where water comes from...

Many years ago, my Aunt Kathy gave to her father a book. It was a mostly empty book, with lots of lined pages in it and printed prompts at the top of each page. The prompts asked simple, generic questions that anybody might ask in a "get to know you" sort of conversation. If you filled out all the prompts, however, you'd have a reasonably good stab at an autobiography. My Papa James, in spite of how intimidating that big empty book was, gave it a serious go in his last few years. Sometimes, he wrote only one word or one sentence in response to a prompt. Sometimes, he had so much to say that he'd write for three pages on one topic, ignoring the prompts on succeeding pages so he could tell his story. This is one of those, and if I say so myself, he's a great storyteller. I hope to grow up to be like him.

Today, I'm a Master's Degreed Civil Engineer with a specialty in Water Resources. I've never lived in a home that didn't have hot running water and modern plumbing and I spend most of my time thinking about how to protect water from the polluting influence of humans. This is my Papa's perspective on water. Change takes time, but -- WOW -- does it happen.
Just FYI, I have corrected misspellings and grammatical mistakes to make the meaning clear, but the text is otherwise unaltered.

Water, A Precious Commodity

When I was very young & even into adulthood, water was not readily available everywhere. If you lived in rural America, most likely your water supply was a well, or if in southern Louisiana, a cistern for rainwater. All over East Texas water was plentiful at about 30 ft. or so. Most people dug their wells about 3 ft. in diam. You could start out digging w/shovel & posthole diggers, but when it got into hard clay & then rock you had to use a flattened point bar & chip away one side while you stood on the other side. Then you scooped up the chips & put in a bucket & handed it up to or had someone else draw it out on a rope. You then got on the other side & did it again. This was a slow process but effectual.
After getting down to the first water, which was usually just a seep or trickle it got real messy, because from there on down the sides were wet clay mud. It was hard work & hot in summer & cold in winter. You needed to keep the walls round & straight, especially if you intended to run concrete tile in it to keep it from caving in later. At night seep water would accumulate & had to be drawn out before digging could resume.
After getting electricity & installing a pump & indoor plumbing, a lot of older wells had to be deepened to either hold more volume or down to another water vein. As long as people had to draw w/a bucket & rope, they were more conservative w/water. Some wells had to be 60 or 75 ft. deep to reach sufficient or good water. (n.b.: The next time you run water, remember these 3 pages)
I had to deepen our well when it got dry one year. It was hard to find someone to go down into a well & work. There was danger of caving & dropping a bucket on them. Humpy Fielder’s well was 75 deep & I helped him clean it out & deepened it a few feet. 5 gal. of mud gets awfully heavy drawing it up that far. Humpy was a trusting soul to work down in that well w/me, a 14 yr. old drawing mud. The hard part was drawing him back up, but by letting the tail of the rope down into the well, he could help pull himself up after he could reach the tail rope.
When water is this precious, you can take turns bathing in the same tub of water. You only use 1 glass full to brush your teeth. You dip your brush into the glass, brush, then wash your brush out in the glass of water, then spit & rinse your mouth w/the same glass of water. It looks kinda gross but your brush just came out of your mouth anyway. You swallow your spit, but if you spit it out into a spoon you wouldn’t want to put it back into your mouth & swallow. Ha. It’s all in your head!
Some people either were too lazy to dig a well or provide water near their home. They carried water from a spring, usually downhill from the house. Some people went to a stream to bathe. A very common practice when I was a small child. All the men & boys went to one hole & the women & girls to another. It was common to see tubs of water out in the sun warming for baths later on that day.
Wash water had to be drawn & heated in a big cast iron pot by wood fire. The clothes were boiled in that pot & rinsed in tubs. That was a chore, especially wringing by hand.
Without water in the house there was no bathroom. Every family had a chamber pot w/a lid to use at night or when someone was too sick to go to the outside toilet. The whole family used that one pot sometime & it got awfully full & smelly by morning, unless someone did the noble thing & went out & dumped it. If you were prosperous, you might have more than one pot. You could really know who was your pal when you were sick & needed your pot emptied.
Besides having to draw water for the family, the animals had to be watered. Even the hogs had to have a mud hole to wallow & stay cool in. A big mule or horse would drink more than 5 gal a day & cows almost as much. Teenage boys usually caught these chores. I almost always enjoyed drawing water except when the rope had ice on it. UGH!
Some people had a specially made bucket for milk to be kept in, down in the well. That way you could have cool milk for supper & it would keep 1 day w/out souring. If it soured a bit you could use it to make butter & buttermilk.
If an animal like a rat or mole or snake or cat got in the well & died the water would smell & taste bad so the carcass had to be gotten out & all the water drawn out. That was a big time job. Usually took hours of constant drawing to get the well empty, as water was constantly running in while you were drawing out. Bleach was then added to kill bacteria & you carried water from somewhere else for a few days. We had 2 wells & that was handy. It saved carrying water very far, too.

