money and its production harms the environment. Turning off lights is a simple win-win.
But here’s a thought experiment for you: How much does your car’s mileage change when its headlights are on? Is it even measurable? Even when your car is idling?
Let’s do some quick math. Based on sources I cite here, a gallon of gas is considered to be the energy equivalent of 34kWh of electricity (34.02, actually. You know this ridiculous false precision is the result of politics, but this is the number that MPGe is based on.) That’s the amount of energy needed to light 340 100-watt incandescent bulbs for an hour.
But to make the comparison fair, we have to factor in the energy required to get the gas into your tank, and the energy lost to bring the power to the socket in your wall. The math I used in the previous episode resulted in a gallon of gas requiring 5 gallons of gas to reach the pump (refining takes a lot of energy), while it takes 2kWh of additional electricity to bring you the 1kWh you burn. We then divide the gasoline energy by six, and the socket electricity efficiency by three, and that brings us to a slightly-more-honest conversion factor of 68kWh of wall-socket electricity per gallon-in-tank of gasoline. Let’s call it 70 to avoid any pretense of false precision ourselves.
That number will move violently depending on where your gasoline and electricity comes from. 70kWh/gallon is just some wild-assed number based on broad averages, but it’s a number less false than most.
Let’s say, to keep the math easy, that you drive a car that gets about 30 miles per gallon (most of us don’t). That comes out to about 2kWh per mile. Roughly speaking, all the lights in your house, on all night, is about the same as driving one mile in your car (if your car is relatively efficient).
One damn mile.
Unless, of course, you’ve converted to compact fluorescent and LEDs in your home. In that case one damn mile could light your house for a week.
Let’s look at things another way, as long as we have our calculators out. The question: how much energy do I save if I choose a car that gets one slim mile more per gallon?
Of course, that depends on how much you drive. But let’s say you tune up your car and inflate your tires and your mileage improves from 30 to 31. And entirely doable scenario.
We’re going to have to go to unsupported decimal points here, so the numbers that pop out are only valid when compared to each other.
70kWhpg/30mpg = 2.33 kWh per mile
70kWhpg/31mpg = 2.25 kWh per mile
Savings: 700 Watt-hours per mile
Improving your mileage from 30mpg to 31 saves about as much energy as you use burning a 70w incandescent bulb for ten hours, every damn mile you drive. Improving from 20mpg to 21 saves more than twice that. Have your checked your tire pressure lately? That simple act could mean a lot. All your other good-energy-citizen choices are dwarfed by your choice of car, and the way you maintain it.
The takeaway here is simple: Yes, please do buy energy-star appliances. Turn off the lights when you leave a room. Be smart. But don’t go the extra mile. Not in your car, at least.
I just saw an ad for a tool that didn’t interest me much, but I noticed that the neatly-bearded spokesman in his flannel shirt was standing in what was declared by the subtitles to be the “Tool Research Laboratory”, or something like that.
The set was clearly NOT a tool research laboratory, competing with CSI:Miami for “Least Practical Lighting for a Place Where People Use Their Eyes On the Job” award.
But… Somewhere there actually is a facility where people work hard to produce new, better tools. The people sitting at the workbenches aren’t necessarily wearing flannel; many of them likely have advanced degrees and spend their recreational hours reading about new alloys and fabrication techniques.
An example challenge: Make a better wrench. No biggie, it’s just a tool that has quietly matured over the centuries. But now, with math and engineering and gol-danged science, people are making better wrenches. Most of the emphasis in this new tool revolution is on convenience and one-size-does-more designs, which are all right, but then you get an ingenious device that puts the force on the flats of the bolt, rather than the corners, allowing you to apply a lot more force. A genuine improvement on an old standard*.
Christmas is the time these devices get to strut on the television, as women try to find gifts for men who don’t seem interested in things that are knitted. (Hint: many of those guys are looking forward to holiday leftovers more than they are to the gifts. Because there’s something magical about holiday leftovers. Just sayin’.)
You know, upon further review that last paragraph was pretty sexist. To the guy looking to buy tools for his husband, or the woman trying to figure out how to leave some hints as she cleans the grime from under her fingernails, I say rock on, and don’t forget the leftovers. Forgive me as I perpetuate the stereotype with my use of pronouns to follow.
Hey, remember the SnakeLight? It’s just a rechargeable flashlight with a bendy section, but many years ago when I got one for Christmas I was amazed at how useful it was. There’s a whole SnakeLight product category now. That’s a win.
