As we sped along a white sedan pulled up next to me in a manner that required the driver, a woman, to look over her shoulder should she want to look at me. And she did. Twice. The third time she looked at me I started wondering if she thought she knew me. 

She looked one more time. And then she pulled into my lane and nearly clipped the sweet mini-van.

And I thought: "Maybe she's someone I dated."

I mean, not everybody can divorce me and it was only a matter of time, I suppose, before someone tried to crash into me.

The reason I didn't think she was trying to pull in front of me is that her car was never past me and that is typically a very important part of pulling in front of another car. Even in the no-fault insurance states.

She was so incredibly not past me and had looked at me four times and had such a shitload of space between her and the car in front of her that when she started to come over I didn't think it was anything more than a little bit of lane drifting.

And then, all of a sudden, she was there. Luckily I'd braked out of reflex.

Of course, she hadn't signaled.

Technorati Tags: Driving, Women

"Yes," I said, "Mike O from work and my friend Dave."

"Blog Dave?" he asked, forcing me to eventually create a sentence of which I was unsure of the punctuation.

"Yes. Blog Dave."

I'm not sure if I should feel that it's awesome that the world seems to be shrinking which, I think, will somehow make it more friendly (would we be so quick to invade if we had an awareness that Evil Dictator X was evil as he blogged about how he was struggling with kidney stones?) since my kids know the names of some of the bloggers I read or if I should be concerned that the fact the boys know the names of some of the bloggers I read means I need to get out more.

[Man! That is an incredible paragraph! What a perfect end to your Sunday.]

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Blogs, Health

To top it off, I have the best job ever. And I love everything about my job.

Except running cable. And I'm not even sure what I don't like about it. It could be all the ladder work. Or the crap falling out of the ceiling onto me (insulation and chunks of ceiling tile) and how it sticks to me as I invariably work up a sweat. Or all the shit in the ceiling area I have to work around.

The job itself is really rather simple. Well, sometimes feeding the drops down the wall can be a bitch.

Anyway, I spent part of today running Cat 6 cable (for gigabit Ethernet) to some of the Engineering stations. I'm very happy with the way everything went except for the hole I put in the wall for the jacks. I ran four drops and bought a four-jack faceplate. I also purchased mounting rings (I've seen them called mud rings and they give you something easy to mount a faceplate to) in standard size (like a regular wall outlet) and double size. Since I had a four-jack faceplate I made a hole — the perfect frikkin' size, I might add — for a double-size wall plate.

Naturally, the four-jack faceplate is the size of a regular wall switch.

Poop.

Technorati Tags: Cat 6, Networking, Sweating

As I typically do, I started the hot water running before I stepped into the shower. It takes just a moment to for the water heat up and as this is about the same amount of time it takes me to drop my shorts the pre-heating/getting naked portion of showering typically works out to a tidily-timed single step.

I stuck a hand in the water stream before committing my entire body to the flow — you only have to step into water so cold that it reduces your nipples to the size of consistency of a Dippin' Dot but once to learn your lesson; scorching hot water is no treat either.

The water was tepid.

None of the boys had a look about them like they'd been anywhere near the shower.

We'd had a big storm the day before. This felt more than coincidental.

It also felt bad.

And possibly expensive.

Like I said, the water was tepid (which is French for "cold enough to shrink man parts but not so cold that you have to worry about brushing up against the shower tiles and etching them"), and I had a brief, yet refreshing, shower. The reduced man-part size made getting dressed all the faster.

After the movie I went into the cellar. In a moment it became clear that my cellar would not have been a good place to seek shelter from the prior day's storm. Sure, we might have been safe from the wind, but there's a good chance we would have drowned.

Based on the amount of water in a bowl that had been on a low shelf I had at least six inches of water in the cellar.

It's not a lot, I know, but it was enough to put the water heater flame out and, despite my best efforts, I was unable to get it restarted (either last night or this morning).

I called my brother first thing today, he's an HVAC guy, and he told me what I needed to do to fix it. He also told me he's going to crew for a racing boat this weekend in the Chesapeake Bay. This led me to suggest that if a captain were serious about winning a race that filling his crew with Wells Family Members might not be the way to go. My brother said, "No, I'm the perfect size for" … whatever that thing is called where you lean on one side to keep the boat from capsizing (he knew the term) … "One big guy is a lot better than two smaller people for that. Smaller people are good for" … other sailing terms that involved climbing and something to do with a sail… "but when it comes to drinking beer and keeping the boat upright I'm perfect."

