Atomic Nerds

So, one of the things that happened while we were dark is that I somehow, through a process that even I don’t fully understand, became a football fan. Yes, the American one. Yes, NFL. I am as surprised as you, frankly. Though not more surprised than Stingray, who has diligently been searching for the pod ever since.

What happened roughly was this: the last Superbowl was a faceoff between the Seattle Seahawks and the Denver Broncos. As New Mexico doesn’t have an NFL team, the state’s football fans divide by rough order of geography into Broncos, Cowboys, and Cardinals fans; up here in the north half of the state close to Colorado, it’s mostly Broncos fans. I also, through a series of coincidences, have a fair chunk of friends or teammates who are from or residing in Seattle. Thusly about two thirds of my social circle was REALLY EXCITED about the game, half because Broncos and half because Seahawks. This had never happened before.

At this point I had a couple of options for reaction. A) Ignore everything diligently until the war dance was over. Kind of difficult to do when my teammates were chatting about it while strapping on skates and pads, and my guildmates were while rounding up to go kill internet monsters. B) Make fun of both sides while snarking about handegg. Been there, done that, it had started to feel hollow. C) Try to understand the game and see what the people I liked and respected were so exercised about.

I chose option C, just for the change of pace and to have something to do. Given that I’m a die-hard gamer and can learn and understand pretty much anything if someone has translated to video game format, I started there- given there’s a ludicrously popular franchise devoted to just that. I snagged the mobile version first, which was diverting albeit really quite buggy, and enjoyed it enough that I snagged the (by-now marked down, given the season is over) console copy.

Then I got a really annoying strain of the flu that left me without energy to do much of anything. For three weeks. Every time I stood up too fast or moved further than about ten feet, I’d get dizzy and need a rest break. So I spent a lot of time on the couch, playing the feetballs.

Somewhere through that process I discovered that I actually really enjoyed the game, in and of itself. I think it appeals to the same level of geekery in me that likes derby and games in general (and no matter what anyone tells you, football fans are massive geeks, just about a more socially acceptable interest). I like that there’s a fair bit more strategy involved than I once understood- like chess with intelligent pieces. I also like that it gives me a weird subject of nearly universal small talk with strangers I otherwise have absolutely nothing in common with. (And that people boggle at me when I turn out to be able to converse intelligently on the subject- I guess there’s still an adolescent part of me that loves being something other than what others expect.) And just like any good geek, I love that there’s damn near total saturation of available information about the subject.

So, because that is what you do when you Football, I decided to pick a team to follow. I grew up in Phoenix, which would make the Cardinals the logical default choice, but I remember listening to the car radio a lot during the era when they’d first relocated there from Saint Louis, and I remember what an obnoxious attitude they had when they first turned up- like we were lucky to have an NFL team at all, let alone one that actually acted like they belonged or were happy to be there. (It also irritates me they’re still called the Cardinals, which are found nowhere in AZ. C’mon, the Oilers became the Titans and the (former) Browns became the Ravens…) Cowboys were out. They were rather high-profile dickwads when I was a teenager. Broncos were out because my major impression formed during the Superbowl (the first I had ever watched with more interest in the game than the commercials) was that I harbor irrational hatred for Peyton Manning. Pretty sure it was watching him scream at his teammates while the Denver team actively melted down- that can’t have helped anything. Or maybe it’s his forehead. I don’t like his forehead either.

So now it’s the Detroit Lions. Why? Honestly, it’s because they were the team that really suited the way I found I like to play in Madden (aggressive defense, strong-arm pass-heavy offense), and that’s not really any less logical than geographical proximity or inheriting a team like a family heirloom. (My brother is a Cowboys fan for that reason, which is a perfectly good reason but not one strong enough to erase my memories of strutting cocks in Dallas.) Also because when I went in to research their participation in the National Felon League sub-competition, I found plenty of arrests, but mostly for weed and none for violent crimes. Also my dad was a Red Sox fan, and while I have no investment in the Sox myself, it was a thorough early socialization in the draw of talented underdogs, as well as the bitter joy of constant raised hopes and subsequent heartbreak. Plus I found I really dig watching Ndamukong Suh plant offensive players like tomato stakes.

All of which is essentially a long-winded warning that among this blog’s usual eclectic content will probably appear some football musings, simply because I now have things to say about the sport other than snark. And I’d hate for anybody in what remains of my reading audience to die of shock.

So this is a week late and five bucks short (Inflation! #thanksobama!), but I’ve got a bit of dust to blow off the keys too. Originally I’d planned to do this on a Monday since all 3 people who still check this digital graveyard likely do so at the start of the week and move on, but I figured I’d take the bounce off LabRat posting to see if I could get a few more eyes to:

The Grey Man Vignettes

Everybody’s favorite spooky curmudgeon OldNFO done wrote hisself a book. He was even desperate gullible misguided enough to throw early copies at me to help with the editing process, so I’m getting a bit of vicarious ego off watching it do this well myself.