Finally, the promised advice for tool-givers: beware the one magical wrench that’s as good as a whole set of traditional wrenches. It’s probably not quite as good, and your tool-appreciating gift target already has a whole wrench set and knows how to use it. When Tool User opens the package during your holiday ceremony, he will likely exclaim with happy surprise, but you will know he’s faking it.
But later, in the shop, on many occasions that every-wrench-in-one device is the one your beloved tool user will reach for rather than take the time to find the exact right wrench out of his set. Well, unless your tool user is like me. I’m a frightfully slow worker, and part of that is not just choosing the right wrench, but getting it positioned optimally. So give me a wrench that can reach a nut I couldn’t reach before. That is the one that will make he hairs on the back of my neck stand up — almost as much as a turkey sandwich with all the fixins.
Oh, and battery-powered tools are fundamentally inferior to ones you plug into the wall. The 120 seconds lost to laying the cord and coiling it up again dwarf the loss of power, the time lost messing with batteries, and the general better performance of the tool. Hippies and true craftsmen agree: batteries are no good.
Go Tool Research Laboratory! I’d apply for a job there, but I’m wretchedly unqualified.
* I’ve never seen sockets that embrace this innovation. Get on that, Tool Research Laboratory!
Whew! November’s over and I put another 50,000 words behind me. 50,032, to be exact, finishing with six fat minutes to spare.
Not of all of those words were worth reading again, by any stretch. Still, it was an interesting exercise this year, one I seemed hell-bent to make more difficult for myself. Here are a few of the elements that made this novel different:
Will I pick up where I left off and fill out the story? Let’s just say there are a couple of other stories on top of this one in the to-do pile.
Exciting times over at Poetic Pinup Revue! For one razor-thin day, you can score a huge discount on the upcoming issue, and even on a subscription for the next year. Details are at The Revue. To get a feel for what the mag is like, you can check out a few samples here, but you will have to imagine the pages big and glossy and super high resolution and in your hand.
And if that’s not enough, for tomorrow only, we’re selling back issues at half price! Woo! Some of the issues are in short supply, and when they’re gone, that’s it, most likely forever. If you like poetry and/or art photography (both in a wide variety of styles), you owe it to yourself to grab at least one of these big, glossy, beautiful magazines. Here’s a couple of my favorite covers, but you should head on over to the The Revue to take advantage of this clean-the-closet special. The special prices are available on the sale page; just scroll on down and choose your favorite back issues.
This has become one of Lady Byng’s favorite places to hang out:
Lady Byng, hanging out in the back yard.
As I try desperately (and occasionally despairingly) to cross the 50,000-word mark for the thirteenth year, I’ve been pondering the world my story takes place in, and the following question: Is this our Earth or some other Earth? How many stories have you read that take place on a world with completely different geography, but the same moon as ours? Is it Earth or not?
My story takes place on a world that has been blasted to ruin. The civilization before the cataclysm was very different from our own (at least on the surface), but there’s that big ol’ moon lighting the way for Wolf and Joe as they cross the wasteland. Is that riverbed the former course of the Rio Grande? The Vltava? The Nile? Or is this some otherworld that just happens to have a big, fat moon like ours?
Or maybe I should just stop thinking so much and get to typing. I have a lot of words to go.
I’d like to have a set of post-it-style notes printed up, with a variety of messages for a variety of parking situations. Some of the messages might include:
The last one is fairly specific; and honestly if I were in charge I’d cut a deal with Amazon and lease them bottom level of our garage. The others, though, I think you can appreciate.
If anyone out there I know is thinking about buying Apple stuff — we make computers and whatnot — I can get folks a modest discount. I get a set amount of discounts to hand out each year, so if no one uses these discounts by Dec 31st, *poof*, they are gone.
Friends don’t let friends by Apple gizmos for full price.
I’d heard whispers about it in the shadows, seen the knowing glances between those in the loop, and recently I’ve become one of them. I’m a Wazer.
I am required to be at an office during what we call ‘normal business hours’. That means I’m driving to my office in the morning and home from the office in the evening, along with all the other NBH drones. Some mornings, the 12-mile trip can take an hour. That’s not good.
Along my route are some key decision points. It’s shortest to turn left at Curtner, but that ramp onto the freeway can get massively backed up, to the tune of fifteen minutes. On those mornings it’s better to stay on the surface streets for an extra mile.