Oh, if you're curious, I'm sitting at work unshaven and with bad hair. I do have clean pits and man parts.

Technorati Tags: Sailing, HVAC

I'd goofed, it seems, and MikeO pointed out that sidebars were coming up with comments. More research showed they were coming up in the various archive templates as well. All of that has now been removed and we'll see what tomorrow's count comes in at.

Please excuse the mess.

Technorati Tags: Blogging

As you can see one of the problems I have with the sirens is that I can't recall when they go off (except for Wednesday). I also don't remember if it's a watch that means conditions are right and a warning means a tornado had been sighted or if it's the other way around. I use the non-Wednesday-noontime sirens to mean to turn on the TV as I know the weatherperson will tell me what to do.

So, I turned on the TV.

My boys all piled into my room as we tried to sort things out. One of them, the oldest, seemed to be overreacting in my opinion and insisted we go to my Wizard-of-Oz-like cellar (which meant braving the severe rain to get to the outside door.) While I imagine a lot of calm people have been swept away by tornadoes I'm not one to panic and wanted a bit more info before I went that far. As our weatherman had, just moments before said he was surprised we'd had a tornado warning and not just a severe thunderstorm warning, I wasn't sure seeking shelter was needed. (Also, the neighboring county, that I can bike to in five minutes, had been dropped from Tornado-Warning status to Severe-Thunderstorm status.)

Then of course, as we noticed the storm had passed over us (via Doppler Weather Radar images) our weather team reminded us that a Tornado Warning (which is what we were under) means we should seek shelter immediately. Doppler Radar had detected rotation earlier.

[As an aside, if you live in a place that doesn't get severe electrical storms you really don't know what you're missing. So long as nobody gets hurt they're really sort of amazing and a damned fine example of what mother nature can due when she sets her mind to it.]

A wall cloud was spotted several miles away. There was lots of thunder and lightening. And some small hail here and there. We had high winds, serious rain and the thunder and lightening in my neighborhood (this would have been when Doppler Radar had Hilliard getting the brunt of the storm … I'm not sure how the hail missed us).

I have an old tree in my front yard that is trying to fall down one piece at a time. We can get a light breeze and this thing will drop a small, dead branch; I have to pick bits of it up each time I mow the yard. This morning I was interested in seeing what the storm might have done to it. And the storm did seemingly nothing; or the tree gave ups it's branches so easily they were blown into the next neighborhood.

What the storm seemed to have done was pick up a piece of 3x4 landscape timber that was about two feet long and toss it down the alley. And really, my first thought was that a kid had done it who'd, apparently, been taking a walk outside after the storm … yea, it didn't make a lot of sense but neither did the wind thought; my neighbor had five 2x4s leaning against his garage and they were still leaning upright not far from my landscape timber. I picked up my chunk of wood, put it on the pile and walked around to the van. As I got to the front yard there were four or five 3-foot long pieces of landscape timber in my front yard. Again, hoodlums made more sense than anything. And then I noticed the swatch of leaves laying with the timbers — leaves that had been in a pile next to the mound of cut up landscape timbers in the backyard area.

Landscape timbers are not terribly aerodynamic. Had the leaves not been with them I'd have thought kids did it even as I struggled for a motive.

A Motorola Razor isn't terribly aerodynamic either. Yet, somehow, the high winds opened my back door, after unlocking it, and swept my cell phone off the kitchen table, where I'm sure I left it, and then placed it on a table near the grill — where it got rained on for a good, long time. As irritating as this is I'm pleased to report that the high winds were kind enough to lock up after themselves and not make a mess of the kitchen.

(The Razor had gone into emergency-shutdown mode when it got wet (yea, that's it). I took the battery out this morning and let things dry for an hour before putting it all back together. It is up and running.)

Technorati Tags: Hilliard, Thunderstorms

Lately I've wondered how many people are reading the blog. And not necessarily because I need to know but because there are three tools I use to track it and none of them agree with each other.

I guess I'm really more interested in which one is more accurate and how they can differ so much from one another than how many people stop by here. (Which is not to say I don't love each and every one of you. The women just a little more than the men, if you must know.)

One of the tools suggests that X readers come by each day. Once says X plus or minus 20% of X and the other says about 4X. 

The tool that provides X also provides some other data and based on the info it provides and things I know for a fact, it is missing several people.

I could get into a whole lot of analysis, some of it brilliant sounding while incredibly flawed, but instead I think we'll move on to what I'm calling Delmer's Big Blog Experiment. (With modest apologies to Sara.)