It’s a good little read. It’s not Clancy technoporn, it’s not Dickens being paid by the word, it’s just a solid character-run series of short, loosely connected glimpses into the lives of some good ol’ boys (the good kind) doing their thing. Worth snagging for a solid couple hours entertainment.

*deep inhalation*

*blows off a thick layer of dust*

I’m not going to explain why I stopped writing for so long, because it’s personal AND boring, but the itch to exercise those muscles is getting pretty strong, so I need to stop self-criticizing for everything I might or might not write and Just Do It, as the overpriced brand has it. So, in light of that, I’m gonna start with a warm-up set commentating on an article I saw today. It’s LIFE ADVICE, y’all. Mostly about destructive self-criticism. So naturally I’m going to criticize someone else’s insights instead.

1. 1. Stop spending time with the wrong people. – Life is too short to spend time with people who suck the happiness out of you. If someone wants you in their life, they’ll make room for you. You shouldn’t have to fight for a spot. Never, ever insist yourself to someone who continuously overlooks your worth. And remember, it’s not the people that stand by your side when you’re at your best, but the ones who stand beside you when you’re at your worst that are your true friends.

Mixed feelings about this. The first bit is good- people who like you will act like they like you, it won’t be a mystery, and you won’t experience much ambivalence over it that isn’t fairly recognizable as coming purely from yourself, and passive-aggressive or mercurial “friends” are a waste of time and energy. The same thing applies to dating- someone who is constantly giving you mixed messages is either a pointless time-waster or someone who is actually giving you really clear signals you don’t want to hear, and more to the point anyone who couldn’t be a good friend as well as a lover isn’t worth your time either unless all you’re after is short-term sex. (In the long term these people won’t make good partners in bed either.)

But I have a big issue with this line: “And remember, it’s not the people that stand by your side when you’re at your best, but the ones who stand beside you when you’re at your worst that are your true friends.”. Yes, true friends will stand by you during the lowest times in your life rather than scattering as soon as you’re no longer that fun to spend time with, but a really true friend will kick your ass if you’re acting like your worst self. They won’t put up with it. They’ll tell you you’re wrong. If you’re really fucked up they’ll tell you to get professional help, repeatedly. And eventually, if you refuse to work to get better? They’ll leave, because you’re no longer the you they loved.

2. #2. Stop running from your problems. – Face them head on. No, it won’t be easy. There is no person in the world capable of flawlessly handling every punch thrown at them. We aren’t supposed to be able to instantly solve problems. That’s not how we’re made. In fact, we’re made to get upset, sad, hurt, stumble and fall. Because that’s the whole purpose of living – to face problems, learn, adapt, and solve them over the course of time. This is what ultimately molds us into the person we become.

No issue here. Good advice. The only thing I’d add to it is that no matter how painful dealing with the problem is, it’s not nearly as painful as living with indefinitely.

3. #3. Stop lying to yourself. – You can lie to anyone else in the world, but you can’t lie to yourself. Our lives improve only when we take chances, and the first and most difficult chance we can take is to be honest with ourselves.

Actually you can lie to yourself very well if you’re really motivated to, and a lot of the time you’ll do it without even thinking twice about it. It’s pretty normal, actually. But your life will go smoother in direct proportion to how well you learn not to. Also while lying to others is sometimes necessary and even honorable, it usually doesn’t help you to lie to them, either.

4. #4. Stop putting your own needs on the back burner. – The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too. Yes, help others; but help yourself too. If there was ever a moment to follow your passion and do something that matters to you, that moment is now.

You don’t actually get a cookie or a medal for martyrdom. And constantly feeling deprived or like your own needs don’t matter is a recipe for misery, and miserable people make lousy friends and partners.

5. #5. Stop trying to be someone you’re not. – One of the greatest challenges in life is being yourself in a world that’s trying to make you like everyone else. Someone will always be prettier, someone will always be smarter, someone will always be younger, but they will never be you. Don’t change so people will like you. Be yourself and the right people will love the real you.

Actually if the real you is a shitty person with shitty values, no they won’t. But the good news is you actually CAN change that, it will just be a lot of work. But ultimately very rewarding work.

6. #6. Stop trying to hold onto the past. – You can’t start the next chapter of your life if you keep re-reading your last one.

Having your brain taken over by constantly re-enacting past patterns, emotions, and experiences is one of the most effective ways to attach a metaphorical boat anchor to your own ankles.