But which mornings? How can I tell in advance whether Curtner is a mess? Enter Waze, the social mapping service. Waze takes real-time data from drivers like me and finds the fastest route to work (and, perhaps more importantly, home again). Sometimes those routes use streets I never would have thought of, but I ignore the advice at my peril. (Monday, I thought I knew better than Waze. Boy was I wrong.)
Waze is a bit quirky; right now it tries to steer me around one intersection at all costs — including cutting through a cemetery as an alternative. I have no idea why it developed an allergy to that right turn, and I suppose a true Wazer would log in and fix the map. Even the maps themselves are crowdsourced. It’s pretty cool.
You should be aware, however, that Google just bought Waze for a cool 1.1 Billion, so as I drive I’m telling the Goog where I am. If you use Google maps you’re already doing that, however, and I think this is a case where a voluntary surrender of personal information (with a very short useful shelf-life) actually makes the world better. Perhaps I just think that way because I really hate traffic. I decline to advertise my location on Facebook, and I hope all you have more common sense than to do so.
Another very useful phone-related product I came across recently is actually a gadget/app combo. You may have read recently that I’ve been tinkering with my car so that it will pass the California emissions test. I made some repairs and pulled the fuse that powers the onboard computer and counted thirty seconds, which should reset it. Even if the Check Engine Light is off when I get to the smog place, if there are old error codes in the computer’s memory, I will fail. Again. I know this because that’s why I failed the first time. The Check Engine Light had been on, and that was enough.
So I cleared the computer. Probably. Maybe. After my first round of repairs the light came back on (I had broken a plastic bit during the first operation) so I made my second repair and pulled the fuse for 30 seconds. Once again, there was no way to tell if I had actually cleared the memory. Just in time, help arrived via the U.S. Mail.
You see, during this whole process I was frustrated that I couldn’t just check the damn computer myself. (Once you fail smog, all except a few specially-designated repair places aren’t even allowed to hook you up. Bah!) Then while reading a Miata forum I found a discussion of which OBD tools worked with 1999 Miatas. A light turned on over my head. I could buy my own damn code reader! That had quite truthfully never occurred to me. I went to Amazon and started looking around. There was one hitch that made me hesitate: Units were either a) really expensive; and/or b) not sure to work on my car. Although there is a standard connector, different cars communicate with different protocols. I didn’t want to spend a bunch of money for something that didn’t know my car’s dialect.
Then I came across one that was both cheaper than any of the others AND low-risk! BAM! For $21 bucks I bought the Elm327 WIFI OBD2 Car Scan Tool
When the ELM-327 arrived I splurged and got one of the most expensive apps available to talk to it, based on reviewers saying it worked no problem with their ELM-327’s. Ten bucks. For a total outlay of $31, I had a scan tool that not only worked far better than dedicated devices costing hundreds of dollars, it had a better UI, and could even display a host of real-time data as I drove around! Speed, rpm, air volume, battery voltage, and more. Some modern cars provide a ridiculous amount of information through the OBD port. The app I chose, OBD Fusion, can log data and even superimpose that info onto a map. Racers, apparently, love this stuff.
My smog guy was really impressed as well. He actually laughed when I revved my motor and the virtual tach needle swung upwards. He was excited that he could prescreen customers in the parking lot, quick and easy. I expect he owns one of these now.
And in fact I had not successfully cleared my computer by pulling the fuse, but with my gadget and my app I cleared the old codes and ran the car until all tests had come back green.
This tool is a game-changer for even an unsophisticated home mechanic like me. Knowing the code and being able to look up the repair on the Internet literally saved me hundreds of dollars. (I know because I once paid hundreds of dollars only to have the problem return a few months later.) It also confirmed that my speedometer is a wee bit off.
And next road trip I’m totally going to make a map of engine RPM along my route. Because the world needs to know stuff like that.
NaNoWriMo returns, and with it the public airing of my first night’s work. Thanks to all y’all who suggested ideas for me to write this year; it may or may not be obvious which one I chose from the following excerpt. Had a chat with my sweetie after I wrote this bit and I’ll be going back and inserting a fairly disturbing event, but here’s the first two chapters of what I did last night.
The usual disclaimers apply: I haven’t even reread this, so errors likely abound. I’m about to take this setting and try to turn it into a story, but so far I have no story in my head, just a regular superhuman guy and his daughter getting by in a harsh world.
