I'm kind of dragging at work today, mainly because a gigantic hummingbird was hovering over my house at 2 a.m.
Okay, so it was a helicopter. Turns out that the police were looking for a fugitive. The incident happened within a couple blocks of my house; I could see the squad cars from my front window.
Of course, once the helicopter left, I laid in bed in my now quiet house and listened to every single little creak. So yeah, I'm a little annoyed with a certain individual that is now parked in a nice little cell. Thanks to the cops for nabbing the guy!
So my mother-in-law bought the kids a play set, which arrived several weeks ago, but we only just this last Saturday got it completely assembled. What follows is the Saga of the Play Set:
Sometime during the first week of May: The set arrives via freight in two boxes. We make some phone calls asking for help putting it together. The instructions claim that two people can assemble the play set in 8 to
12 hours. I decide that 8 hours is for two professionals who have
assembled these before, so I shoot for the 12 hour figure, which would
have it 2/3 or 3/4 of the way done when we finish, leaving only a little
more to do the following weekend. With a third person, it might even get done the same day.
Friday, May 9: The family's sick. We call people up again and tell them not to bother coming.
Saturday, May 16: I'm sick again. Play set and anniversary plans are canceled.
Saturday, May 23: Jake and Greg show up to help. We spend a good chunk of the morning clearing the ground, as well as laying out the wood and trying our darndest to identify the various pieces. We determine, after much confusion over several similarly sized pieces of wood, that two pieces are missing. We proceed
to assemble what we can, figuring we'll probably be knocking off for the day earlier than we thought. The factory is closed on Saturdays, and Monday is Memorial day, so we have to wait until Tuesday to call for replacement parts.
The first few steps have us building the slide, the ladder/rock wall and swing frame. After completing step 3 of phase 5, we are instructed to leave the last two steps of that phase for later. I skip ahead in the instructions and find the place where it says, “Now go back to phase 5 and complete steps 4 and 5.” Why not just put those steps at right spot in the manual in the first place? At least the instructions are in proper English, notwithstanding a couple of spelling mistakes.
As the afternoon turns to evening, we are only just nearing the point where we're stopped by one of the missing parts, about 1/3 of the way through. The instructions imply that most people would have reached this point two or three hours earlier, so either the instructions are incompetent or we are. We attach some pieces of wood near the base that split in a rather surprising way, and figure out pretty quick who the incompetent ones are. We check the instructions, and it seems like we're doing the right thing. Fortunately, those pieces don't have to support human weight. We finish what we can and call it good for the day. I put Burn Free on my sunburns (great stuff, that) and resolve not to neglect the sunscreen next week.
Tuesday, May 26: The factory informs me that one of the two missing
pieces is not in stock and will need to be back ordered. They offer to ship the other piece tomorrow with overnight shipping. Fortunately, it's the one that stopped
progress on Saturday. The other won't come in until the following week. I figure we can get 2/3 of the way through on Saturday before we hit the remaining missing part.
Thursday, May 28: The first missing piece arrives. Weird, I've never been shipped a 2 x 4 before.
Saturday, May 30: I slather myself with sunblock and head out. Jake and my brother Scott come out to help. I realize that it was a mistake not to label the pieces a week ago after spending all that time sorting it out. We organize the pieces again—which is harder this time because we've used some of them—and write their assigned letters on them.
The play set as built thus far needs to be positioned, leveled and squared, so we spend some time leveling the ground. Gorgeous Wife comes out to see how we're doing and points out the obvious: that we leveled a less-than-ideal spot for the play set. We level a different section, move the play set over to it and rotate it 180 degrees. We then spend the next while nudging it around in various ways until it finally comes out square.
We quickly discover that the pieces that split the previous week were not the pieces we thought they were, hence the splitting. After a brief panic about the possibility of missing more pieces than we thought, we realize that we just mixed them up with some other pieces. Fortunately, their new, correct location has them only used to hold down a tarp that forms the ceiling, so it should be okay. We put them in their new place, then attach the ladder/rock wall without incident.