7. #7. Stop being scared to make a mistake. – Doing something and getting it wrong is at least ten times more productive than doing nothing. Every success has a trail of failures behind it, and every failure is leading towards success. You end up regretting the things you did NOT do far more than the things you did.

Or, as we say in derby, “If you’re not falling, you’re not learning.” And most stuff isn’t going to leave bruises.

8. #8. Stop berating yourself for old mistakes. – We may love the wrong person and cry about the wrong things, but no matter how things go wrong, one thing is for sure, mistakes help us find the person and things that are right for us. We all make mistakes, have struggles, and even regret things in our past. But you are not your mistakes, you are not your struggles, and you are here NOW with the power to shape your day and your future. Every single thing that has ever happened in your life is preparing you for a moment that is yet to come.

I sometimes think there’s a Shame Center of the brain that has no other purpose other than going over past regrets and embarrassments until we feel almost as bad about them as we did the first time, all over again.

9. #9. Stop trying to buy happiness. – Many of the things we desire are expensive. But the truth is, the things that really satisfy us are totally free – love, laughter and working on our passions.

Actually, working on our passions isn’t remotely free unless your passion is bodyweight exercise, and even then it costs in time and energy. Love isn’t really free either, it requires hard work, lots of time, and sometimes money- though real love usually (usually!) doesn’t feel like work.

10. #10. Stop exclusively looking to others for happiness. – If you’re not happy with who you are on the inside, you won’t be happy in a long-term relationship with anyone else either. You have to create stability in your own life first before you can share it with someone else.

More or less true. I don’t buy this sentiment’s close cousin, “you can’t love anyone else until you can love yourself”, though. I’ve known plenty of people who struggled or still struggle with loving themselves who did a lot better at it when they had a strong, healthy relationship- but it does take a lot of self-awareness and self-control to pull off.

11. #11. Stop being idle. – Don’t think too much or you’ll create a problem that wasn’t even there in the first place. Evaluate situations and take decisive action. You cannot change what you refuse to confront. Making progress involves risk. Period! You can’t make it to second base with your foot on first.

Mostly true. Sometimes taking action won’t lead to success though, especially when you have a basic belief that doing something is invariably better than doing nothing and placing a little faith in those around you.

12. #12. Stop thinking you’re not ready. – Nobody ever feels 100% ready when an opportunity arises. Because most great opportunities in life force us to grow beyond our comfort zones, which means we won’t feel totally comfortable at first.

Again, mostly true. Sometimes we genuinely aren’t, though, and failure when there was never a possibility of success isn’t necessarily beneficial.

13. #13. Stop getting involved in relationships for the wrong reasons. – Relationships must be chosen wisely. It’s better to be alone than to be in bad company. There’s no need to rush. If something is meant to be, it will happen – in the right time, with the right person, and for the best reason. Fall in love when you’re ready, not when you’re lonely.

You shouldn’t pursue love just because you’re lonely, as that will only lead to searching for anyone to fill that partner-shaped hole in your life, which NEVER ends well. (Healthy people you actually want to be with will correctly sense you see them as an object/spacefiller and not a person, and they’ll run like hell- but the people who are fucked up or exploitative might bite.) But we all get lonely, and it’s not a reason to back-burner it until we’re not. You might wait forever.

14. #14. Stop rejecting new relationships just because old ones didn’t work. – In life you’ll realize that there is a purpose for everyone you meet. Some will test you, some will use you and some will teach you. But most importantly, some will bring out the best in you.

I agree with the first sentence and nothing else. People don’t exist to serve a purpose for you, they’re people and they exist for their own damn sake, not to teach you some sort of lesson. Definitely avoid people who seem to bring out your worst self and stick with ones that bring out your best, but people are not FOR you and your personal development.

15. #15. Stop trying to compete against everyone else. – Don’t worry about what others are doing better than you. Concentrate on beating your own records every day. Success is a battle between YOU and YOURSELF only.

Yup. Though for certain very specific goals (like picking up your time on a speed/endurance metric, or a weightlifting personal record), it’s sometimes helpful to pick someone who is *already very close to you* and use them as a rabbit to chase- as long as it remains good-natured.

16. #16. Stop being jealous of others. – Jealousy is the art of counting someone else’s blessings instead of your own. Ask yourself this: “What’s something I have that everyone wants?”

Actually, that’s ENVY. Jealous is worrying that someone else is going to take or already has something you have. This is why we use the phrase “jealously guarding”, and refer to someone as jealous when they’re suspecting a partner of cheating. Technically speaking this bit of advice is telling you to drop envy for jealousy instead. This has been your pedant moment of the week.

