Snakes On A (Higher) Plane

When your wife texts you that the garage door doesn't work, you would think it's just the batteries in the remote, or maybe the power's out.

But when she says it goes up a little bit then reverses, you would think it's going to be a walking stick breaking the beam of light.

And when she says there's a snake in the cable and it's keeping the door from working, you don't really think anything; 'cuz that's crazy Liz Lemon.

Snakes, why'd it have to be  snakes?

Somehow, a Texas Rat Snake decided to sneak his way into the garage and slither up the cable. And it was a big one.

He got wrapped around the pulley as the door went up, getting caught between the cable and the pulley and wreaking havoc with the door sensors. Door broken.

There will be blood.

When I finally got back from work, the entire house wanted to participate in the serpent liberation, except the woman.

When you've got an 800 pound door (I had to lift it, so don't argue with me) being held up by a tiny diameter cable, there's a lot of force that the snake's body just can't handle. Don't you feel sorry?

Trying the door a couple of times after inspecting and realizing there wasn't much I could do, I saw the snake drop onto the concrete near the puddle of snake blood. He slithered underneath the van, and that's when the wife denied the snake's stay of execution.

I was prepared to commute the sentence, since he wasn't going to last much longer, but the governor is the decider. So the boys and I worked on various ways to lethally "inject" him.

Spare me the details.

Let's suffice it to say that he's now resting peacefully in two different landfill locations. The garage door is in fine working order with a restringing of the cable, and the four foot rat snakes are 0 for 2.

How to View Venus in the Daytime, With the Naked Eye

I've known about this from my earliest days of interest in astronomy, but I never made it happen until the handy events in the week of March 26, 2012 (and today as it happens). I have recently tormented my family with helping them experience the joy of astronomy during the daytime (like this other event), and now you can enjoy it, too.

Venus

It is possible to see the planet Venus in the day sky, you just have to know where to look.  During a single day, Venus is essentially the same distance from the sun, and travels with it across the sky.  It doesn't change much from one day to the next, either.

Without technology you can find it by measuring the distance that you notice the very bright "star" in the evening or morning.  (Remember, Venus is also known as the Morning Star; or just ask an astronomy buddy.)  So, once you know that it's about a fist-width away from Sol, or an elbow length, or whatever, you just wait until some time during the day. Given a clear sky and blocking the sun behind a building, you put the relevant appendage back up, measure off the correct distance and start staring.

But, nerds have long since solved even the most mundane problems for us, and this one is no different.  Sky charts are electronically generated now, like the nice people over at Heavens Above do quite well. You can put in your location, set the clock to whatever time you want, and it spits out a picture.

Leave it to The Google to kick it up a notch, and a long time ago when Android was still young.  Get the Sky Map app on your phone, make sure your sensors are calibrated and your location is set (usually automatic), then hit the search button.  Type in Venus, hit enter. A circle will show up telling you what direction to move your phone, when you get Venus in the circle, it will expand and you'll see the planet on the screen. You can zoom with the screen controls (or finger spreading) to get a little finer location.  If this happens to be in the day, and the phone indicates that Venus is not obscured by the Earth, if you keep looking in the right direction, you'll be able to see it.

It takes a bit of concentration to make it appear, but once you see it, it will surprise you at how easy it is to see.  With some practice, and checking the night sky frequently, I have been able to glance up at the daytime sky and find it unaided.  Show your friends. This is an impressive trick for those adults who have lived their whole life not realizing that you can see a "star" in the middle of the day.

Sky Map App

FYI, if you use one of those fruity phones, I don't know how you would do this, but it's probably possible. Just ask a genius.

References:
Google
Heavens Above (Android app)
(used to be Google) Sky Map App
Calibrate your phone compass
China eclipse

Arizona's Desert Gets Hot, and Other Understatements

The '52 Buick Super 8. Oh yeah.

A project car if there ever was one. It needed an engine, engines need motor mounts, motor mounts come with frames. So the best thing we could come up with was a 1973 Chevy truck frame, cut down to fit inside the body of the Buick.

