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Johnj wrote:roscowgo, you may want to pick up a sound power meter from Radio Shack or some place like that. Goofball may be sensitive to that frequency and the solution could be as simple as putting a different speed fan in the power supply. I bought some of those fluorescent bulbs, that are shaped like regular light bulbs, and when I use them I can hear them humming. You might be surprised how noisy the office environment really is, and how much of it you've tuned out.

Could be. She might be part labrador tho.... You're right though. some days I can hear the hear the lights, they drive me nuts then. The reaction from this lady was roughly what I would expect from someone standing next to a f-15. And no one else could hear it.

The Computer is Loud, Got-Dammit!

I have to admit that once I fell for the ol' loud computer gambit. A user at one of our other hospitals called because she had a fan going bad in her computer. I had her hold the phone up to the case and listened and sure, it sounded loud. I grabbed a selection of CPU fans, climbed into the department's Ford Econoline van and set out from Traverse City to lord -- it's a solid hour-and-a-half drive on country highways across desolate, windswept plains, past unspeakably beautiful lakeshore vistas, through indescribable poverty, underneath great works of... okay, it's a long drive, especially in a crosswind with an empty panel van.

So I should mention that it's right about this time period that we had stopped ordering PentiumIII computers and started ordering our first PentiumIV computers. The significance of this is that the PentiumIII and all preceding models had a total of one (1) fan inside them...a little-bitty 1-1/2" fan on the processor. The PentiumIV computer had no less than three (3) fans inside it: a 3" fan on the processor, a 2" fan on the back of the case and another 3" fan on the front of the case. And they all spun at 5000rpm or so.

So I reached lord, I carried in my satchel of fans and I looked at the pc...a nice, new PentiumIV singing away happily like Nancy Sinatra under a sheet-metal desk. Can you say "sounding board?" I can. I almost wept. I explained to the user how utterly normal the noise was. No, it wasn't that loud before, sure'nuff. I explained the "big fans in a little tin can" analogy. I hung my head in resignation. I got some Subway. I drove the long road home.

Be grateful guys for the Goofballs and Kathys of this world. I work backoffice now and truly miss the colourful oddballs I used to have to deal with. Now I just have to endure deeply psychotic managerial strategies and the deeply psychotic managers who believe their banal effusions have meaning and significance in this world.

I miss JJ who wanted to move to Barnsley but changed her mind when she 'realised' it was under 400 feet of water, having been flooded by the North Sea as the result of a government conspiracy. And I miss Miss H who believed me to be a fascist pig and probably a mass murderer to boot. Miss H performed her civic duty by keeping the streets of the town clean. Then once a week she brought the rubbish into the office in a supermarket trolley and dumped it all over the floor.

Miss H desperately wanted to save the planet, but I was never entirely sure which one.

These are joys to be savoured. Don't knock 'em.

[Whoops! Sorry Noodle; this is a hijack, isn't it? I'll go away now.]

Hijacks be dammed! (yeh, stop the water...)

Yeah, hey, so I'm back from our vacation. We drove the red delight you see under my username from Traverse City to the Upper Peninsula and spent a few days in Paradise.

Translation for non-Michiganders: (Michigander is the official term for residents of our fine bankrupt state) We drove 3 to 4 hours north, crossing a very large bridge at one point, and vacationed in a small town on Lake Superior named Paradise.

Tangential point: Michigan contains H.ell, Paradise and Christmas. Check it on Mapquest.

Anyway, we were awakened each morning by the sun rising over the lake. Canada was on the horizon. The air was fresh and crisp. We spent time at the in-laws' cabin throwing things in a campfire and blowing myriad pop-cans into shrapnel with shotguns and .22's.

...and...


And while I did absolutely nothing involving a motorcycle...as is this year's theme for my life... there were a buncha cyclists up there. Our next-door neighbor at the motel had his Harley parked outside...I never saw him wear a shirt under his black vest. His woman did though. (thank you, Lord) I did notice up there that the bikes were either full-dress tourers or big dual-sports. Lots of UltraClassicGlideDeluxe Harleys and the more expensive BMW long-travel-suspension bikes. I guess since it's at least two hours from anything, it makes sense.

We were also staying about 20 miles from the Sleeper Lake Fire currently in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Big wildfire, started by lightning, has burned about 20,000 acres so far. We drove by it on Hwy 123 from Paradise to Newberry, or at least the aftermath. We'd watched on the news at home how they'd closed 123, then opened it again, and we only expected to see smoke, but instead:



We saw that the fire had burned literally up to the shoulder of the highway. The smell of smoke was thick, and we heard the crackle of still-smoldering wood as we drove by -- they were enforcing a 25mph speed-limit due to smoke, though the winds were carrying it away from the road that day. Very sobering.