17. #17. Stop complaining and feeling sorry for yourself. – Life’s curveballs are thrown for a reason – to shift your path in a direction that is meant for you. You may not see or understand everything the moment it happens, and it may be tough. But reflect back on those negative curveballs thrown at you in the past. You’ll often see that eventually they led you to a better place, person, state of mind, or situation. So smile! Let everyone know that today you are a lot stronger than you were yesterday, and you will be.

While it’s true that wallowing in self-pity and constant bitching will only get you more of the same, you still need to feel and process sadness, disappointment, and unhappiness and there’s nothing wrong with you doing so. Thinking you need to show a happy, positive face all the time will only make you feel a miserable secret self and terrible loneliness. Also, telling someone else to smile is a fucking asshole move, and sometimes what doesn’t kill us doesn’t make us stronger, it just leaves scars and crippling injuries.

18. #18. Stop holding grudges. – Don’t live your life with hate in your heart. You will end up hurting yourself more than the people you hate. Forgiveness is not saying, “What you did to me is okay.” It is saying, “I’m not going to let what you did to me ruin my happiness forever.” Forgiveness is the answer… let go, find peace, liberate yourself! And remember, forgiveness is not just for other people, it’s for you too. If you must, forgive yourself, move on and try to do better next time.

You don’t have to forgive to not being wasting energy and thought cycles on the person you haven’t and maybe will never forgive. Sometimes forgiveness benefits neither of you. Letting them ruin your life or your peace of mind after you’ve gotten clean away is letting them win, and living better is your victory- but you don’t have to forgive to do that.

19. #19. Stop letting others bring you down to their level. – Refuse to lower your standards to accommodate those who refuse to raise theirs.

Words to live by. Tit for tat erodes your own integrity and self-respect- or it should.

20. #20. Stop wasting time explaining yourself to others. – Your friends don’t need it and your enemies won’t believe it anyway. Just do what you know in your heart is right.

BULLSHIT. If you take it for granted all the time that your friends understand exactly what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, you’re going to lose friends, and your butthurt reaction when you discover you were NOT understood is only going to hasten the process. This is particularly important applied to partners. (Romantic or business.)

21. #21. Stop doing the same things over and over without taking a break. – The time to take a deep breath is when you don’t have time for it. If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting what you’re getting. Sometimes you need to distance yourself to see things clearly.

Fair enough, but far from universally applicable. If you’re a paramedic keeping someone alive on the way to the hospital, you don’t want to take a break, change what you’re doing, or pause to reflect. Less extreme situations sometimes also apply.

22. #22. Stop overlooking the beauty of small moments. – Enjoy the little things, because one day you may look back and discover they were the big things. The best portion of your life will be the small, nameless moments you spend smiling with someone who matters to you.

Agree. Happiness is a fleeting enough emotion you’ve got to savor it while you’ve got it.

23. #23. Stop trying to make things perfect. – The real world doesn’t reward perfectionists, it rewards people who get things done.

This is true. Although perfectionism is sometimes appropriate to time and place- perfectionists make good neurosurgeons, though you still have to close up that skull someday.

24. #24. Stop following the path of least resistance. – Life is not easy, especially when you plan on achieving something worthwhile. Don’t take the easy way out. Do something extraordinary.

Agreed, just so long as you have a healthy sense of proportion about it. Your life is not wasted if you don’t climb Everest or otherwise go down in the record books. Being a good parent and raising kids to well-adjusted, kind, productive adults is extraordinary. So is doing a job the way it should be done, every time.

25. #25. Stop acting like everything is fine if it isn’t. – It’s okay to fall apart for a little while. You don’t always have to pretend to be strong, and there is no need to constantly prove that everything is going well. You shouldn’t be concerned with what other people are thinking either – cry if you need to – it’s healthy to shed your tears. The sooner you do, the sooner you will be able to smile again.

You have to pick your time and place, but also words to live by. Take it from someone who has an ulcer without a helicobacter infection, purely from internalizing stress: it creates so much long-term misery permanent stoicism just isn’t worth the cost. Doesn’t mean you have to be public about it, though.

26. #26. Stop blaming others for your troubles. – The extent to which you can achieve your dreams depends on the extent to which you take responsibility for your life. When you blame others for what you’re going through, you deny responsibility – you give others power over that part of your life.

Yeah, though this really cuts both ways. If you constantly internalize everything bad that happens as having been somehow your fault or something you could have prevented, you will eat yourself alive and then you won’t be much good to anyone, including yourself. Psychologists call this internal vs external locus of control; people who are balanced somewhere in between are happiest and most successful. Plus taking credit for sheer gobsmacking luck will make you an arrogant ass.

27. #27. Stop trying to be everything to everyone. – Doing so is impossible, and trying will only burn you out. But making one person smile CAN change the world. Maybe not the whole world, but their world. So narrow your focus.