For some reason, a cross beam must be attached to three uprights which do not have factory-drilled holes for it. The instructions confirm that, for reasons still not fully understood, this is expected, and that we must drill holes for it. We do so and attach the cross beam, then discover in the next step that the crossbeam is too high. I realize that I accidentally measured from the top of a baseboard instead of from the ground, so we remove the cross beam, drill new holes, and reattach it. We now have three completely unneeded holes in the uprights. Lovely. This is why the factory should drill the holes.
Further along, we have to attach supports for the picnic table and seat, and discover again that, for some strange reason, the holes were not factory-drilled. I wonder if they thought I would be disappointed if I didn't get to use the drill for something more macho than driving screws and making 1/8-inch starter holes. We triple-check the measurements, drill the holes, and put on half of the supports, as the other half must attach to an upright that is, hopefully, winging its way from China to the Texas factory. I head inside and look at the construction site. It actually does start to look something like a play set.
Wednesday, June 3: The other missing piece arrives, along with another copy of the piece they sent me already. Huh? The remaining work to do doesn't seem as difficult as what's already been done, so I opt for asking only one person to come help on Saturday.
Saturday, June 6: Greg comes to help. We bolt on the upright that was missing last week and finish attaching the picnic table. Another brief panic over a possible missing piece ensues, but I realize that I had accidentally mislabeled a piece last week. I quadruple-check it against the instructions, heave a sigh of relief, and bolt it on.
Proceeding onward, we discover that we are missing four 2 1/4-inch screws. I pore over the instructions and read that the cap board on the rock wall attaches to the side rails with four 3-inch screws. We extract one and find that it is actually a 2 1/4-inch screw. We replace them with the 3-inch ones and move on, another disaster averted.
We put on the tarps that form the ceiling of the fort and picnic areas, then proceed to the final steps, which have us attaching the remaining assemblies constructed two weeks ago. The slide goes on without major incident. The swings are another matter, however: two of the four factory-drilled holes where the main beam for the swings attaches to the fort do not line up with the holes in the metal brackets that brace the beam. They are, for some reason, over half an inch too high. There is no way this can be a mistake of ours; the wood piece in question is quite distinctive, so we cannot have used the wrong one, and each set of two holes is supposed to line up with corresponding holes in a single, solid piece of metal. Seeing nothing else to do, we drill new holes and bolt on the beam. At least the other holes are covered up by the metal braces.
Anyway, except for finishing laying down the wood chips, it's done. Thanks to Gorgeous Wife's mom for getting it; and to Jake, Greg and Scott for helping us put it together. Here's some video of the finished play set and of the kids enjoying it:
We do not sleep normally at our house, for the most part. I'm a night owl, although less so than I used to be. Gorgeous Wife always gets sleepy before me, especially with her fibromyalgia medication. My daughter doesn't complain about going to sleep, but she will often stay awake for a while making funny noises and apparently trying to wake up our son. She also will sometimes wake up in the wee hours screaming at the top of her lungs. My son usually sleeps fairly normally, but it's disconcerting to wake up to him crying at night, go in his room and see that he's still fast asleep.
A funny thing happened last week. If something goes wrong with servers at work, we get a notification message on our cell phones, and we take turns being the primary “server babysitter.” Last week was my week, and shortly after we went to bed, an alert came in, warning about a minor issue. As I picked up the phone to look at it, Gorgeous Wife, who was sick and therefore even more tired than usual at that hour, told me that the light from the phone was going to keep her up. I told her I would try to make it quick. She rolled over and, one minute later, with the light from the cell phone still shining in the dark, she was asleep.
Odd sleeping habits run in my family. There were times we'd discover my dad asleep with the television blaring. If you turned it off, he'd wake up and say, “Hey, I was watching that.” As a small child, Sister used to sleep with one arm hanging upright in the air. One of my brothers once sleepwalked out of our room, down the hall, into the family room, up two flights of stairs, into the kitchen, down another hallway, into my parents' bedroom, around the bed to the wastebasket, dropped his pants, took care of business in the wastebasket, then went back to bed.