This lifted the car pretty good. Something up that high deserves a cherry glow, so a few cans of light grey primer and it was all set for a paint job... that never came. Ever.

But it looked pretty awesome.

The windows were able to roll down, and the doors worked. The paneling inside was pretty wore out, and the seat fabric ended up getting covered by horse blankets. Maybe the AM radio worked.

It was sturdy enough to tow a travel trailer, both the boxy type and a popup trailer. The popup came in handy as we camped by the side of the road for extended trips. The big one ended up being my bedroom one summer where I got to listen to Larry King's radio show and found out about Sig-alerts from the KNX 1070AM California radio station.

But I digress. Another pertinent detail is that my dad was interested

in the road less travelled. (Currently his fascination is Route 66 and all of the old, old-old, and old-old-old sections that the current highways have bypassed.) So we would tend to take the side highways rather than the interstate.  You could see how he really enjoys theme and story elements of the movie Cars.

For this episode, we had increased the family size with another sister, maintaining the dog. Taking interesting trips to New Mexico and So. Cal. As mentioned in Snow Days, we would leave from Flagstaff (7,000 feet, rather cool).  Heading south into the Phoenix area, we travel part of one of the interesting features of Arizona: you can start at nearly 13,000 feet in elevation and go to near sea level traveling through numerous climate and vegetation zones, all within the borders of the state. I think my 9th grade Biology teacher said Arizona is the only state that has this many zones in its borders.

Anywho, we tended to end up in the desert region, essentially the bottom half of the state, and most of New Mexico, and parts of California.

 Let's see where we're at.


Dad is cheap, we drive a cobbled together Frankenstein's monster of a jalopy stuffed with a family of 5 including pet, tow a rectangular gas mileage-killing anchor behind us, in the desert, where it's hot. So hot, in fact, that the car overheats. If you've seen Gumball Rally, you know that the way to fix an overheating car is to turn on the heater, full blast, in the desert, where it's hot. This takes the heat that would be dangerous to the engine and routes it to the passengers faces and feet. Of course, when it's hot inside the car, you open the windows (since the A/C wasn't purchased as an option for this 1952 chariot). This allows the 120 degree desert air to mix with the 300 degree engine heat to produce a blast of air that idiots would call "balmy".

 For some reason this wasn't working (i.e. keeping us from complaining), so we broke out two handy items to ease our mild discomfort. The first was a "water cooler". This modern marvel was truly an amazing invention. One would be hesitant to imagine that a slighlty porous canvas bag filled with water, and then hung on the front of this vehicle could cool water just by travelling through the desert at a highway pace. And this clever individual would be right. It doesn't work, it doesn't cool the water, it tastes like you've filtered the water through an Army tent, and that's when you've drank it soon enough after filling it so that it hasn't leaked and evaporated until empty.

Next invention, perhaps from the same geniuses that invented the magic water bag, was the window-mounted air cooler. It looked like a rocket motor with 50's Jetson's styling. Now, my HOA doesn't allow window units because they look bad, but the desert VOA either doesn't police these sections of roads or they don't exist. So we gave it a try.

For this to work, you have to mount it to the passenger window, and everyone else's windows have to be closed. This allows the air forced through the mini turbine to blow through another reservoir of water, pushing that air through a tiny little slit and distributing the frigid air to the interior of the cabin. You probably see where this is going, it didn't work. But we sweated it out while we gave it a chance, which was the instruction from the front seat; for several hours.

The passengers are hot, the car is hot, and we need to make this travel trailer slice through the air to help us get where we're going more quickly. So we do what any normal family does: we remove the hood of the '52 Buick and strap it to the front of the towed trailer. Engine gets more air, trailer gains the aerodynamic profile of a stealth fighter, fuel mileage rivals a Prius.

I think I passed out around this time, because I don't have any recollection of whether this REALLY improved our gas mileage. My memory picks up as we continue the drive at night, when the textbooks report that the desert is cooler.

Don't believe everything that you read in books. Unfortunately, the photos below don't come close to replicating these adventures, but you get the idea.

Breakdowns, but Expected

I grew up with old cars. My dad seemed to enjoy working on them, knowing how they worked, knowing how to fix them, knowing a LOT about them. 