The End
Chapter 1
By mutual consent they paused to rest beneath the tree that separated their dusty fields. Dot leaned the plow against the tree’s rough trunk while Joe shrugged out of the harness, sweat staining his tattered shirt where the straps had lain across his skin. Dot sat carefully, cradling her gravid belly with both hands. She sighed heavily, her cheeks puffing out, and closed her eyes. Beneath a sheen of sweat her face was gray. Her loose tunic blended with the bare earth between the tortured roots of the tree.
They didn’t talk about her sickness. There was a lot of things they didn’t talk about. The race between the malignancy that would destroy her and her unborn child. Who — or rather what — the father was.
Joe stretched his back, flexed his shoulders. On her side of the creek, the dirt was turned and ready for planting, the soil almost white in the unforgiving sun. On his side, stubble from the last crop limp and dry. Beyond the fields, nothing. Poisoned soil dotted with stumps and rocks, impossible to till. It had been a mighty forest, once.
He wondered why they were doing this. Plowing their fields, as if either of them would be around when harvest-time came.
“Water?” he asked.
“Yes, please.”
Joe stepped cautiously down the embankment to the edge of the stream. The water moved sluggishly, weighed down by green scum. The swarms of insects left him alone as opened the pouch on his waist and extracted his water kit. He put the fine mesh filter over one of the cups and scooped water with the other. It took two minutes or more to pour the water from the first cup through the filter and into the second, but there was no reason to hurry. There was never a reason to hurry anymore.
He took the water back to Dot. She drank it down in one go. Joe took the cup back from her and returned to the stream. When he got back, her eyes were closed. He put the water near her, but no so close she might knock it over by accident, and returned to the stream to refill his deerskin water bag.
Fifteen minutes later he returned to find her watching him with haunted eyes, her sandy-brown hair shifting with the listless breeze. He sat facing her, and took a sip.
“How are you going to feed her?” she asked.
Another thing they didn’t talk about. Not until now, apparently. Dot was certain her child was going to be a girl. Joe had no reason to doubt her.
“I’ll find a way,” he said. “Don’t worry.” As if he could say anything else.
She was staring at him now, and he was sure she was going to say something else. Something that demanded an honest response.
“Do you regret it?” she asked.
Joe thought for a while before answering. He almost didn’t answer at all. He wasn’t sure what she was referring to—probably the night they had slept together, after she had learned she was going to die. The night they had created a new life they had no means of sustaining. But she might have meant a thousand other things, large and small. “No,” he said, and it was mostly the truth. “Unless you mean the time I let you cut my hair.”
She smiled, showing gray teeth, then her face went slack again, as if exhausted by the effort. She made a listless effort to push a stray lock of hair away from her face. “That didn’t turn out well, did it?”
He passed a rough hand over his close-shorn scalp. So much easier than the long, black waves of hair he had worn back then. “It turned out OK, in the end.”
“She’s going to be all right.”
Joe nodded, wondering where she had found that confidence and wishing he could share it.
Dot pulled her feet underneath her. Joe jumped up and helped her stand. “That field’s not going to plow itself,” she said.
Joe hefted the plow and harness and stepped carefully over the creek. He went back to help dot across and up the slope, then shrugged into the harness. They probably shouldn’t have rested so long; now they would not be able to finish before nightfall.
Chapter 2
“Wait a second,” Dot said.
Joe relaxed in the harness. He twisted around to look at her, but couldn’t when bound by the hardened leather straps. “You want to take a break?”
“We hit something. Huh.”
Something about the huh made the hair on the back of Joe’s neck stand up. “What is it?”
“I don’t know, but…”
Joe tried harder to turn around, partially shrugging out of the harness. Dot was crouching, knees far apart, one hand under her belly, the other holding a perfectly spherical object.
Joe’s heart tied in a knot, refusing to beat, and his lungs became stone. He dropped to one knee as stars danced at the edge of his vision. “Shit,” he said.
The artifact—there was no doubt, this was an artifact—lay in her palm, the size of an apple (Dot had never seen an apple), black to the point that it was an absence in the world, rather than a presence.
“It’s warm,” Dot said.
“Put it down!” The scream tore from Joe’s throat, edged with hysterical panic.
She flinched and dropped it, pushing it away from her. Joe dodged as it landed right in front of him. Dot was pushing herself away from him, her eyes wide. She stopped when she was about ten feet away. She swallowed and collected herself. “What is it?”
Joe took a ragged breath and regarded the orb. He didn’t recognize it, but that didn’t matter. “Trouble,” he said.
“It’s an artifact?”
Joe nodded.
“What’s it doing here?”
