...and electrical substations.

My daughter Alex has been wanting to get a part time job, I'm all for it as most parents are.

I think a lot of us take the entirely professional approach, "It teaches them about responsibility and money management and time management" blah, blah, blah - bollicks!

It reduces the loading on my own wallet if I am to be completely honest.

..that aside, my first job did teach me something about all of those things.

- I learned that I was hopeless at time and money management and, the time spent out from under the watchful gaze of my parents lent me the opportunity to behave in a most irresponsible manner...

My first job was like that of most young lads of the time - a paper route.

In New Zealand at the time there were two newspapers (yes a whole two..). One was a morning edition, and still is, The New Zealand Herald. The other was an evening edition, The Star.

I chose the Herald.

The upside was that the circulation was higher and therefore you got paid more because you had more papers to deliver. The downside was that it had to be in the householders mailbox when they awoke.

This saw me out of bed at about 4:30AM every morning except Sundays and home again at about 6:00AM for breakfast.

I would meet with a friend David who ran a route close to mine and we would smoke cigarettes and make prank phone calls from a public phone outside the local dairy while we waited for our boss to drop our newspapers off.

Every few days we would come armed with several wire coat hooks or hangers stuffed in our carry bags.

The last part of both our runs ended at the top of a long hill and at the top of the hill was a very large substation. This substation supplied power to many surrounding suburbs, suburbs that were all just beginning to awaken and switch on their lights and stoves.

David and I would ready ourselves for a fast getaway down the hill and once prepared would take turns to hurl our coat hangers over the compound fence and into the maze of tall insulators, cables and associated and vulnerable extremely high voltage electrical wizardry!

For David and I it was the sparks and occasional fire that we liked. But every now and again we were also rewarded by seeing the lights in the area shutting down. In fact once we watched as every light in every house we could see went out.

We pedaled like demons down the hill that morning and when I arrived home out of breath and looking as guilty as sin - it was to find, much to my chagrin, that our house was without any power!

What a pair of little shits we were.

Currently listening to:

Ministry of Sound 2010 US edition

A small collection of things one should not do...

Yes I know most of these will seem like common sense to most people but I had to learn this stuff the hard way and now it is common to me too.

1) Do not adjust your car seat position whilst driving downhill and applying the brake.

2) Never speak badly of anybody without knowing who is standing directly behind you.

3) Never use a cigarette lighter to see how much fuel you have in your motorcycle tank.

4) Never actually eat those edible knickers.

5) An electric hot air paint stripper should never be used as a substitute for a hair dryer.

6) If it looks like poo, treat it like poo - do not be tempted to smell it, under no circumstance taste it.

7) Never attempt to impress your friends with a CO2 fire extinguisher without first being certain that it is not a dry powder type.

8) Although tempting one should not fall asleep naked in the sun.

9) Never shine a red laser pointer at the police helicopter.

10) Never fall asleep when working on an old CRT television set.

11) Don't use a pogo stick on a wooden deck.

12) Think twice before attempting to whiten your teeth with toilet bleach.

..of failed attempts

I quite often find I am inspired to write, either by a rekindled memory, an experience, a rather heavy dose of red wine or simply because of an epiphany.

However inspiration it would seem, is certainly a fickle friend indeed (so too is red wine..) and of late I have not been able to maintain the necessary inspiration (or sobriety) required to finish some of the pieces I have started.

No big deal I thought. Create a drafts sub folder within my blog documents directory and get back to them when next I’m ‘feeling’ it.

The only problem is that when I re-open these documents I find that I don’t like the mood I’m generating, I’m going nowhere, the syntax is poor or I’ve meandered off and completely sidetracked myself to the point of combining one story with another!

Two of them I can’t even seem to work out why I got started on because nobody, including myself, would be interested in them anyway.

I suppose I should just junk the lot and start afresh but a certain side of me can’t seem to bear the apparent waste of time that this action would equate to.

To date I now have three or maybe even four blog doc’s that I cant seem to finish and I cant seem to dispose of – what a plonker!

Ah well... I guess I’ll procrastinate about it a bit later.

What I need now is a beer or maybe a very large red wine... oh gawd Daryl when will you grow up!!!???

Currently listening to:

The Bloodhound Gang – Hooray for Boobies.

Fall Out Boy – Infinity on High.

Eyes...

I wrote this some time ago and it should have copied across from my FaceBook Archives but the font was too small so it ended up auto drafting and I've only just realized that it didn't publish.

Anyway, perhaps I have noticed it right at this moment because it is relevant...

Eyes are the gateway to the soul. Of this I have no doubt.

Sometimes sustained eye contact can be almost physical...

have you noticed..?

.. as if the person with whom you made that contact actually reached out and gently brushed the hair back from your face or placed a finger gently to your lips.

Eyes will quite often meet across considerable distance, flitting briefly across each other with only the slightest brush.