The experiment will try to make all the tools more closely match each other and provide more accurate data:

In order to know the exact count of readers I'll need each one of you to do something for me. No, not comment; I wouldn't ask you to expose yourself like that. Instead I'd like you to drop a dollar in the mail (or something more colorful if you are from one of the outlying countries) to me c/o Mel's Diner in Hilliard, Ohio. If you're like me, a dad with kids, you may not have a dollar; a ten or a twenty will work just fine — I'll do the conversion.

There's a thought that some of the things that rotate images on the blog skew the stats high on the tool that provides 4X. Okay, this is my thought as I've got 3 things that rotate images: Granny Gallery, My Kids, and Boobiethon, and the weather widget. Theres also that Blogosphere item. I'm going to disable some of those bits to see what happens. The tool that provides the 4X count also provides a far greater number of search-terms-used info than either of the other tools. It also gives me bandwith data. It'll be interesting to see what happens when I make changes. [Update -- I've decided to simply remove the sidebars.]

We'll be photo-free during the experiment.

So there we have it. You'll be sending in a dollar. I'll be changing the blog.

Together we'll get to the bottom of this.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Blogs, Hilliard, Mel's Diner, Statistics

Several years ago Granny and Big D (my mom and dad for the newer readers) were in a fast food place; my children were with them. At the table next to them was a group of young people who were using language, in a conversational tone, which my dad didn't think he nor his dining companions should be exposed to. Dad gave the young people a few minutes to note they weren't the only ones in the restaurant and maybe reign the cursing in. When that didn't happen he slapped his hand down and in his authoritative-booming-dad voice said, "That's enough of that." I honestly think when I heard this story it was told with dad slapping his hand in the middle of the foul-mouthed-patrons' table. In any case, the cursing stopped and the conversation turned more toward the rudeness of the big old guy; they seemed to be clueless that tossing "fuck" around between French fries might put some people off. I believe that conversation was held as the foul-mouthed-diners filed out of the restaurant. 

Another time Big D was at a campground and overheard a father tell his son, "Michael, don't run off and leave your sister," and assumed it to mean maybe little Mikey had been running off and leaving his sibling to run crying after him and that Mike's dad was tired of it. The next day Big D was at the campground's carryout and saw Michael and his sis buying snacks. After the little boy paid he made a dash for the door leaving his sister at the counter. "Michael," dad said, and the kid froze, "don't you run off and leave your sister." And he didn't. And if your name is Michael and you were anywhere within three counties of my dad that day you didn't run off and leave your sister either. Such is the power of my dad's dad voice, will, psyche and Clint-Eastwoodness.

In the above examples he isn't exactly stopping bank robbers but he did make the world better for anybody who didn't care to hear thoughtless kids tossing F bombs over lunch and for a little girl who was buying snacks. And I'm certain he could stop bank robbers if the situation ever arose: "You, with the gun! That's enough of that! Give the money back!" 

You may recall my frustration with idiots who text in theaters and the steps I've taken to keep that behavior from being a bother to those of us who came to watch a movie. And my possibly-poorly-thought-out chasing down of people who yell at me while biking (though I maintain that may eventually keep idiots from yelling a someone else and distracting them to the point they crash into the ditch… oooh, that's a weak one). And there was the shopping cart incident that I can't find the entry to link to.

Hmmm. Maybe I'm just an asshole.

Anyway, this past Sunday, Samson and I rode our bicycles up the bike path and then to the local carryout for refreshments. At the door of the carryout was a very young brunette gal who politely stopped us and asked if we had any "spare change for gas." The brunette was likely somewhere around 20, perhaps just under 18 or just over 22. Having a choice of tossing a twenty at her or three ones, I gave her three ones; I figured I'd give her two more after Sam and I had our drinks.

While Samson and I paid, another patron asked the clerks if they knew anything about the gal panhandling outide; one of them got on the phone to the owner.

The carryout emptied except for Sam, me and two clerks. As we sat sipping our pops the young gal came in, apparently having gotten all the money she needed, paid for her gas and asked for a pack of cigarettes.

"I gave you that money for gas," I boomed from where Samson and I were sitting. The clerks turned and looked at me though the brunette appeared not to hear.