Take it from a lazy person: this is so much less work and stress it’s not even funny. Doesn’t mean don’t make an effort, but taking on impossible tasks just consumes you.

28. #28. Stop worrying so much. – Worry will not strip tomorrow of its burdens, it will strip today of its joy. One way to check if something is worth mulling over is to ask yourself this question: “Will this matter in one year’s time? Three years? Five years?” If not, then it’s not worth worrying about.

Would that people could just turn this off by thinking positive. Believe it or not, how much anxiety you experience, as well as how easily you can turn it off on command, is heavily genetically influenced- and people who draw the short end of that straw have to learn much more powerful coping methods, and in some cases use medication.

29. #29. Stop focusing on what you don’t want to happen. – Focus on what you do want to happen. Positive thinking is at the forefront of every great success story. If you awake every morning with the thought that something wonderful will happen in your life today, and you pay close attention, you’ll often find that you’re right.

I DO BELIEVE IN FAIRIES I DO I DO I DO. Being able to visualize success clearly and move toward it is very important, but so is avoiding pitfalls you can see if you keep your eyes on the road and not the horizon.

30. #30. Stop being ungrateful. – No matter how good or bad you have it, wake up each day thankful for your life. Someone somewhere else is desperately fighting for theirs. Instead of thinking about what you’re missing, try thinking about what you have that everyone else is missing.

Ehhh. This is a good way of calming yourself in a crisis, but feeling like you have no right to your own unhappiness over your circumstances just because there are starving children in Africa isn’t going to lead to any sort of psychologically positive outcome. It’s not good for making kids eat their dinner, either. Is good for giving them a weird and dysfunctional relationship with food, though. And for that matter happiness.

Tune in next time for… I have no idea what, or when.

I know I’m just pissing in the wind for all the effect this will have, but can we please stop playing hard-ass make-believe and just say “tan”? Interior decorators have already come up with a dozen names for this color, calling it “coyote brown” doesn’t make it any more ninja at the end of the day than calling it “taupe” or “latte.” In fact, I encourage all three of you reading this to switch to using interior design color names exclusively in place of these tactical-fluffer color names.

Currently in the fermenter, the resurrected Bearfucker ale is bubbling away like an irritated lesser deity. “Beer room” also doubling as “guest room,” the CO2 emissions were actually noisy enough to wake houseguest Indy at one point. Signs are good that once again the bottle label should read “Caution: May Be Whiskey”.

I say that only as pre-text to The Complete Guide To The Craft Beer At Your Local Bar. All three of us were laughing out loud and exclaiming “Oh, there’s what [Labrat/Stingray/Indy] always orders!”

Now if you’ll excuse me, Maverick just threw down. I’ve got these hops I found growing over by the Dog Park I’m going to try something with.

So after a couple weeks worth of neatsfoot oil, Dr. Jackson’s Hide Rejuvenator, and Leather Honey, the leather in the boots has come quite a long ways towards viability. Work on the plates has been a little more challenging. A few shots of penetrating oil didn’t do much, but some small vice grips did the trick on getting the kingpins loose.

The toe-stop obviously didn’t fare so well. The kingpins remain the oddest bit, but more on those in a bit.

The pivot cups, being arguably the most wear-prone part, are in surprisingly good shape. Gonna replace them anyway since the age of the rubber has some cracks showing, but if the leather hadn’t been dessicated, you could mistake these for something that just sees regular use and hasn’t been replaced in a while.

Getting useful toestops in, as you can see by the post size, will be a bit of work. The fixed stops originally on were loc-tited in place, but came out clean. I should be able to bore out the holes and re-thread them without un-mounting the plate from the boots, but if there’s any hope of a derby life for these old war-horses, a transition to adjustable stops is pretty mandatory.

So the kingpins. They’re kind of bass-ackwards from most these days. Largely, with exceptions and hand waving and so forth, kingpins either drop through the top of the plate with the nut on the bottom for adjustment, or are more in this vein, screwed in from the under side of the plate, again with a nut on the bottom for action adjustment. Not quite sure what to do here, since these screw in from the bottom, but the nut is non-integral. Adjusting the nut to be able to screw the pin further into the plate to tighten up the trucks is… awkward at best. The bushings are toast, and rock hard, but at $15 for a full set for both skates, who cares? They’re wear parts again, it happens. The bushing cups could possibly stand replacing, but they’re not really something that wears out, and the metal is overall in good shape. The 7mm axles remain interesting. Bearings are plenty available in that size, or a ten dollar sleeve will let me use normal 8mm bearings.