And thus we came home. Last but not least....a picture of the Noodle clan:

Look at all the noodles by the water!

Camping is good stuff. And +10000000 for teaching the kids to shoot

You camped on a strip of land about 10' wide with water on both sides?
How cool is that?

Yes. Very Cool.

Actually we camped in a room at Curley's Paradise Inn, and visited the in-laws at their cabin in the Hiawatha Nat'l Forest. The photo is at the beach on Whitefish Bay in Lake Superior...it's knee-deep or less for at least 200 yards (200 meters for you Canadians...) offshore, and there's a sand reef about 100 yards (100 metres) out.

More importantly:

Single Serving Spam.

There exists on this planet a thing called "Spam Single Classic." I got two of them at Big Lots and they are, if the on-package propaganda is to be believed, "Crazy Tasty." Let me quote the back of the package...and as Dave Barry says, I'm not making this up:

Isn't this the most easy and convenient SPAM ever? SPAM Singles are already cooked! This might just blow your mind. For your own safety, stop thinking about how easy SPAM Singles will make your life. It's time to enjoy. Take another bite and throw your head back and think wonderful thoughts of faraway places while you chew. Like a magical SPAM castle in the sky and what a delicious and convenient visit you'd have. This is the meaning of SPAM singles. Crazy Tasty.

A "magical SPAM castle in the sky." (pause) Wow. I feel a disturbance in The Force.

To continue...The front says "Just rip and tear your way to CRAZY TASTY town!" The back says (on the line where you tear off the top of the packet) "This dotted line is like a freeway. The freeway to a delicious explosion in your mouth."

Delicious explosion?

MY mouth?

EWWWwwwwww! And you have to picture that in your mind's ear as a two-tone eww...the capitals are the high tone, the lowercase are the low tone, like a teenage mall-girl.

The microwave instructions? "Nuke it until SPAM is good and hot."

Nice. I actually bought two and gave one to a co-worker who has a history with SPAM. He had his jaw wired shut a long time ago, and used to blender up SPAM into milkshakes and drink them. His doctor told him he was maybe the only person in history to GAIN weight on a liquid diet.

Possibly the saddest thing is that my SPAM single is going to end up in my lunchbag this week sometime, between slices of bread with some mayo, lettuce and tomato.

Things I Have Eaten

So yeah, I ate the SPAM single. The morning after the last blog entry, I fried it in a pan -- unsurprisingly I didn't need any oil, butter or Pam spray...the SPAM-gel sufficed -- and toasted some bread. Mayo on the bread, tomato on the mayo, lettuce on the tomato, cheeze on the lettuce, SPAM on the cheeze. It was actually pretty good.

Last night for dinner, we pulled out a couple of steaks and broiled them. There's a stupendous butcher-shop in the next town over...12 miles from here. They make jerky that brings a tear to your eye, and their beef is just astounding. We usually get the boneless sirloin, but when we were shopping, they had t-bones on sale to the same price, so we got those instead. I never knew what made them a "thing" until Bob the butcher (no joke, Bob owns Paradise Meats) explained that the larger side of a t-bone is a New York strip, and the smaller side is a bit of filet. Anyway, I rubbed them with garlic powder, black pepper and seasoned salt, then four minutes on each side under the broiler. Te-ender. My wife cut up some zucchini and summer squash and sauteed them. We also deep-fried some Ore-Ida product. Washed down with a 2005 Syrah-Cabernet from Australia that was perfect.

Which speaking of, we've really been on a wine kick in the past year or so. I've historically been a beer guy, really. Starting in college I began a beer odyssey that's served me well. I began with Killians Red as an "exotic," and commenced from there. I've tried hundreds of different beers now. Stout, Porter, IPA, English Mild, Brown, Bock, Doppelbock, Lambic, Scotch Ale, microbrewed anything-and-everything, Belgian Trappist ale, German lagers, Hefeweizen, Belgian white ales...all very entertaining, some truly delicious, some truly disgusting. I even made three well-intentioned batches of homebrew.

And I always thought of wine as "icky." My dad's a "wine guy," though, and once I started talking to him again we realized that we had to start sending Christmas presents his way. So since there's a thriving Michigan wine industry, we took an afternoon and tasted wine. Quite frankly, we were dreading it -- snooty people looking down their nose at our naivete, laughing "aw-haw-haw-haw" at us as we made faces at the noble nectar derived from the humble grape.

