Monday, December 22, 2008

of randomness and vampires....

I know what you're thinking; "Why don't he write?". Well it does seem as though winter has returned in the Northeast in such a way as to clearly and definitively punish us for the last few relatively mild years we've gotten away with. First a nasty ice storm that many cities in Massachusetts and New Hampshire have STILL not fully recovered from. Then, fluffy one-two punch of snowstorms over the weekend just passed. Today we'll be lucky to see any thermometer register more than 20 degrees. (That's Fahrenheit, for the rest of the metric and civilized world that would be -7 degrees Celsius. We're Americans and many of us still believe the metric system is some sort of communist plot! Present company excluded.) So I had to shovel or otherwise remove no less than a foot and a half of snow from 30' x 40' car lot that is now MY responsibility. Renting does have it's bright spots. As I am so fond of calculations let's figure out how many cubic feet of snow that is shall we?

30' x 40' x 1.5' = 1800 cubic feet of snow.

Wow! If I didn't have a snow blower I think I might be lying dead out on my drive way right now.

I am happy to report that my house is back in the 21st century. Power was restored after about 48 hours. The casualties resultant from the basement flood are as follows:

  • Several cardboard boxes of fabric (crap i wanted to get rid anyway, apologies to my wife)
  • Several RG-45 ethernet and RG-6 co-axial cables (that really frosted my cookies)
  • about 30 feet of 14-2 electrical wiring (ouch!)
  • 2 Panasonic surround sound speakers (sob!)
  • about 16 boxes that house my die-cast model airplane collection! (dammit!)
  • a box of old computer hardware (not much of a loss, what was I going to do with 4-40MB hard-drives anyway?)
  • 2 boxes of ridiculously ugly Xmas decorations (I secretly applauded this as i felt my wife had gone a tad insane in that regard)
Let this be a lesson to you. When you buy a house whose basement has lots of shelving suspended from the ceiling, there's probably a reason! I'm an engineer you'd think I'd have seen this coming. Perhaps I did and just pretended I did not.

Onto my next concern:

When the hell did vampires become so freakin' interesting to people? Did I miss a meeting? Everywhere I look...vampires, vampyre, blood suckers....

What's the bloody fascination. Between my eldest daughters obsession with the 'Twilight' series (which thankfully seems on the wane) and some HBO series called "True Blood".... I am bloody tired of vampires. Reminds of the 80's and 90's angel craze. Truly I am beginning to believe that Americans yearn to live in some fantasy world where either JK Rowling or Tolkien or CS Lewis is God. I have peers who are so enamoured with that damned Twilight series that they'll spend hours talking about what they got right and what they got wrong in the damned movie that just came out. I suppose that I should just be thrilled that my daughter actually reads. I just wanna toss her a copy of "The Slaughter House Five" or "Grapes of Wrath"! Vampires! Gimme a break! What's next? Goblins? Werewolves?

There must be some deep and hidden psychological explanation as to why people have always been fascinated with Vampires.

Anyway...back to work!

R.