so far behind i might lap myself...

Last night i had a terrible bout of insomnia, but was not inspired to write anything. "Yea!" is probably what you're thinking in response to that, but I won't hold it against you. Instead, I worked on finally collecting and organizing the photos from my trip to Utah this summer. Wow. My vacation photos from September, and I'm just now getting around to organizing them. Don't ask me about holiday cards. I never got there.

I'm not quite done with the photos just yet. We went on vacation with friends, you see, and there were some complications with getting the photos from them. I'm not going to bore you with technical details, but this would actually have been a little easier if they'd just printed all their photos and sent me doubles C.O.D. Then I could've scanned them and cleaned up the scans and manually entered the camera and date information. That seriously would've been easier.

When I finally get around to writing it all up, you'll see that the photos were, indeed, worth the effort. That should be happening sometime around September of this year, at the rate I'm going. About the same time I get around to doing my Spring Cleaning and making a scrapbook to commemorate my summer in Europe.

looking for the mouse...

HERE is a neat article by author Clay Shirky on the topic of where our society, as consumers of media, are going. His theories are fascinating, and I particularly like the way he makes parallels between modern sitcoms and gin pushcarts from the early industrial revolution. here's a snippet of one of his punchier points, for the link averse:

So [watching less television is] the answer to the question, "Where do they find the time?" Or, rather, that's the numerical answer. But beneath that question was another thought, this one not a question but an observation. In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: "Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves."


At least they're doing something.


Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

the title refers to the fact that a friend of his has a 4-year old who sprung up in the middle of a dvd to root around in the cables behind their entertainment center to "look for the mouse". because children today think that if their entertainment isn't interactive, it's probably not worth sitting through. as someone who hasn't sat down to watch tv on anything approaching a regular basis in three years, i heartily agree with the kid.

want.

wow, do i want this clock.

Free Rice Vocabulary Game

Free Rice is a website in the vein of The Hunger Site, The Breast Cancer Site, etc. Visitors to the website click on a link, view a couple of advertisements, and the revenue generated goes to a charitable cause. This one is affiliated with the United Nations and is set up as one of my personal favorite activities of all time - a word game! yea! So, if you go visit the site and answer a vocabulary question correctly, you donate 10 grains of rice. The game keeps a running total, with special counters for 100-grain and 1000-grain piles, while the latest grains go into your "bowl".

My high for today was a vocabulary level of 47, but most of the time i was around 44 or 45. I donated about 1500 grains doing that. I shot right up to 45 quickly, but then knocked around the 43-46 range for a good long time. Once I made it to 47, I came over here to write it up. :)

never in a bajillion years...

...did i think i'd be agreeing with pope benedict xvi on any of the controversial topics of the day. but here's one we agree on. until we have some sort of scientific theory more sound than "proteins came together in a primordial soup in a random way to spark First Life, and maybe lightning was involved" about how the whole process of evolution was kicked off, i'm happy to believe that there's room for the touch of a Maker in there. however, that's no reason to eschew the mounds of evidence that say favorable adaptations stick around and change whole species because those adaptations better equip individuals to thrive.

for the link-averse, the following is the salient excerpt from the article above. and to this i say, "Right on, Your Holiness."