Joe shrugged, hoping he wasn’t betraying the churning in his gut. How far into the future do you have to see to arrive at the blade of a plow here, now? Long ago someone dropped this thing here, and it stayed buried until circumstances suited it. But had the artifact reached its destination or were the two—three—of them just the next step to get it where it wanted to be? “You can never tell with these things,” Joe said.
“What do we do?”
Joe stared at the thing, tried to look through its perfectly-black surface to see what purpose it might conceal. Run away! some prudent part of his mind shouted. “I don’t know,” he said to Dot.
“I—ugh” Dot’s face contorted.
“What’s wrong?”
She smiled, and for a moment her skin flushed pink and healthy. “It’s time,” Dot said. “She’s coming.” Joe had seen that look before, on the faces of soldiers who lay dying after a victorious battle. Dot would not survive childbirth, but her daughter would.
Joe lifted her in his arms and carried her to the hut that served as her home. He laid her on the straw-filled mattress that served as her bed and dripped cool water on her forehead. She was burning up. She clung to his hand. “I’m frightened,” she said. Her face contorted with pain again.
“I am too.”
“You’re supposed to tell me I’ll be all right, you idiot.” Another wave of pain hit her and Joe could hear her teeth grinding together.
“You’ll be all right.”
She was breathing fast and shallow now. “Too… late…”
Joe wanted to stand, to pry her hand off his, to get the hell out of there. To be anywhere else. Dot was about to be dead, and nothing was going to change that.
“Bring it,” Dot said.
“Bring What?”
“The…” she grimaced again. “The thing. Out there.”
“No.”
“It can help her.”
“No.”
“It came to find her.”
“To use her. It might just want her blood. Tomorrow I’m going to dig a very deep pit.”
She contorted as the next spasm tore through her. “Bring it.”
“No.”
“I…” Dot moaned and words were done. In the terrible hours that followed, the baby arrived, Dot departed, and Joe wondered what he might have done differently.
Last episode I talked about how valuable a well-written tutorial can be. Two weekends ago, supported by an excellent write-up, I dug deeper into the innards of an automobile than I have since I drove an Alfa Romeo. Which isn’t that deep, but you get the idea. The operation was a qualified success, and I saved myself several hundred dollars.
A qualified success. The qualification: I broke a different bit. I didn’t even know the name of the part (1974 Alfas didn’t have them), but it turns out it was the Positive Crankcase Ventilation Valve. The good news: PCV valves are inexpensive and butt-simple to replace. On this car at least, you don’t even need a wrench. The PCV valve is mushed into the top of the valve cover and sealed in place with a rubber grommet. Yank the old one out, mash the new one in, you’re good to go.
But… on a 14-year-old car, the grommet that seals the PCV valve in place can get hard. Not a biggie, but the grommet is cheap and in the long run could be a point of failure. May as well change it, too.
This reasoning is perfectly valid, unless you’re an idiot. In this case, “idiot” is defined as “a guy who might push the old grommet into the valve cover, rather than pull it out.”
Yep.
I stood, looking at the empty hole that the little rubber donut had just leapt down. I don’t even think I swore. Sometimes words give out. I stepped back from the car and spiked the screwdriver I’d been using to pry at the grommet, hard, into the concrete floor of the garage.
My quick ‘n’ easy repair job had just become considerably more complicated.
Oh, I considered the consequences of just leaving the grommet in there. Could a piece of rubber really damage the camshafts? Yeah, dumb question. I was going to have to remove the valve cover and take out the little rubber donut.
In fact, that’s not a terribly difficult operation. The catch is that the same logic that applied to the grommet applied to the valve cover gasket. Fourteen-year-old rubber might not reseal properly. Off to AutoZone I went, and got a new gasket. It was surprisingly affordable. I also got a torque wrench, because you have to be really careful not to overtighten the bolts when you put the cover back on.
Back in the garage, with laptop propped up with the instructions for the upcoming operation, I snapped my 10mm socket onto the extender and dove in. Things went smoothly, and before long I had the valve cover off. I set it carefully aside and looked down between the valve stems, expecting to find the offending bit of rubber.
It wasn’t there.
I probed in the pooled motor oil with a screwdriver. Nothing. Nic. Nada.
Perplexed, I turned my attention to the valve cover I had removed. Where the grommet had been pushed in, there was a chamber sealed by a flat plate. Seven screws held the plate in place, and they were a bitch to get out. I peeled the plate free, breaking some sort of sealer.
