Fire in the Hole!

The original lists were probably carved in stone and represented longer periods of time. They contained things like ‘Get More Clay. Make Better Oven.
- David Viscott -

Did I ever tell you about The Car Guy’s To Do List? It contains things that I put on it (see Pink Jobs and Blue Jobs for an explanation of what kinds of tasks I put on his list) and things that he adds. He often adds items after he has done them, and then he immediately crosses them off.  He likes his list to look like it is close to completion.

This week he added Order a new oven bake element from Amazon.com.

We’ve never had an oven element self destruct before. It is pretty dramatic. It started in one spot with a spark like you see when someone is welding. This white hot spot slowly inched along the element, even after The Car Guy turned the oven off. It stopped as soon as he closed the electrical breaker.

This seemed infinitely more sensible than the recommendation from some guy on the internet who said he tried to put the same kind of fire out by dousing it with water.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Home

December found us far from home, though at a place we are learning to call home – our Snowbird place in Arizona. The gathering of the clan at Christmas was, therefore, a smaller event than usual and Christmas morning was a quiet affair. At least it was until a stranger appeared in my Christmas stocking. He said he was just a Businessman, but there was something about his bowler hat that hinted he had a secret agenda.

Well – seven can play at the Spy Game! Armed with only our cameras and our wits, we syrupti… serrepti… surreptitiously followed him around for the next few days. Here is what we found:

Businessman spent a lot of time investigating a bowl of oranges.  On the surface, they all seemed innocent enough…

But apparently there was one bad one in the bunch. Businessman coldly bisected it and skewered it with a cocktail fork.

Later that day, we found him up on the roof of the house with the stalk of another orange in his hand. We heard him whisper, “This is one body they are never going to find.”

Businessman’s behaviour was unsettling, so we quickly juiced the rest of the oranges and hoped he would leave. And leave he did. With only a cursory glance at the GPS and a stare that told us we should forget we had ever seen him

he left in as mysterious a manner as he had arrived.

Days later, we read that a Businessman had lost his life in an unfortunate accident involving a paper shredder. It happened in Orange County, Florida.

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The photos for this story were the result of a challenge. Each of us had to photograph the Businessman – no one else could see the result until all the photos were taken.

Of all modern notions, the worst is this: that domesticity is dull. Inside the home, they say, is dead decorum and routine; outside is adventure and variety. But the truth is that the home is the only place of liberty, the only spot on earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment or indulge in a whim. The home is not the one tame place in a world of adventure; it is the one wild place in a world of rules and set tasks.

G.K. Chesterton

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Another LEGO story: Work and Play with LEGO – the Fruit War

The Afterlife

The chief problem about death, incidentally, is the fear that there may be no afterlife — a depressing thought, particularly for those who have bothered to shave. Also, there is the fear that there is an afterlife but no one will know where it’s being held.
- Woody Allen

I’ve been thinking about Death lately. Not mine, specifically. Others. We’re spending part of the winter in Arizona, and most of our closest neighbours are considerably older than us. I fully expect to see a decline in the number of occupants at any time.

Emergency Services/The Fire Department have been on our street twice so far, but one time was to remove a rattlesnake from a garage and the other was to put a new key in the lock box just outside our front door. The Fire Department seems to only have one daily driver – a big shiny fire truck – so when the truck, and two or three burly young firemen arrive in our tiny cul-de-sac, it is quite the production.

I’ve also been thinking about the Afterlife.  I’m not inclined to believe in Heaven and Hell – not as locales I will be spending eternity in, at any rate. No, I’m thinking of Data Afterlife. Thanks to the Internet, little bits of my life will float around forever – or at least until Google figures out how to put an expiry date on blog posts that detail how much snow there was at the Red House during the great storm of ’11.

In addition to all those bits, there are the websites and accounts that require you to register a username and password before you can access any information. If left unattended, long after you have departed this world your Facebook Account will be sending your Email Account Happy Birthday messages.

Clearly I need to have an Exit Strategy in place. If my ultimate demise is slow enough, I will have time to cancel all those online accounts. But if my death is sudden, as it surely would be if that big saguaro cactus next to my lawn chair toppled over while I was engrossed in reading a book – well, I just wouldn’t have time to react, let alone post my farewell on this blog.

I started my Exit Strategy with a list. First I thought about all the Online Accounts that create a Public Presence. My list included a few of the following (you can likely add many more to this list):

• Facebook
• Myspace
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Flickr
• YouTube
• Pinterest
• eBay
• special interest websites
• blogs
• business websites
• gaming accounts

Then I thought about my private accounts, such as:

• email
• news readers
• banking
• credit cards
• retail purchases
• cloud web storage

Once I had my list, I thought about which ones I would want to close down (or have someone close down for me if I did suffer Death by Cactus). The most important one could be my email accounts. If they were hacked in my absence, all the addresses in the account would be fair game to the hacker – and all my friends would receive Viagra Spam.

Any account that had access to any of my banking information should also be closed down.

Any personal information that is stored on the web should also be removed. That would include personal photos and documents.

As for all the rest, I thought about:

• What content I was willing to leave in the hands of all the insensitive, inappropriate, mischievous people who might take advantage of my absence.
• Who was going to tell my Facebook friends that I wouldn’t be reading my timeline any time soon?
• Who was going to say goodbye to all my faithful blog followers?
• If I leave an account open, how long does it remain the property of my survivors? When does post mortem copyright expire? (This doesn’t actually apply to my content, but it might to yours.)
• How do I want my online presence dealt with. Do I want all the information removed? Do I want it left online?

Last, but not least, I am working on an Action Plan (if the Canadian Government can have an Action Plan, so can I:

• I’m making a list of all my internet accounts, with their URLs and my usernames.  I’ll state what I want done with each account. I’ll print this document, then hand print in my passwords and file it in a safe place. I’ll try to keep it up to date.
• I’ll decide who will carry out my wishes. (I have no problem with The Car Guy or one of my children seeing all my online content.)

That pretty much wraps up my thoughts this week about Death and the Afterlife. How about you?

As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.

Charles Darwin

In the Good Old Days

Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.
- Doug Larson -

The Car Guy has a 1950 Fargo half ton. It has been in his family since the early ’60′s. It isn’t all that comfortable to ride in, and it no longer does any particular job around here since a newer truck was purchased. But I expect the Fargo will stay in the family for many more years because it is a link to a place and time that is now only a memory.

I introduced you to our friend (L8n) and his nostalgic ride (Pink Freud) in the post Free Spirit.  Freud is a 1938 Ford Hot Rod. The Car Guy has been thinking about adding a Hot Rod to his fleet, so this summer we attended a few car shows. What we discovered was – we have very different opinions as to what would be the perfect Hot Rod.

I took pictures of some of my favourites and when I looked at them after the show I realized that they all had two googly eyes (headlights) – old Fords, I think.

They were all nice and shiny too, but I wanted to make them look like a pencil sketch, so I used the appropriate filter.

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
- Henry Ford -

People can have the Model T in any color – so long as it’s black.
- Henry Ford -

I see no advantage in these new clocks. They run no faster than the ones made 100 years ago.
- Henry Ford -

It has been a month and a half since the last car show. Much has changed since then. The Harley has been written off, six inches of snow covers the ground, and the stores are already playing Christmas Music. Time to hunker down and think fondly of better days – both in the past and to come.

If you could go back to the “Good Old Days”, when would that be?