THEORY OF EVOLUTION

In his talk with the priests, the Pope spoke of the current debate raging in some countries, particularly the United States and his native Germany, between creationism and evolution.

"They are presented as alternatives that exclude each other," the Pope said. "This clash is an absurdity because on one hand there is much scientific proof in favor of evolution, which appears as a reality that we must see and which enriches our understanding of life and being as such."

But he said evolution did not answer all the questions. "Above all it does not answer the great philosophical question 'where does everything come from?"'

CB mania. Breaker 4. Over.

I have been riding my motorcycle for almost a year now. In celebration, and because I'm stupid, I'm riding it out to San Francisco next week. Why does that make me stupid, you might ask? San Francisco is a perfectly lovely place to go and ride motorcycles. The answer is because I'm starting in Dallas. And if you recall your American Geography lessons from elementary school, everything east of the Sierra Nevada range in California until you get to ... well ... Dallas is part of the Great American Desert. So, yeah, what that means is that I'm going on a very long ride through deserts and mountains to end up in San Francisco. Mark Twain never said that "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco," but he could have. In fact, he implied the same thing about Paris, France in an exchange once and the famous quote morphed from there. Still, the fact remains that San Francisco has cold weather, and lots of it, and often even in the summertime it is a chilly place to be. Blame it on all the leftover seawater they get from "The Deadliest Catch", I guess.

In preparation for the ride, and by way of spending the cash-ola that I got for Christmas, I decided to get a comms system for my bike. This means that when my girlfriend and I are riding together, we can actually exchange phrases like "I'm out of gas." or "Did you see the hair growing out that guy's ears?!?!" Usually, we have to wait until we get to the next gas stop to swap such observations. Further, we've been on a long and mostly unsuccessful hunt for a way to play our iPods that doesn't interfere with our ability to communicate important facts and get each other's attention. The solution, it turns out, is a J&M CB system. This lets us talk to each other and many of the other vehicles on the road, which is useful if you ever get tired of your entire 60 GB music library and need other forms of entertainment. It's also very, very helpful if you're trying to figure out what the weather and traffic are like a few miles up the road and whether you should pull over or try to make the next town. So we bought the system for me (Rose already had one for her bike) and let it sit on our kitchen table for about a month while we mulled over the options for installing it.

We ended up doing the installation ourselves, and it turned out better than I expected. Rose had to re-install hers because she'd had a malfunction in her driver/passenger intercom system and had sent it in for service. Hers had been sitting on our dining room table for three or four months while we mulled the installation options. There's nothing like "the last minute" to get you motivated to tackle these sorts of projects, eh? I was having a particularly difficult week with asthma and allergies and a navel-gazing moody spell, so I let Rose handle most of the installation work herself. I did put the antenna mount on my bike (which involved the use of power tools and was thus quite good for my moody psyche) but after that, I pretty much stayed out of Harm's Way - aka: The Garage. I have to say that she did one helluva job, and that is unalloyed praise.

But... (sorry, honey, i have to post this part. it's too funny.)

When she called me to come out for the first test broadcast of my new system, I came out to the garage and held the microphone and mashed the button and transmitted. Yea! It worked! And then I noted that the bike wasn't "on". None of the lights were on, none of the instrument panels were glowing. She didn't even have the keys in the bike! Problem: if the accessory will run without the key in the bike, it can drain your battery while you are sleeping with the keys on your nightstand. This problem is easily surmounted if you're methodical and ALWAYS turn everything off, but it's a Disaster Waiting To Happen when you're easily distracted (oooh! shiny thing!) and forget to turn off the accessories sometimes. You can guess which of the aforementioned cases applies to me.