There was the goddam grommet. I removed it, cursed myself, and then considered how I would put everything back together. The plate had been sealed with a dark substance; I went back online to find out what product I needed to restore the seal.
This was when I found a question on a Miata forum by a guy who had, in his words, “idiotically pushed the grommet into the motor”. Like me, he had pulled the valve cover, but he had yet to open the chamber.
“Just leave the grommet there,” was the advice. “It can’t hurt anything.” The chamber exists, you see, to keep oil from shooting straight into the PCV valve. The grommet would be just another obstacle. This would have been really good to read before I tried to fix my blunder. Too late now, though; the chamber is open and must be resealed. Happily in that same discussion was advice that addressed my condition. The right sealant to use (probably unimportant since the chamber is open on one end anyway), and a strong caution about the seven screws. If one of those works free it could destroy the engine. The proper adhesives are called for.
So, another trip to the friendly and knowledgeable guys at my local AutoZone later, I began the reassembly. It went well, with only a (hopefully) minor hitch. My car has a big stiffener bar that reaches across the engine compartment. (The bar was part of Mazda’s “dominate autocross” package.) That bar makes it really hard to slide the valve cover into place without disrupting the complex, 3-d gasket. By now I was cursing freely, but finally I got it into place with (as far as I can tell) the gasket properly seated. Then I discovered that the torque wrench I had bought really couldn’t measure bolts as loose as these are spec’d to be. But I got pretty close, I think, and it really felt like I was compressing the gasket gradually as I turned the bolts.
So in the end my clumsiness cost me about fifty bucks and three hours of stress-filled life. Unless I have an oil leak now. One deep breath later, I’ve still saved a lot of money compared to having the original problem repaired by a mechanic. But it could have been so much easier.
A while back a buddy of mine had trouble with his washer. He was pinched for cash, so he tackled the problem himself, rather than call a repair man. He got some information off the Internet before he started, not all crystal-clear, but enough to dive in.
He fixed his washer. But along the way he did something else, as well: He carefully documented each step of the process, with commentary, lessons learned, and pictures. In the process not only did he save himself a hundred bucks or more, he helped a lot of other folks as well. It’s the most-hit page on his blog (last I heard), and for good reason. Here’s the tutorial, in case your washer’s not draining.
Sidebar: It’s a little frustrating for a blogger to create an episode that’s not the main focus of the blog and have that episode take off. In my case it was “New York Sucks”. But at least “How to Fix Your Washer” has some benefit to the world at large. Lately my tutorial about setting up a LAMP stack using MacPorts has become more popular, which makes me feel better.
Let’s take a moment more to understand why my friend’s blog episode was so effective. First, there was the voice: “I’m just Joe Homeowner with a couple of wrenches and a mysterious machine that’s not working right. But I fixed the bastard.” Second, the tutorial answered a specific need. Third, Joe Homeowner was there with you every step of the way, with pictures and the kind of observations that never appear in service manuals.
The most effective reference materials are almost never videos. When I’ve got both hands tied up with the task, I just want to be able to look at the screen and see what I need to know. I want a still image I can absorb at my pace, and look for reference points to reconcile with what’s in front of me. I want to read the instructions three times without having to rewind.
This is the sort of content ‘they’ were thinking about twenty years ago when they were trying to convince us that the Internet was a good thing.
Last weekend I benefitted from a similar tutorial. Owners of 1999 and 2000 Miatas know code P0402: Excessive EGR flow. Usually a P0401 comes first. It’s a design flaw; there’s a narrow passage in the intake manifold that gets clogged. The killer is that the ol’ 402 suggests that a $200 part needs to be replaced. Actually, that’s almost never true in this car. All you have to do is remove the throttle body, take off the top part of the intake manifold, and clean that passage out.
Reference material close at hand, I’m ready to fix my car.
The task is not difficult, but it can be intimidating. What you need is some guy like you who’s done it, who took pictures, who remembers the details, and isn’t afraid to admit he was a little frightened going in. You can feel his satisfaction as you read the how-to and you know you will feel that way too.
The ONE THING I wish he might have mentioned was “when you take the age-hardened hose off the top of the intake manifold, be careful not to break the PCV valve.” But that’s a topic for another episode.
There’s a tutorial out there for almost everything. Almost. Next time you’re facing a task, if you can’t find a good set of instructions on the Internet, do the Web a favor. Make the first tool you pick up a camera. Take a little longer on your repair, record each step, and remember your moments of uncertainty and how you dealt with them. Put it out there and make the world a better place.