My thought was the brunette and I had a verbal contract of sorts. She asked for money for gas and I gave her some. She did not ask for money for cigarettes and while I'd have happily bent the contract to allow for snacks and a pop, tobacco products fall outside of my contract bending. I'm guessing the gal could have argued the point that while she'd asked me for gas money she'd asked the next person for cigarette money and they'd tossed some cash at her — I don't think Perry Mason would have believed it and neither would I, but it didn't matter; she wasn't interested in arguing her point so much as she was scurrying out of the carryout.

"That was really good," said Samson, more about the boomyness of my voice than my oddball sense of right-and-wrong.

Later, when he told his brothers about it he said, "Dad sounded just like Big D."

[I was just the smallest bit irritated with the brunette because I expected honesty from her. I've given seemingly-intoxicate homeless folks money "for food" when they've asked me even though I've suspected they might use at least part of it for Thunderbird; that was my expectation and it was my hope they'd buy at least a little food. (I've bought food for people too, rather than hand off cash — it depended on the situation and my fatherhood status at the time.) "Can you spare a few dollars" would not have come with any strings. "Can you spare a few dollars for gas" comes with strings as the "for gas" portion suggests a specific need — a need she felt to mention as it made her more a damsel in distress than it did a person with poor budgetary skills. I'm not saying it'll make sense to everybody.]

The following photo is a Flickr photo inserted using Linear (formerly Ecto); it's inserted as an image of medium size. AND, it's the Iron Sheik, Haydn, Jack and Samson. 

Technorati Tags: Flickr, Wrestling

Not long ago I did something to my lower left side, just beneath the last rib. I don't know if I bruised a rib, separated a rib, or cracked a rib off so that it was sort of pointy and poking whatever internal-organ thing might be behind it.

It hurt a fair amount whenever I did something to aggravate it but as the aggravation-type things seemed to be few there wasn't much to complain about. After a few days I'd determined that running, coughing and doing sit-ups/crunches were the things that hurt most (and sit-ups/crunches the most by far)… so I tried not to do those things.

The sit-up-crunches were very easy not to do.

You'll recall I'd talked to a couple of doctors about this and we'd decided to see how things felt after a few days. And, generally speaking, things felt better day after day.

When I went to bed Friday night I noticed the pain as I put my head on my pillow. This was new, I thought, but I attributed it to having my pillow puffed up a bit much. Saturday morning things hurt a good deal more in that way things will hurt when your body acknowledges that your doctor is closed and your only chance to see a medical professional involves Urgent Care or an ER. Not that I'd go to Urgent Care or an ER for it — the pain wasn't that bad — I was just enjoying the irony. And I'd decided if it hurt that much on Monday I'd certainly see my primary care physician then.

It hurt enough that when I'd lay back on a bench while lifting my eyes would water a little and getting up off the bench required that I sort of roll onto my right side and push off with my shoulder. You've probably seen that move in the Olympics.

Several times over the course of the day I'd lift my shirt and look at the area in pain as I figured there should be some sort of bruise, maybe some swelling, or a glow-in-the-dark patch of skin right around the painful area. Something! But there was never anything there.

And then, Sunday, I could do situps. It hurt a little. But just a little.

The photo on this page is an old schoolhouse I rode past last summer. I've probably posted the picture before but this time I've used the Insert Flickr Photo tool from Linear (formerly Ecto) to place the image. 

Technorati Tags: Cycling, Flickr, Health, Injuries, Working out

One of our crossing guards was killed when she ran into the crosswalk to push a child out of the way of a dump truck that then struck them both. Diana Sharp died and the child, eight-year old Christian Engel was seriously injured. According to the Columbus Dispatch it seems to have been a simple case of the truck driver not seeing the pair.

(This is not the best shot of the crowd)

This past Saturday the Sharp-Engel Carnival was held at a park not far from my home. Due to the fact that I have to make three children happy I wasn't able to attend the whole carnival. As it was Samson and I showed up about an hour before it ended.

Now, in all fairness, the only reason I'd have wanted to be at the Carnival the whole time was because I wanted to see McGuffey Lane and Phil Dirt and the Dozers. The fact that we showed up toward the end only modestly affected the amount of money I was able to spend. Well, I guess we did miss most of the raffles — so we could have spent a little more. 

But let's not worry over that.

Technorati Tags: Hilliard, Carnival

Technorati Tags: SPAM

I played The Game for the first time this season and likely for the final time ever. And I'm going out on top with this year's score being me with one and hoodlums zero. The reason we're done with the game is I've decided boys can't help themselves and just shout things for no reason other than they're guys. I caught up with the "yelling guy" today and we had a pleasant chat at a light. He wasn't trying to be an ass; he was just a guy.