So if you're a guest at my house or that of one of my relatives, be prepared for a little weirdness at night. And having a plastic liner in the garbage can wouldn't hurt.
In case you have somehow managed not to hear about them, I'll explain: Redshirts are a kind of stock character in television, whose purpose in life is to end it quickly, sometimes even before the opening credits. On the original Star Trek series, they were typically security personnel who beamed down with the main characters, and were promptly killed to demonstrate that the situation was serious without having to kill off a main character. The captain would show suitable pathos for the fallen crewman, and one minute later the entire remaining cast would have forgotten that he existed. (You'd think at least once, at the end of an episode, Kirk would have said something like, “I'm glad we've worked out a lasting peace between our people. By the way, your trial for vaporizing Ensign Nobody starts Tuesday.”) Since the security officers wore red shirts, the facetious notion arose that wearing a red shirt on Star Trek was likely to severely shorten your life span. The term continued even when later incarnations of Trek had security officers wearing gold.
Back in 2002, I was working as a software developer for a .com startup. Like most other CFO's at .com startups at that time, ours was yelling, “Cap'n! She cannae take much morra this!” But the way you knew that things were getting serious was when the redshirts started falling victim to the pink slips. I survived round one, but in the second set of layoffs, I took the phaser blast/acid spray/weird alien disease along with most of my co-workers.
Sometimes if things are really bad, main characters can die, too, although they generally don't go down until a significant number of redshirts have expired first. This is also true in business. The first round of layoffs pretty much never includes any of the top brass. This isn't surprising; after all, if the situation were reversed, you'd probably rather the redshirt to go down instead of you. However, unlike TV, sometimes it's preferable to be the redshirt. A co-worker who survived the second round of layoffs informed me later that, in retrospect, he probably would have preferred getting canned. After all, better to get shot by the evil overlord's henchmen outright than to rot for months in his dungeon, only to eventually die anyway. It's not fun going down with the ship.
From what you see in the news, it seems like a lot of redshirts (and yes, even some captains) in business are getting posthumous honorable discharges. Let's say that you would rather not be the one that gets his or her head gnawed on by a giant lizard creature in the first act. What do you do? Well, the most straightforward answer would be to go into science or medical rather than security. Unfortunately, in business, if you're at the bottom of the org chart, you're a redshirt, regardless of what you actually do. So that means you want to get promoted fast. However, this is up to your superior officer, who, if he's thinking about it, probably likes the idea of having a meat shield when the natives start throwing spears. (“Look, I cut expenses!”)
So that pretty much leaves one other option, short of quitting Starfleet altogether: stick to the captain. Nine times out of ten, when a redshirt passes into the great beyond, he's by himself. Nobody actually witnesses the stroke that does him in; they just hear his agonized scream and come running to find him lying on the ground, not breathing and covered with purple goo. But the captain has an invisible aura of protection around him; he won't go until everyone else is dead first. So if you can get inside that bubble, you can share that protection. Granted, this may involve spending way more time with him than you'd prefer, but hey, it's that or get eaten by a giant carnivorous plant. Take your pick.
So maybe the tough New Yorker image is all a sham.
Apparently, a NYU student is conducting a social experiment. She created a miniature “robot” and turned it loose in New York City, armed with nothing but a cardboard smile and a flag stating its intended destination and asking for help. Since it's only capable of constant forward movement, it must be assisted by strangers pointing it in the right direction to get to where it's going. One Gizmodo columnist expected the little guy to get “stabbed, stomped, mugged, or covered in graffiti;” but thus far, New Yorkers have assisted the tiny artificial pedestrian in reaching its destination in every venture, helping it get unstuck from curbs, out of potholes and away from traffic.
So are New Yorkers really a bunch of softies? I'll have to ask Gorgeous Wife the Bronxite what she thinks.