But it wasn't like that. The people were open and friendly and the wine...it didn't have that "wine ick" as we came to call it. That nasty medicinal flavor that the Gallo/Sutter Home/Boone's Farm stuff we'd tried all had in spades. No, the wine we tried that day was.....dare I say it? GOOD! We were hooked. When dad would come to visit we'd go taste wine. At holidays, we'd send wine. Now, I'm sipping a wonderful raspberry port as I type this -- port being wine that's fortified with brandy. In this case, Leelanau Cellars made a wine totally from raspberries, and fortified it with a brandy made from raspberries...so alcoholic raspberries just exPLODE in the mouth.

Sorry, I digress. We've come to the point where searching out a neat bottle of wine to try is fun. Neat, and cheap, I should say...we're broke, after all. But we've learned that a nice merlot, malbec or shiraz makes beef or Italian food taste even better. We fully realize that this makes us both old and snobs...being able to say with utmost certainty things like, "oh, this is a malbec from Argentina, 2005 vintage? Well, 2005 was a good year for the Mendoza region, and the malbec grape -- derided in France -- is like the national crop of Mendoza, so this wine should be fruity and delicious." Yeah, old and snobby, that's us.

What?

What? You thought I was going to talk about NASTY things I've eaten? Geez, no. Gawd, that's so been done already. Gawrsh.

You were worried people would tease you cause you didnt know anything about wine? Yet you eat spam and tell us?

Roscow's blog reminded me of a story...

That Time I Rode Through A Thunderstorm

Way back in the day -- well, when I was in college, anyway -- I was a reporter for a community weekly newspaper. Since I was studying journalism, it made sense. I covered city council meetings, school board meetings, etc. So one pleasant evening I put my notepad in my jacket and rode the 25 miles from Mt. Pleasant (home of Central Michigan University) to Coleman (population about 1100 and a cow) to cover one of those meetings. When it was over, it was just about 15 minutes shy of dark, and I could see the clouds on the western horizon as I put on my helmet and leather coat. As I set out for home...again, 25 miles to the southwest, I hoped I wouldn't get rained on.

Well, I had a variety of routes I could've picked. I could've headed straight south, then straight west. I could've meandered on as much of a diagonal as roads laid out in square sections would let me. I chose to ride due west, then due south, with the westerly part being about 2/3 of the ride and the southerly part the remaining 1/3. And off I went. The first third of the ride was nice. The air was balmy and humid, the air was still, the smells of pastureland were thick in my helmet -- in a good way, not like I was eating dairy-farm-whiff.

Then I saw the first lightning. It was ahead of me, on the horizon, and was the in-the-cloud type of lightning...and I started to have a little sinking feeling in my belly, as I watched more flashes in the clouds ahead, and I watched them firing all along a north-to-south front. So I sped it up a bit, hoping to make it to my corner and head south before the storm hit. As I rode west the lightning grew more frequent, and after a few more miles it started being to my left and right instead of just in front. I rode over an overpass and actually hunched down on my tank just so I wouldn't feel so tall.

I only got about 1/4 mile past that overpass before the rain hit. Big, drenching sheets of rain started pelting me, and I was REALLY thankful for my full-face Nolan. I had to cling to my handlebars in the howling headwind. Then I reached my corner and had to turn left.

Now I had a howling CROSSwind to deal with. The drenching sheets of rain were hammering me from my right side, and I kept feeling the wind try to push my wheels out from under me, so I slowed down, and slowed down, and finally felt almost in control at about 35mph. In about 5 miles of this maelstrom I pulled into the Shell station in Rosebush (population about 11 and a cow) and squished my way inside to wait for the rain to slack off. Coincidentally enough, I ran into Ed, a guy I went to college with, and he was also riding, and also waiting out the storm. Ed, however, had pulled in before he'd really gotten rained on. We shot the breeze a bit, then I turned up the collar of my jacket.

"Oh, dang, man, your jacket's actually BROWN?" Ed said.
"Yeah, why?"
"The only place you're DRY is underneath where the collar was folded over, man!" He was right. About 10 minutes later the stormfront passed on, and I went out to my soggy bike. I sluiced the water off the seat, planted my damp butt on my damp seat, and set off. I thought that since the rain was over, I'd dry out some, but I learned about how the spray coming off cars is just as wet as rain falling from the sky...but doesn't taste as good. So for the remaining 7 or 8 miles home I stayed just as wet. I started to shiver, too.

I reached my apartment, and I parked, unlocked my door, walked in and walked straight to the bathtub, which I climbed into, fully geared up. First the jacket came off, and it weighed over 20 pounds, I'd swear. Next, I sat down on the tub edge and fought the dreaded boot-suction. I won. I poured brownish water out of my cowboy boots. I had to peel off my jeans like rubber gloves, and see that my legs had been partly dyed denim blue. I looked like a drowned rat. Except for the four legs thing...and the 2" tall thing. And the...well, it's a common comparison, you get the clue.

And that's the time I rode through a thunderstorm. Not to be repeated, if at all possible.