What an obvious thing

I admit it, I should have figured this out and rigged it up a while ago… it isn’t particularly complicated… but something about having figured it out still feels good. What a neat thing I’ve just done.

So, as you may know, I heat the room I live in here in Pine via wood stove. If you’ve ever run a wood stove, you know that you periodically have to put more wood in it, or it will stop functioning as a heat-provider. I have a relatively small wood stove, so I have to put wood in it pretty frequently to keep it giving off heat. Which is a problem when I’m sleeping, as I do not tend to wake every half hour and get up out of bed to put wood in the stove. Most nights I sleep straight through to morning.

Except that then in the morning, my room is unconscionably cold. Like, generally lately it’s been mid-40’s cold in my room when I wake up. Obviously, if I get out of bed and light a fire, the room will warm up, but if I’m going to brave the cold long enough to get a fire started and the room warmed, I may as well just get dressed and get the day started. Which is what I’ve been doing lately.

What I did tonight was to set up and test a system for starting a fire in the stove across the room (~25 feet away) without getting out of bed. As soon as it occurred to me, it seemed obvious, it’s so simple. I happened to have an old starter and a few igniters (plus a few engines not used today) for model rockets. I attached a few matches to the igniter, and gerry-rigged the electric starter to work without the ‘safety key’ I lost countless years go. I put together the workings for a fire in the stove, carefully placed the igniter/matches at the bottom next to some carefully placed newspaper (all just inside the stove), and ran the line across the room from the stove to my bedside table. Voila! Instant, makeshift stove-lighter! I tested it, and now have a nice fire going.

Anyway, small victory for warm-bed-loving me. I don’t think it’ll get cold enough tonight to worry about using it, but it’s supposed to get back down to unbearable coldnesses next week, and barring running out of igniters, I’m set.

I will not mention the war

Okay, so… as some of you should know… actually, all of you should know, it’s just some of you who bothered paying attention… anyway, I have this whole, alternate calendar that I made up…

And as those of you who have known me since High School or before know, it has been counting down. Now, I lost my records at some point along the way, and when I tried recalculating it a few years ago from scratch, I ended up a little off. But then last year I figured out my miscalculation and adjusted everything. Thus the abbreviation “A.C.” I’ve been adding to my dates lately (see my webcam date on the right), which stands for “Adjusted Calendar”. To differentiate it not just from the old Farmer’s Calendar (what I call the calendar commonly used by the western world), but from the mis-calculated version I had used for about two years. And I’m counting down the final days now. The last day of the last year before the Zero year on the adjusted calendar is 5/4/2003.

Anyway, as I said, I’ve been counting down for quite some time now. This thing in the back of my mind has become a part of a lot of things I’ve done. My old ramblings are actually dated with the miscalcualted calendar. Anyway, I’ve held back on telling anyone what exactly is supposed to be happenning on 5/5/2003 for as long as I’ve been counting down, but that hasn’t stopped me from telling people about other future events, or incorporating them into my writing. Last year when I was trying to write a novel, I figured it was safe to have a paranoid character spout off about a similar countdown, and I actually included quite a bit of vague prescient information as he babbled on about the approaching doomsday. Except that I’ve been re-working some of that story into the novel I’m re-writing and re-structuring lately, and … well…

Examples include SETI@home. The paranoid character in my story told of how the SETI@home people had come across data not only indicating possible extra-terrestrial intelligence, but data that pointed toward a 5/5/2003 event. He spoke of how SETI@home had had to raise money to rent Aricebo time to capture new data from the points in space that had provided potential sources of ‘synthetic’ data, and that they were pushing to try to get the time in Feb. or March so they could analyze the data before the May deadline. He said that the data they already had laid out a line through space where this ‘synthetic’ data originated, and that outside this narrow band, no traces of ‘synthetic’ data had been found. I wrote all this early last year.