The logical thing to do at this point was to pick up the manual and see what it said about installation. And I know my girlfriend NEVER reads the manual. It's a part of her life philosophy that she developed while working hel(l)pdesks. So, on page 3, in fine print, in the third item of a numbered list, was the instruction that you should power the thing from a switched circuit on the bike, or better yet from a fuse-enabled accessory terminal. Well, I just happen to have one of those! I installed it so that the Mobile Dog Unit could have taillights. Some day, I swear I'll write about that. Anyway, I took the covers off and moved the power wire from the positive battery terminal (where she had connected it) to the accessory terminal so that it would only allow the CB to power on when the bike was on. Yea! And lest I make myself sound all fancy and knowledgeable about this stuff while bagging on my girlfriend, let me admit here and now that it took a bit of trial and error to find the right port on the accessory terminal. I didn't get it right the first time, and I had to cut off all the wire ties I'd used in my first run at it and re-route everything. You can bet I tested the wiring setup before applying any wire ties in the second run. Anyway, with the wiring fault corrected, I was happy with the installation and I was forgiving of my girlfriend because (after all) the important instruction was pretty well buried.

Then, I happened to be tidying up after the installation, and when I got to the little nest-like pile of tools, spare bits, empty water bottles, and dirty spoons that seems to accumulate wherever my girlfriend works for more than 2 hours, I discovered that there was a Quick Start Guide to the installation. And then the forgiveness EVAPORATED INSTANTLY. It might have even FLASH BOILED, it went so fast. In LARGE BOLD TEXT on the quick start guide, was the instruction "Do not EVER connect this accessory DIRECTLY to the BATTERY!" Yeah. So it's a good thing I read the manual, eh? My mom figured that out about 25 years and two Barbie Dream Houses ago, of course. I've been the Designated Instruction Reader in my household for as long as I can remember.

i <3 Dahlia Lithwick

if you're scratching your head and wondering who that is right now, hie thee hence to slate.com and just peruse a few of her articles. she's an insightful journalist who never fails to cut through the b.s. with common sense and a really good look past the hyperbole to the issues at hand. i love her articles, and i hope if i ever get to have a cup of coffee with her, i'd like her, too.

her latest is on the blogosphere and what can be done or what should be examined about some of the hypersexual threats aimed at women bloggers these days at clicky. unsurprisingly, this is an issue of keen interest to me. not that i attract the sort of attention that tends to bring on detractors, but i would hate to think i ever attracted a stalker. i just don't want to have to choose between sharing these little random slices of my brain with you and the sense of security i cling to when i lie down in my bed at night.

real live e-mail convo with someone i love

i just got this e-mail. it cracked me up, so i'm sharing it. i (like most geeks) do a little tech support on the side for my friends and loved ones. it's usually rewarding, but not usually entertaining. today, i was entertained.

Huh??? I got VIRTUAL MEMORY?????

Just when I thought Mother Nature and Father Time had depleted all my resources, I find I got virtual memory!!

The resident guru at Office Depot said my computer sluggishness might have to do with me nearing the limit of my virtual memory. He told me how to check it and the instructions went in one ear and out the other (without a lot of impediment I must say). In fact I believe the exit was faster than the entry!!! (instructions have a phobia about wide open spaces and darkness!!)

If you think this could be part of the problem, write me back and give me some intsructions. I remember something about cntrl/alt/delete which I thought was one of the seven venial sins......

first, i had to respond that there are 7 cardinal sins. there are, however, as many venial sins as the human mind and the devil's whispering voice can devise. go-go gadget catholic school education!

then i dispensed boring, but accurate, technical advice. i'll spare you having to read those bits. those of you who know me well might guess from all the asides and parenthetical notes that i'm somehow related to the questioner. and you might be right.

plug and play?

excerpted from a work e-mail containing some instructions for tricking windows into thinking it has a printer when it doesn't. this, of course, does you no good for printing things, but it enables you to send things to the printer in a software demo without getting nasty error messages on your screen.

2) From the Control Panel, Go to> Printers and Faxes

3) Select> Add a Printer

4) At the Welcome Screen, select> Next

5) Select "Local Printer" (the default) and UN-Check> "Automatically detect and install my plug and pray printer"

6) Select Next

note the emphasized word in step 5. that's my emphasis, of course. i don't know if my boss sent me that to be clever or if it was just a typo, but it put my keyboard at risk of a coffee shower this morning. i laughed so hard that i had to come share it with you.

yeah, another meme. i'm busy...