Now the bad news. After loosening up the leather a good bit, the odds of these fitting my battleship-like feet are getting lower and lower. The width could probably be stretched, but the length… that’s a long way to go. Fortunately, there are still multiple good homes for these, and the restoration itself is actually a lot more fun than expected. The leather is just about to the point where it needs motion before it’s going to get any better. We’ve got a couple sets of wheels that can be Frankensteined in, and some old clean bearings (from before I discovered the ones that apparently never get dirty) so long as I put those sleeves on.

Thanks, FarmFam! These are awesome!

Farmgirl and FarmFam have been in the process of cleaning up and renovating the actual farm house this year. Part of this has been cleaning up the basement. In the process, they came up with a pair of ancient skates. Farmgirl made an offhand crack about them and my derby skating, and somewhere in the Good Idea* matrix of my brain, something said “No, don’t throw those out, let me take a look at them.”

Time passed, and I’d managed to forget they were in the for-Stingray pile at Blogorado. More time passed. Farmgirl got a case of the itchy-feet and came down to visit, and did in fact remember that there was a for-Stingray pile (mostly empty beer bottles that need refilling), and brought that, and the skates, along.

For once the Good Idea matrix of my brain was on to something. This is what showed up:

They’ve already had two coats of neatsfoot oil to start reversing the effects of, I’m told, 30 years minimum living in a basement without any attention aside from that of a packrat, but they look suspiciously similar to modern skate design.

On the right is one of my current workhorses, along with a spare truck and kingpin for reference. A brief aside into skate anatomy, the plate is… well, the plate. The metal bit to which all other bits are mounted. The truck is the bit that has the axles (detached with the black plastic caps protecting the threads below the two). Rotate the pictured spare so the lower cap is pointed up but otherwise in the same position and you can see how they fit, if you’re of the less spatially-thinking set. The forward tip is the pivot (mirrored on the rear but pointed the other way), and the kingpin goes through the bushings (black on the old skates, “orange” with a hefty dose of grime on mine) and the large hole in the truck to hold the whole assembly together. They’re both double-action trucks. I haven’t busted out the protractor yet, but they appear to fall in the more popular 10-15 degree range (45 being the other somewhat less popular but still common angle. If anybody is really that interested in this particular divergence, I can go into more detail later, but it’s sort of a hornet’s nest.) Also the axles are 7mm instead of the currently more popular 8mm (which is what LabRat and I roll).

Oriented to see the model, the make (inverted) is Sure-Grip. This is interesting because Sure-Grip is rivaled only by Riedell in terms of ubiquitousness in the modern derby world. The more things change, the more things stay the same, it seems. The plate is even today part of Sure-Grip’s lineup.

As it stands, they’re too narrow for my feet, but not outside the realm of stretchable. I think you all know where this is going.

The bushings are obviously shot. I could get some 7mm axle wheels, but in the interest of in-house sanity, I think the better bet will be to replace the trucks entirely (and the pivot cups, obviously) and go to 8. The kingpins will go as well, since the crank-it-down flathead screw model doesn’t leave a lot of room for adjustment, and the less said about the toestops the better. They have a similar flat-head crank-down mount leaving the stops very high, which is less than useful for tomahawk stops, which are a severely non-trivial part of a referee’s toolkit. Options there are to either go with a standard nut and washer setup, or drill and tap a couple holes for set screws. Having skated both ways, I’ll be adding the set screw. May also have to bore out the main hole itself, but we’ll see how things go.

All in all, thanks FarmFam! (Like I needed another time sink…bastards.)

(And to end-run the inevitable questions, yes the Trunk Monkey moniker is based on the commercial campaign. My general policy of making boy scouts look underprepared** has resulted in way more than a few “Does anybody have a [oddball thing nobody would ever think a derby practice would need]?” “Yeah, I do. Just a sec.” moments, ergo press the button, deploy the Trunk Monkey, fix any problem. My number, for those curious, is .30-06 because “a man with a .30-06 doesn’t panic.”)

*They’re not
**Which sadly is not foolproof, as I have found myself underprepared at times.

Recently, LabRat’s mother paid us a visit. This is not a happy occasion to put it mildly, but detailing this is not the purpose for which I blow the dust out of the keyboard today.

As part of the appeasement package, some of the art museums available in Santa Fe were tapped for afternoon visits. The fact that most were located near the damnable plaza, the tourist-packed heart of the oldest part of Santa Fe, and thus not well configured for the high vehicular traffic that tourist attractions draw deterred none but me, the driver of the ginormous pick-up.

The New Mexico Museum of Art was eventually selected as the top candidate, and thus we hauled the ponderousness of the truck and LabRat’s mother directly to the plaza to see The Art.

