johnstewart.com

Double Rainbow all the way

I am replacing our (now dead) air conditioner this Friday.

Out of curiosity, I contacted the company (Carrier) to find out when it was made… 1970!

Pretty amazing. Even though I’m putting in another Carrier, I don’t think this one is likely to make it until the year 2050.

On the left is what the guest bathroom looked like when we moved in. This spring, we finally got around to updating it. We were going to try and rip out just the rightmost cabinet and squeeze in a shower kit. However, nothing really fit well, and it became obvious that we would also have to tear out the vanity.

Given that, it freed us up to design whatever we wanted. I always had an affinity for glass block, so I wanted to see if I could make that work as a shower wall.

It turns out Pittsburgh-Corning has a Sketchup library which allows you to design using all of the shapes they have available. I played around with this until we had a design that fit the space how we wanted; a screenshot of the final design is on the right:

Ripped out to the studs; the work begins. I’m committed now! On the right, after the plumber has finished installing the drain and supply lines, and laying out the glass block to know the dimension to build the pan.

The shower pan was built by a separate contractor (this and the plumbing being the only jobs I farmed out on this project:

Tile on the shower pan and the curb, to make a nice even base for the glass block:

The first row of glass block goes on. I built this using, instead of mortar, the “ProVantage” system. Basically, it consists of using silicone to glue the blocks together with plastic spacers:

The block is up, and Augie helps me remove the shims I used to get the block completely level as the silicone cured up:

Drywall seaming and then grout going into the glass block. Until the grout was in, the glass block wall was jiggly like Jell-O. After the grout, it’s solid as a rock:

I put a shelf in over the protrusion of the concrete foundation wall, which had a slanted top. Now it’s quite usable as a surface. First coat of primer is up:

The first coat of real paint is on the wall, and the tile work on the shower walls begins:

Toilet goes back in, grout complete in shower:

And here are the final shots with the vanity installed and all grout/caulk completed:

All in all, it was a hell of a lot of work, but a hell of a lot cheaper than having it done by someone else… and a lot more satisfying.

In less than three months, Stiltsville will be on bookstore shelves (August 3rd).

Susanna is already a writer, an author. But this gives us an actual artifact to prove it.

She’s been doing more frequent blog postings as the publication date approaches; the world of publishing is a lot more interesting that I’d thought it would be, and every day is a little more exciting.

Soon after publication, Augie and I will be joining her on her whirlwind book tour (consisting of only seven dates as of now, but we hope that will expand). We’re still trying to find a bookstore she can read at in Key West to give us an excuse to head down there.

Please check out her book blog.

I saw a sticker on the front of this week’s Isthmus, the free local weekly here in Madison. It reads:

Opposed to higher electricity bills?

Tell state legislators to KEEP our law governing new nuclear reactor construction in Wisconsin.

Oppose SB340 AB516

Call 608/250-9240 for more info or visit http://www.wnpj.org/cfnf to write a letter to your legislator opposing new nuclear power.

I visited the site, and they oppose repeal of a current Wisconsin law which requires a federal facility (a la Yucca Mountain) before any new nuclear plants can be built in Wisconsin.

For various reasons, this is silly. I think it’s a real shame that so many years ago that various environmental and anti-war movements linked in their own minds nuclear power and nuclear weapons.

I am opposed to the latter, but recognize, as anyone who takes a reasoned look at the issue, that nuclear power is the only reliable, clean, and safe technology we have right now to generate electricity.

There has never been a single death associated with nuclear energy in this country. Despite the hysteria over Three Mile Island, that incident did show that the safeguards put in place, the layers of protection, worked. No one was killed.

Today technology is much better, and we could build even safer, cheaper, reactors.

The waste issue is an important one, but also one we can solve. In fact, it does make more sense in many ways to store spent fuel in various distributed sites rather than in a central repository.

Furthermore, the total volume and mass of the waste is tiny in comparison to the volume and mass of, for example, the carbon emitted into the atmosphere by coal and gas plants.

The hippy-dippy types like to think we can get all of our energy from wind, solar, and hydrodynamic technology. It can be a part of the portfolio, but those technologies will simply not meet our needs, and they also come with their own set of unintended consequences (wind farms killing huge numbers of birds, for example).