Then as I was re-writing it this week, I thought to myself “Hey, didn’t I get an email from SETI@home recently? I wonder if…” and in fact I did. it told me that SETI@home had raised money & rented the Aricebo telescope for 24 hours & had collected data about some potential ‘synthetic’ data points they wanted to verify. They did the collecting March 18-20. If you go to the official site, you can see a starmap of the data points they collected data for; all but one are in a narrow band of space. Everyone running SETI@home is now crunching the new data & nothing else – this is their priority, and they have emailed everyone who has ever used their distributed software at all, encouraging them to come help out with the new data. Anyone want to guess that they know they’re working under a deadline? They’ve rented time on some very powerful computers to help crunch the data independently of the @home program, too. That costs money. Which means someone knows something.

Anyway… what else? hmmm… i won’t mention the thing that was going on around the time I started counting down that’s also going on now, just 25 days before Zero Hour… Ooh! The Chinese!

I have warned several of my closest friends (you know who you are) and I warn the rest of you now, that China represents a real danger to the US. I will not go into detail here, but suffice it to say that I have given a few people a discreet countdown to that danger becoming a reality, and that the countdown should begin on the day that China successfully launches a human being into orbit. I recently learned that this schedule has been pushed up because of India. Did you know that India has a space program? Would you believe that the same political forces between the USSR and America that created the ‘Space Race’ now exist between China and India? When I explained the danger of China to my friends (the warning was adequate, despite the new timetable; they know what to look for) I set an expectation in their minds of China having a man in space within 1-3 years of now. My new information shows that China should have their first successful launch of humans into orbit right around the waning days of Year Zero on my calendar. Possibly on the first day of Year One, if they want to push the political and social punch of it. (For those of you who can do math & want to know what I’m talking about, a year in the Adjusted Calendar is 300 days long.)

I don’t even want to tell you what’s supposed to be happenning on the first day of Year Two, but I will remind you that I recently moved 100 miles from the nearest metropolitan area in any direction, and well out of the way of every major flight path to a small town most people have never heard of, and which does not appear on some maps. Oh, and I now spend my days trying to learn as much as I can from a sniper/demolitions expert who was highly respected by the military in the last World War, and served in the Pacific Theatre. (Wait, does that count as mentioning the war? Nah. Wrong war.) I think I’ll stop here. I’ve only gotten into the first of five pages of prophecies in the story, and at least two major ones have recently scrolled by unnoticed by most people at the bottom of the CNN broadcast, not worthy of being mentioned aloud, but predicted almost a year ago in this story.

And to think Dani is moving from Canada to the US right now… I’m not so sure that’s the best decision, politically. I guess time will tell.

Hooray, tetanus!

So, earlier today I was working with my grandfather and because of a simple miscommunication, I managed to scratch my left hand twice in 10 seconds on the same rusty nail, drawing blood in both places. Hooray! I immediately stopped everythign I was doing and cleaned out both wounds with hydrogen peroxide, then applied triple antibiotic and bandaids. Then repeated these steps again after about an hour, since my bandaids weren’t adequately applied.

According to dictionary.com, tetanus is “An acute, often fatal disease characterized by spasmodic contraction of voluntary muscles, especially those of the neck and jaw, and caused by the toxin of the bacillus Clostridium tetani, which typically infects the body through a deep wound. Also called lockjaw.” But neither wound was deep. Just tiny scratches. I figure since it lives in an oxygen-rich environment (rust), the anaerobic environment created by hydrogen peroxide should have adequately prevented any infection from these tiny scratches.

Plus, I have no medical insurance or income to pay for shots. Here’s hoping I don’t start going into spasms and die!

A quote

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.

-Theodore Roosevelt, 26th US President (1858-1919)

Where will it be seen?

I have my copy right here in front of me. I actually made two copies, but one of them can only be run in a computer, while this one, labelled only ‘COPY’, has been tested to work in a standard DVD player. Now the question comes: Where should I put it? Where can I put it that it will definitely be seen? How can I be sure someone puts it in a DVD player?

Do I slip it into one of the DVDs at the local library? Do I sell it to Zia inside a used CD or DVD, and hope it makes it to a customer? Do you think I can get a Zia employee to simply give it to someone as a ‘freebie’ or rare ‘bootleg’? Maybe if I sell it online, it will have value, and certaily if someone pays for it, they’ll watch it, right?

I’d love any other suggestions. Also, anyone whose computer is set up to output to VHS, let me know; I’d love to get a VHS copy of this running around. Really, I’m just glad I got the copy made in time. Here’s to Apple!