This did not go well. Allow me to present, with minimal commentary (until later), some of the pieces of art we encountered in this fraud of an institution. File names contain additional commentary, and those that are not terribly well in focus, I’m torn between calling art and just noting that the pieces were bad enough that focus would not really help anything.

Yes, that’s construction paper on cardboard.

I’m not positive these next two were actual exhibits, but given the rest of the museum I wanted to be sure to get a snapshot just in case I was standing in front of genius.

I don’t know, this one had a light shined specifically on it so I think it was an installation piece. *rimshot*

And finally, I present the best thing in the whole damn museum:

Now, to be fair there were two, maybe three pieces that were actually interesting and worth looking at. There was a decent Georgia O’Keefe repressionist piece. By contrast, there were roughly 15-20 of those bullshit “I sloshed my brush-water on loose-leaf” pretentious troll-pieces from Richard Tuttle. LabRat left insulted on behalf of the two good artists for having their actual work displayed next to such vapid drivel, while I was insulted the institution would willingly display so much that would be best used wadded up to light the fireplace and have the gall to charge money to look at it. Or go in the fireplace as actual fuel at Blogorado. I’m reasonably certain we destroyed thousands of dollars worth of art in the firepit there this year, but luckily it’s ok because my scrap pile must be worth millions. I’m sincerely tempted to select some random chunk of battered 2×4 with a nail sticking out of it, and attempt to deliver it as an addition the artist sent to the exhibit.

In fact, y’know what? Check this out:

I made that. Right now. Between typing the colon in “check this out:” and typing this line. I dare any one of you to find an expert who will say “Nope, that’s not part of this collection of pretentious bullshit.”

I’m not strictly sure photography was allowed. Frankly I don’t care. Being thrown out would very much have been an “Oh, don’t throw me in that briar patch!” situation. Forestalling my urge to redouble my efforts into researching a way to destroy all life on the planet from my back yard, most of the guest book broadly agreed that, in the words of art critic Hilton Kramer invoking the axiom “less is more,” “in Mr. Tuttle’s work, less is unmistakably less…One is tempted to say, where art is concerned, less has never been as less than this.” One can hope that the curator in Santa Fe is similarly fired as the curator responsible for the exhibit that prompted that critique.

Finally, on the long hike back to where I finally managed to find a spot near the plaza big enough to accommodate an extended-bed extended-cab pickup, something caught my eye:

I could swear I’ve seen that emu head somewhere….
(And paging the ministry of irony, the piece is titled “Money Is Too Important To Take Seriously” and they want $3,600 for it. I actually do like it, infinitely more than anything I saw in the actual museum, but…. seriously?)

So, across various sources that I read in the last few days there have come angry reactions to this piece of psuedo-intellectual reactionary bloviation. Which doesn’t usually come hipster-flavored, but hey, it’s the digital age and anything is possible. Except, according to the title and premise of the piece, getting lost. But swiping at low-hanging fruit is still totally possible in any age and with any technology, so let’s give it one more look than it really deserves.

We can’t jump off bridges anymore because our iPhones will get ruined. We can’t take skinny dips in the ocean, because there’s no service on the beach and adventures aren’t real unless they’re on Instagram. Technology has doomed the spontaneity of adventure and we’re helping destroy it every time we Google, check-in, and hashtag.

Actually I don’t jump off bridges anymore (never did, truth be told) because it’s fucking dangerous. Those aren’t high-dive boards, they’re walkways over an unknown depth of water with an unknown amount of places to haul out and an unknown amount of sharp fucking rocks. I’ve done lots of things in various wild waterways, some adventurous and some not, but jumping off a bridge into one was something I recognized as just plain stupid long before I started carrying any sort of personal electronics around with me.

I’ve also never gone skinny-dipping in the ocean, although I’ve likewise spent some time on beaches, both before and after having service there was something it would even have been possible to care about. Why? I don’t like getting arrested, and even if I had a nudist beach available to me I’m entirely too conscious of what lives in the ocean and how much of it actually spends time close to the shoreline to be all that psychologically comfortable naked to it.

You know what has changed about my behavior on shorelines since I started carrying personal electronics any of the time (I do have a smartphone now, which I resisted for years, but I still turn off the ringer and stow it most of the time I leave the house unless I’m waiting for something alone.)? There is now one additional thing I leave wherever I put my wallet and keys. That’s it. That’s all. If you find the beach boring compared to your smartphone, you have other problems that have nothing whatsoever to do with Google or Instagram.

After this bit of inanity follows a bunch of stories about getting lost, some of them adventurous and exciting, and some of them experiences no one should miss unless they’ve suffered a traumatic brain injury. (Like losing his little brother in a busy city- something no parent or guardian would sign up to go through ever again.)