Modern, Cool Nerd
82 % Nerd, 56% Geek, 26% Dork For The Record:

A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.
You scored better than half in Nerd and Geek, earning you the title of: Modern, Cool Nerd.

Nerds didn't use to be cool, but in the 90's that all changed. It used to be that, if you were a computer expert, you had to wear plaid or a pocket protector or suspenders or something that announced to the world that you couldn't quite fit in. Not anymore. Now, the intelligent and geeky have eked out for themselves a modicum of respect at the very least, and "geek is chic." The Modern, Cool Nerd is intelligent, knowledgable and always the person to call in a crisis (needing computer advice/an arcane bit of trivia knowledge). They are the one you want as your lifeline in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (or the one up there, winning the million bucks)!

Congratulations!

Thanks Again! -- THE NERD? GEEK? OR DORK? TEST

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

	You scored higher than 88% on nerdiness
	You scored higher than 82% on geekosity
	You scored higher than 38% on dork points

why did NOBODY mention this to me?

SEATTLE (Reuters) - After introducing the world to new soda flavors like fish taco and salmon, Seattle specialty beverage maker Jones Soda Co. is offering a new flavor: Green pea.

Green pea, along with other unusual sodas such as turkey and gravy, dinner roll, sweet potato and antacid flavor, will be part of the company's $10 to $15 "holiday pack" of bottled drinks available nationwide.

Peter van Stolk, chief executive of Jones Soda, said on Monday the collection of strange-flavored sodas usually sells out quickly, even though he can not stomach the drinks. Past flavors included broccoli casserole, corn on the cob and Brussel sprout.

"Why people buy it is beyond me. I can't drink a bottle of this stuff," said van Stolk.

Jones Soda, which sells traditional sodas alongside more exotic flavors like fufu berry and green apple, first introduced the holiday soda pack in 2003, gaining notoriety for its turkey and gravy flavor soda.

"We have the market share leader in turkey-flavored beverages," said van Stolk. "We know we can't compete with Coke or Pepsi by playing their game, but we know they're not going to come out with a turkey flavor or antacid flavor."

Asked if there were any flavors that were off limits, van Stolk said he put his foot down when it came to curried chicken flavor.

"Fish taco was just nasty and we tried curried chicken. That was just wrong," he said.

© Reuters 2006. All Rights Reserved.

the above article, in which i draw your attention to the last quotation, would have been VERY HELPFUL to me about 150 years ago when i was deciding against chemistry as a career because "chemistry is boring". now, it wasn't that i thought that chemistry itself was all that boring, because you could do some cool things in chemlab. no, i'm not going to tell you what they are. it's possible mrs. barnhart uses the web and i don't want to get in retroactive trouble for publicizing my antics now. still, i thought that all chemists had to grow up and work at dow and babysit reactor chambers for the rest of eternity. if i had ONLY KNOWN that some chemists get to grow up and make curried chicken flavored sodas, i think i'd have seriously considered the field a little further. beyond that, how often do you get to make your boss go on record with reuters saying "That was just wrong." and not get fired? wow, i would love that job!

Bike Maintenance Adventure #1

I <3 the internet. i just bought myself a brand new motorcycle. well, new to me. it's 6 years old, and had a battery from 1999. so when i had trouble starting it last wednesday, i thought... heck, the battery's really old. i'll just replace it and that should fix 'er right up. i consoled myself when this failed to pan out by telling myself that replacing a 6-year old battery could never be a Bad Thing (tm, pat pend) and that i had at least bought peace of mind. i think that's true. however, it got me no closer to figuring out why my bike wasn't starting on command.

as my friend mike says, "You put in the key, you turn it, the vehicle starts. This is the agreement."

my bike was very new and already failing to fulfill its end of the deal.