Once we tested him at night and found he was able to determine the make and model of several oncoming cars just from the headlights or taillights.

Not a Really Old Car

Growing up with someone like that, you're bound to wind up with a few interesting vehicles that pick you up from school. Like the yellow 1960s multi-door limousine, the white "short bus" with the big vertical doors, or the 1930s something that was so old-fashioned that you could see the oily guts of the engine by flipping up a panel on the side.

Quite a few fairly normal cars showed up as well. A handful of 1970s Cadillacs, a 1974 Chevy Impala, even a few new Hondas.

Travelling in most of these older vehicles involved blankets for the cold weather if the heater didn't work, a crank-open window for trips through the desert if the A/C didn't work ("It's 4-60 A/C: four windows, 60 miles per hour!"), and a steady gaze straight ahead to not get motion sickness by ignoring the road you could see flying by through the floorboards underneath your feet.

We were heading to California one day, I don't think it was a Snow Day, when we pull over near a thriving community called Seligman.

Not Anywhere in Arizona

"What's up?" Of course,  in preteen language this question came out more like a complaint than a query. But it's my story.

"Well, I think it's the alternator."  So, given what we know about my dad at this point, this doesn't seem strange. Perhaps this will be the first time that we'll have to use a tow service, or maybe we'll all take turns winding wire into coils to repair this piece of equipment.

He doesn't seem too annoyed and I found his calm demeanor rather odd. While my sister walked around outside with the dog, I went around to the back of the car where my dad was moving stuff out of the trunk.

Out comes the toolbox.  Good, so we're making progr....

Out comes an alternator. From the trunk. A spare alternator.

"Uh, dad, why did you just happen to bring an extra alternator?" Even at this age I know normal people don't carry a spare alternator.

"Well, I had a feeling it might go out for a while now."

In another 45 minutes we're on the road.

So that's the story, we break down an hour into our trip, we install the replacement part, and keep going.

A Spare Radiator?

I'm not sure if that's the same trip where the radiator blew while climbing the hills in So. Cal., having to spend the  night near a junk yard. I think THAT trip was the same one where a tire went flat, we didn't have a working spare, we got to wake up the Tire Repair Service guy, and my dad still seemed to complain about the cost.  

But I can't really remember, I guess I'm trying to block it all out.

Snow Day Vacations

Lots of people think that their family took vacations that rival National Lampoon's Vacation movie.


I recall when they filmed a small portion of that movie in Flagstaff, where I grew up.

I'll describe my stories and leave it to the reader to decide how mine stack up.

Snow Days
In Flag, and other towns that get snow, they have Snow Days for schools. Of course, residents of any place that has weather different than San Diego will scoff at another town cancelling school for a certain inch-level of snow, but let's put that argument aside and just say that when Flagstaff public schools cancelled school due to snow, there was enough snow to hamper parents and buses getting their kids safely to and fro.

My dad's parents lived in Southern California, near the beach.

Why did I place that sentence there? No reason.

When school is cancelled, there is rampant celebration by everyone, except parents. When it's cancelled for snow, kids like to play outside. They come inside for hot chocolate and sit by the wood stove.

Many of our cars we had growing up had poorly working heaters (again, no particular reason for that sentence showing up).

Of course there are two ideal snow days. One on the day of the big test or assignment; the other on a Friday, and maybe Monday.

Three day weekends are popular with all ages. In fact, they're such a surprise that it's exciting to wake up and BEGIN planning what you're going to do with all of this time you've just been gifted with.

Putting it all together, a Thursday or Friday snow day resulted in a harried early morning scramble to load the family of six into the designated 1950-something cobbled transport "system", complete with blankets and dog (heaters) in order to get on the road to see Grandma and Grandpa.  Of course, this being a snow day, the "road" was covered in 2 inches of hard pack snow, with blizzard conditions ensuring that no one in the vehicle could properly gauge the snow depth. It only took an hour or two of white knuckle yelling at the other idiots on the road to get down beneath the snow line and into the desert on the way to the beach.

We never had a snow-related accident.