I’ve got a bunch of stories about getting lost, too. I’m one of those unfortunate individuals with no sense of direction whatsoever, a trait I inherited from both my parents, who also had no sense of direction. I don’t find being lost the least little bit romantic, mostly because it was a normal experience to me growing up and not in any way associated with young adult adventure. I’ve been lost in the woods on foot and in a car, stuck in a vehicle in deep mud or snow a couple of times because of a wrong turn taken trying to leave said woods, lost in a strange city on the wrong side of midnight and in the wrong damn neighborhood to be lost in while a young woman, lost in the empty gaps between cities in the West, lost when the weather presented some real dangers of exposure, lost without food, without water, and lost in more entertaining and hilarious settings. Occasionally it ended in a funny story or some bit of unexpected adventure, but mostly it ended with a lot of stress and cold and sometimes that delightful experience when you’re a small child of seeing real fear on your parents’ faces because they know your situation might not have a happy ending. I’ve had a lot of adventures I remember fondly, but pretty much all of them involved knowing at least roughly where I was fucking going and how to leave again.

I’ve also spent a lot of time eating on the road and in strange places. I’ve got stories about terrifying meals, having to pull over to the side of the road during a road trip so someone could puke after eating somewhere no one should, and a much more prosaic story about spending a number of years only eating in recognizable chain restaurants while traveling after hard lessons learned from those earlier experiences, unless I had a reliable voucher from someone local about where to eat.

I had a lot of fantastic experiences eating in small towns and on the road in the gulf coast south during college, because the biology and environmental sciences department, having to go on a lot of road trips for field trip and collection purposes, had an effective word-of-mouth network going for where to find the best hidden gems to eat. I still have memories of some of the best meals of my life from those times. It reawakened my sense of culinary adventure and made eating at chains somewhere new feel like a personal defeat.

Know what having small portable computers around me has allowed me to do? Repeat that experience everywhere. I can go anywhere there’s good food to be had with a pocketful of recommendations from chow hounds and road food enthusiasts across the nation, and I’m still having some of the best meals of my life that way, or at least something much better than chains and eons and light years better than food poisoning far from home.

I remember the time I picked up my girlfriend from her friend’s house in Massachusetts. She was going to school down in Georgia and this was the first time I’d seen her in months. “We’re back together…finally.” I tweeted, tagging both of our Twitter handles in the status. The flash on my iPhone annoys her and she asks me to put my phone away. I begrudgingly agree and I start to drive. I put my home address into the GPS and follow the voice. She asks me if I want to get lost with her. I ask her what she means and she tells me that she wants to get lost. I ask her where she wants to go and she shrugs. I tell her that there is an interesting looking coffee shop only 2.3 miles away and she sighs. I turn off the GPS and drive. A few minutes go by and I get antsy. I turn the GPS back on and follow the voice, she crosses her arms and is silent all the way back to my house.

Dude. Here is some free advice for you, since you apparently need it. She was not pissed that you didn’t get genuinely, running-out-of-gas, freezing-in-the-dark, scary-goddamn-neighborhood lost. She was pissed you wouldn’t put down your fucking phone and put your full attention on her, and more pissed that you couldn’t do that for even ten minutes without buckling.

You know what’s nice about putting down the damn phone and going somewhere that’s actually new? Being able to, if you need to, pick it back up again when you’re done and find your way back home. If you can’t take step one of that combination, the problem is not the alienating march of technology, it’s your complete and total inability to leave your comfort zone without being forced to by circumstances beyond your control.

I like being part of the most connected generation of all time BECAUSE it allows me to have adventures without major disaster or anxiety attack on the part of my loved ones. (Who tend to, as loved ones do, worry more about me than I do about myself, after experiences of me vanishing from the face of the earth for hours or a day after I said I’d be home.) I love being able to Wikipedia the old building I’m in and find out what makes it special, that I’d never have known otherwise. I love being able to eat truly new things I’d never have tried otherwise- because I’ve had turn-you-inside-out food poisoning while in the middle of a car trip before and IT FUCKING SUCKS.

I suspect what the author really misses isn’t being lost, it’s being young and having a sense of adventure about the world because all of it really is new and having the freedom to explore it at will is too. But I’m me and he’s him, and I can’t speak for him. I can, however, speak for my portion of the same generation, that hasn’t experienced any alienation whatsoever- and is still entirely capable of engaging with non-digital experiences without a competition.

And that’s official, records and contracts exchanged, signed, and collated, and Major has a new owner. I’ll be part of the transport chain to get her to her new home in about two weeks.

Thanks especially to Farmgirl, who raised money to help her and make it easier for whoever has her (her, me, any new owner) to cover her inevitable vet bills. All money raised will go by check or money order along with her health certificate during the transport- the hat was passed for her, and with her it will stay.