I hit 37 mph coming down the side of the overpass that I hit 33 on last year. I'd have made 40 but as I was coming down the hill doing about 30, in a 35 zone, a white van eased by me as he couldn't bear to be behind a bicycle doing 30. You'll note he didn't race by me; it wasn't like he was in a hurry. He pulled away from me for a bit as I continued to accelerate to 37 at which point I was gaining on him but still had plenty of room to hit 40. Until he got on his brakes because he thought the upcoming turn was his. As it happens his turn was a mile down the road at the light.

I have received more than one suggestion that I'll never have sex again if I continue to wear my underwear on multiple days.

A deer ran out of the woods about 20 feet from me as I sat at a stop sign.

Tonight as I pedaled home I came around a sweeping curve and there were six baby bunnies in the mowed part of the grass. I'd swear if you could have measured the distance between them they'd have been space equally at 15 feet or so apart.

A very large truck cut a corner as he came at me and would have hit me had I been a car. He didn't come close to hitting me but that's because I saw him.

I returned the wireless cyclometer I bought. It kept recording my MAX SPEED at 59.6 mph which is a good deal faster than I've ever gone. Even with a tailwind. It also had me going 5 mph as I sat in my recliner with it reading the instructions. Cadence never worked.

I picked up a Cateye Strada wired cyclometer and installed it.

Technorati Tags: Cycling, Health

We'll assume:

So, at the end of the week, having bicycled to work every day, I'll have driven 20 fewer miles than I normally do and I'll have saved one gallon of gas or $4.00. I'll have put it in the face of the speculators that are driving the price of oil up. Big Oil will have been my bitch. I'll have given OPEC the finger. I'll have kept The Man down. I'll be this much closer to helping OJ find the real killers.

I'll also have burned about 8500 calories (or enough to offset 31 cups of Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream) as I typically expend 1700 each day when you take the trips to and from work and the lunch ride into account (which may explain why I'm hungry all the time). It might be worth noting that while it's fewer than two miles to work I stretch it out to about five each way. And the calorie calculation is an interesting one when you consider the software I use says I burn more calories the faster I go and I'm pretty sure I'm burning more when I'm going slower and struggling against the wind (especially if I'm vacationing on Fire Lake in Kathmandu like a Ramblin' Gamblin' Man); oh well, it's not like any of the software I use interfaces with an anemometer.

Another oddity with software that calculates calories burned while pedaling is that some programs suggested I was burning almost nothing over the course of an hour while one or two seemed outrageously high to the point I'd have been reduced to a pile of powder after a short ride. I finally settled on the formula used by software on my PDA as it is close to the calories Bicycle Magazine says I burn; both closely match what my Garmin Forerunner says.

(To keep my life simple, when I'm doing the math in my head I calculate 1150 calories an hour. This should be the low end of the spectrum and I figure that against the wind one way vs with the wind on the way home all evens out. Oh, these calculations are based on a body that weighs 240 pounds. You may have unhappy results if you go on the Ben & Jerry's diet and think riding a bike 90 minutes a day will keep you even Steven.) 

Anyway, we were talking about what tomorrow will bring assuming I ride the bike. One of the things I've yet to mention is that I'll have worn the same underwear five days in a row. Think about it, it isn't hard to wear the same pair 24-hours straight (though, now that I think about it, I normally go 12 hours between changes) and the underwear I've been wearing daily is a pair I leave at work and slip on when I get there.

I'll also have worn only two shirts this week — again, only at work — and I'd have made it just one shirt had I not had dinner with a friend last night. I keep a couple of shirts at work (the ones with delmer.com on them, I feel a little nerdy wearing them out into the real world) that I put on after I take the Lycra off. (So, yes, for a brief period of time I'm in my office totally naked. And yes, once with the door shut, a female person walked in without knocking. But just once, and I had drawers on. But, dammint! the door was shut!) 

I should probably take more underwear to work.

By the way that's one of the two shirts I wore to work this week. You can see the delmer.com just above the pocket. 

Technorati Tags: Cycling

 You've got to be kidding me. 

Wait it gets better: 

I went to the vendor site, logged int, and could see the case they've asked me to take a survey about. When I click on it I'm told I don't have permission to view it and that I'm to fill in the "highlighted fields below." Naturally, the page (in IE and Firefox) is blank except for the notice that I need to fill in the highlighted fields below.

Technorati Tags: Software, Tech Support