What this means is that for the past 20 years, we’ve been building coal plants instead of nuclear plants. The pollution from such plants is terrible, and the human cost to mine the fuel is also high – the average is around 30 per year, even with modern safety equipment.

With all of that in mind, I used the WPNJ links to send this to my state representatives instead of the anti-nuke screed they drafted for me:

I am writing as a supporter of nuclear energy. I came to this page through an ad in my local weekly opposing AB 516 / SB 340.

However, I think the view opposing nuclear energy is misguided and not supported by the facts.

It is our cleanest way of generating reliable electricity, and should be pursued aggressively to help limit our carbon emissions. There has never been a single death associated with nuclear energy in the United States.

Please do what you can to end the restriction preventing the development of new nuclear plants in Wisconsin. Don’t let irrational fears stop the best source of energy we current have available.

I suggest you do the same.

When I met Susanna many years ago, she was a writer. Her novel was nearly finished, and I imagined it would be out any day. Of course, I also hoped it would be an Oprah book club selection and she’d make millions and I’d never have to work again.

We fell in love, we got married, and lots of life has happened since then. When our little boy was on the way, she woke me up in the middle of the night and exclaimed that she was terrified that she’d never finish her book.

I responded, as only a Zen master (or sleep-deprived husband) could:

“Finish it, then.”

I committed any help I could provide to help her make sure it happened, and lo and behold, a few months later, she finished it.

Now the book is done (absent last minute editing and corrections), she has an agent, and her book is sold. We await its publication date this summer.

This past Christmas Eve, as we were packing up our station wagon to the hilt with presents, dog, luggage, and other accoutrements, the UPS truck pulled up with an unexpected delivery… her galleys. This is the first time her book is in actual printed form; an actual, for real, book, before our eyes!

It’s really for real, and the cover looks beautiful – the publisher found a wonderful shot of a stilthouse to use.

Here is her website with more information about the book, and a mailing list where you can get signed up to hear more, when we know more.

Some advice I recently gave to two friends who are about to have their first kids:

- The labor is the easy part; after that it gets hard.

- For the first few weeks, your wife’s only job is to keep the kid alive. Your only job is to keep her alive.

Feed her, keep the mounds of shit from piling too high, and be the gatekeeper. Be ready to say no – don’t let visitors come if either of them are napping.

In the first few months, people will keep telling you time flies so fast. This is the last thing you’ll want to hear, because every hour seems like a day, every day seems like a week, and every month seems like a year. Time drags for the first three months.

After that, time does start to fly. The first three months seems like a year. The next year seems like three months.

This picture pretty much sums it up.

True, there is no way we could give up so many points and expect to win.

However, the Packers game back from a huge deficit to get back in the game and tie it up. A little luck from a missed FG by the Cards and it was suddenly our game to lose.

But with a bunch of bad calls (or no calls) in a row, including this blatant face mask to Rodgers as he fumbled the ball (and lost the game), the zebras screwed us.

A terrible end to what became a great season.

Suz and I saw Avatar this past weekend, 3D IMAX.

I really enjoyed it, but I couldn’t help watching with a critical eye. I think most people have just been so wowed by the spectacle and technology that they’re calling this a great movie when it definitely has some plot holes and/or character flaws.

The 3D was quite awesome. It’s by far the best movie I’ve ever seen done in 3D. The glasses were somewhat annoying but tolerable.

What makes this special is that absolutely everything was shot in 3D… live action, CGI, all in 3D. It’s not a gimmick (or *just* a gimmick).

That said, it’s still not going to be the Next Big Thing in movies (as 3D has been hyped to be – in the 50s, before in my life, and now again with this movie). It’s beautiful, interesting, but it’s not really helping the storytelling. Given the expense, it doesn’t seem likely that anyone is going to go through such an effort to do this again anytime soon… anyone that isn’t named Jim Cameron, at least.

I loved the Colonel. Great bad ass. Sigourney also fit her role well.