*pout*

well, in my enthusiasm for the most glorious cruiser ever built (the Honda Valkyrie, of course!) i went out and found lots of websites on the subject during my research phase before buying the bike. after i bought it, i went and joined the VRCC and got all enthused about browsing their website and their forums and such. i was just about to post a question related to my predicament when i noticed in the handy page-header link-farm that there was a standing "Tech Board" for discussion of such issues. so i browsed. the tech board had one post that pertained, and with a little clueful followup, i found the standing "Tech Talk" that amounts to a FAQ of Valkyrie maintenance. yea!

so, armed with dangerous knowledge from the FAQ, i waited impatiently to have some free time so i could work on the bike. i'd already passed up some great riding opportunities for fear that i wouldn't be able to start the bike and get home from whence i'd ridden, so i was chomping at the bit to start Fixing The Bike!

i took apart the appropriate control device, disassembled the starter switch, cleaned the electrical contacts with a pink rubber eraser, put it back together and... NADA. nothing happened. i could tell the starter switch was working because when the button is out the headlights work. when the button is depressed, the headlights go off to make that much more current available to the starter. when i'd mash the button, the headlights would go off. when i'd release it, they'd come back on. clearly, we're getting electrical contact in there, or the headlights wouldn't work. right? of course right!

two days of battery-charging, button mashing, agonizing, and heavy thinking ensue. i'll skip the boring bits.

today, it occurred to me that i was PRESUMING that because i had current flowing when the button was out, i also had current flowing when the button was in. this had NOT, however, been validated. so, after about the 500th fruitless button-mashing session, i took the switch apart again. this time, i took out the little piece that had the Crucial Bit of Copper in it. i held the Crucial Bit of Copper up to the switch, where it should have been making contact with the Other Crucial Bit of Copper while the button was mashed in, and the bike started up like she was brand new. yea!

HappyBikeStarterIgnitionButtonWorkingElectricityYippieKiYiYayHolyInternalCombustionThatEnginesGettingHotNow Dance!

so, i had to take the part of the switch that contained the Crucial Bit of Copper inside the house and tinker with it a bit in the air conditioned comfort of the office. it turned out there was a very tiny spring in it that had been compressed and kinda gotten stuck and so was not mashing the Crucial Bit of Copper against the Other Crucial Bit of Copper quite hard enough to make a good circuit. it was enough to weakly power the headlamp, but not enough to kick the starter. apparently, all my fruitless button-mashing had served merely to compress this spring even further, preventing it from making more than the barest of contacts between the Crucial Bit and the Other Crucial Bit.

anyway, this concludes Bike Maintenance Adventure #1, wherein we learn that when you PRESUME, you make a PRE out of SU and ME*. or something to that effect.


*my apologies to the woman who said that first. should she ever read this, she can take it out of my hide in the form of an adult beverage on our next meeting.

swiped from the blog of the dark clown...

not sure if this is amusing or scary. I'm thinking both. [ed. note: add horrible to the list. amusing, scary, horrible.]

For those unfamiliar, 'captchas' are the graphics with warped letters that some webforms want you to retype to verify that you're an actual human filling out the form, not a spam-bot or something of the sort.

Today, I became aware of this. It's like the illegitimate offspring of captchas and HotOrNot.com.

holy funny stuff, batman!

This article cracked me up. My very favorite part was when he explained leetspeak, thusly:

Unintelligible spellings: When you see things like OMG the pwn3d haX0r is the ghey LOL!!11!1 you are reading the language of people who consider themselves elite computer users. Translation is possible, but unnecessary; nothing ever said in this tongue concerns you. At all.

k, that's for you!

ALARM!!!!

My friend sent me this link. She thinks I need help waking up in the morning. Anyone who's ever had to deal with me before my first cup of coffee concurs, of course. Including me. Her favorites are 10, 6, and 1. Mine are 10, 9, 2, and 1. The only problem with 2 is that it requires one person to be awake to get the other person up. It's obviously not going to work for me. But if I ever get to have kids, my kids are going to HATE the grenade. Muahahahahahahahaha!