Spoilers Below

So my complaints with the plot:

- They never explain how the link is made between the human and the avatar. One presumes some sort of electromagnetism (since there’s no other option in our current universe). Yet when they went to the Magic Floating Mountains, the link still works? Of course this had to be done, else it would have been a trivial matter to find the humans after they went rogue; if the avatar and human can link, then that human is emitting something that would be easy for the other humans to find. The whole thing was a little bit of hand-waving that I’m prepared to accept, though.

- Michelle Rodriquez’s character is essentially a marine pilot. She trained with the people she flies with and fights with. She depends on her comrades with her life, and they depend on her. War historians have shown time and time again that the reason people give when they fight in horrible battlefield conditions is “for the man next to me”. Not for country, not for honor… but for the men they fight with. That man is your brother, and you are his. You will give you life to save his, and vice versa.

She may have thought what was going on was bullshit, and maybe she wouldn’t pull the trigger on innocent natives. Maybe even she’d bust out the Good Guys to go help the Space Elves. However, no way do I see her actually opening fire and killing her own people. It could happen, but Cameron didn’t give us a reason to believe it.

- How is it that in the first half of the movie, all the arrows bounced off the ships, but then started to penetrate in the final battle scene. Did they get armor piercing arrows?

- Why in the fuck would the armor battle suit (a la Aliens) have a huge armor battle suit knife in its holster? If a knife was ever actually necessary, the gun ALREADY HAD ONE.

- So the Space Elves have a ceremony where the spirit of a human can be transformed into the body of a human engineered half-breed creature by Gaia (or whatever the Pandora mother spirit was called)? This has come up before?

- Clearly the Space Elves were patterned off the modern myth of the Native American in harmony with mother nature. This is a myth, as it turns out that Native Americans were pretty brutal to the local ecology… they just moved on when an area was decimated, and they simply didn’t have the numbers to do any serious damage to such a vast area. I’m just sayin’.

- The Space Elves were pretty fucking stupid. Hey, huge war machines are rolling into your house. You’re going to wait until it’s ON FIRE and FALLING before you get the fuck out? Makes you wonder if Darwin’s rules don’t apply on Pandora.

Again, it was a fun movie, it was interesting. It was done extremely well. It was pretty. It’s just not a *good* movie; it’s not going to stand the test of time.

I read about this stuff a while back, but finally picked up some (extract of it, actually). Weird, wild, fascinating shit. Miracle fruit.

Basically, you chew it up so it covers your tongue for a while, then for the next half hour to and hour or so, everything that was previously sour is now sweet!

Suz and I cut up a bunch of different fruit to try in this state. Of course, limes and lemons are the stars since their flavor is such a contrast from their initial state. Basically, they taste like super-sweet candy. Really!

Here’s a rundown of the things we tried and our impressions:

Lime – Like candy.

Lemon - Super sweet, but you can still feel the twinge of the acid sour on your tongue (with only the sweet flavor).

Grapefruit - Not much different. The main flavor component is bitterness, not sour, which was unchanged by the miracle fruit.

Kiwi - I thought much better tasting due to the sweetness, but it wasn’t overly sweet or cloying.

Orange - Very sweet, but a strange flavor difference I couldn’t put my finger on.

Tomato - I thought they tasted exactly the same, but Susanna said they were like super-sweet tomatoes. It may be, however, just good tomatoes (they were freshly picked, ripe from our garden).

Granny Smith Apple – Much sweeter, although the flavor change was not as extreme as I expected. Just tasted like a firm, sweet, apple.

Wine - Super sugary (and pretty much awful).

Red Wine Vinegar – Super sweet, like sugar water.

Balsamic Vinegar – Ditto, just a different flavor of sugar water.

Cherry – Not much different, just no sour note to it.

Cantaloupe – Basically the same, perhaps mildly sweeter.

Altoids - Exactly the same.

I regret not getting pineapple for our first session; it’s supposed to be excellent and definitely something I want to try next time.

We were left slightly queasy after the experience. I’m not sure if it was a side effect of the miracle fruit itself, or a side effect of so much sour fruit in our stomachs (how often do you EAT a bunch of lime slices?).

Definitely a fun experience. So far none of the people we’ve told about this have wanted to try it, though!