But, if contact is made and held, whole conversations can be transferred at light speed across that distance without the speaking of a single word.

Some people have eyes that can hold me captive for hours, as if staring into them wraps me in a form of warm, luxurious blanket that I never want to lose. I like the way you seem to fall forward into those eyes until all else fades to oblivion and only the obsidian black pool of the pupils exists.

Those are the eyes of the gentle and honest.

Those are the eyes I love.

The ghost of Walt Tip

O.k so those of you that know me well will already be aware that the presence of ghosts in my life are about as likely as pixies and fairies but the other day Walter our very much loved cat of ten years made an ethereal return from the dead...

So yes the passing of Walt was a very sad moment in both Alex's and my life but to be honest it wasn't without its share of humor and being that three weeks has past it seems a reasonable amount of time to wait before bringing forth the truth surrounding the sad event.

Walt was not what you would call a lightweight of the species. Weighing in at a reasonably hefty 11 kilos dry it would be fair to suggest that his little heart was probably under more stress than that of the average hippo.

On two previous occasions we had discovered him lying on the ground, semi catatonic with drool coming from the corner of his mouth and a look on his head vaguely resembling the look you see on the heads of clubbers stumbling out the door of their favorite night spot at 5AM in the morning.

We assumed he might have fallen badly from the handrail of one of our many decks and taken a reasonable knock to the head because given a day to recover he generally came straight back to normal health and showed no sign of carrying any further injury.

In hindsight (and after consulting with a friend trained in Veterinary services) it was probably most likely he had suffered a small heart attack on each of these prior occasions and very likely it was a massive coronary failure that had finished him in the end.

Just so nobody gets me wrong; Walt was not force fed, no, no, no! He had simply developed a love for food and all things food. It was his primary motivation, his life skill, his kung fu, if you will and he had trained long and hard - as such, his kung fu was strong!

Anyway, we discovered his lifeless body lying on his favorite deck beside his beloved barbeque early one morning before leaving for work.

Alex and I both cuddled and patted him before I wrapped him lovingly in an old towel and left him to lie in state in the middle of our dining room table.

At work that day I found a suitable sized cardboard box in which we could bury him along with his well worn food bowls.

Alex and I returned home later that afternoon armed with our impromptu burial casket and began the mournful task of disposing of our much loved 'fatty'.

The first thing we did was to unwrap him for last hugs and it was while we both had our faces buried in his thick fur that we became aware of just exactly how many fleas he was truly lugging around on him; many, would be the understatement of the year!

It seems that although we had never seen a single flea on him while he was alive this was not due to there being none on him, it was mostly due to them never exposing themselves to us and losing the opportunity to live long and comfortable lives housed on a mobile fast food franchise and I don't mean fast food outlet, no way, he was the whole damn franchise! But when the fryers and hotplates went cold those fleas were out of there faster than a streak of weasels piss and because we had a towel wrapped around him it appeared they were somewhat trapped.

They were of course, more than happy to make a hurried escape when offered the altogether tempting new premises that Alex's and my, face and hair offered. It was, to say the least, an altogether most unsatisfying farewell snuggle!

Having had to guess the necessary dimensions of the box while at work I had drastically underestimated the girth of Walt and it soon became obvious that the lid of the casket would in no way remain closed by its own means. This necessitated the application of much sticky tape which on a whole, greatly diminished the decorum and aplomb normally associated with these solemn occasions. It also meant, on a much more selfish but practical note, that the hole I would now have to dig would need to be at least another six inches deeper.

I had decided that Walters final resting place would be in a small and much overgrown garden at the back of the house directly under our bathroom windows, where if we wanted too, we could look down at when having a pee or brushing our teeth.

The topsoil here was as thick as could be found anywhere else on the property and with darkness and rain threatening to close in I set about digging Walters grave.

Now anybody reading this who lives in Auckland will understand that digging any hole deeper than 12 to 14 inches deep is going to mean digging clay. Auckland on a whole is built on clay. In winter it becomes impermeable and so sticky that should you be fortunate enough to get a spade into it you can never get it off the end, in summer it becomes impermeable and something akin to rock. So all in all the Auckland clay is simply impermeable 365 days of the year.

After digging the top 14 inches of top soil away from my roughly 3 foot by 3 foot hole I promptly broke my spade on striking the aforementioned clay. Darkness was by now threatening to beat me to the close so I raced to the neighbors and borrowed the stoutest spade I could.

Two hours later after much sweating, swearing and cursing I had managed to get down another 14 inches if I was lucky and ignoring the rather unceremonious bulge in the box this gave me at least 6 inches of soil to cover the box with. Plus I figured, rather lazily I might add, a small mound on top would mean all was in order, the job would be complete and the box would be covered by a good solid foot of soil.

What I hadn't figured on was how hard it would be to put all that clay back into the hole and I quickly decided that covering the box in the easily shifted topsoil would be far more optimal. The only problem with this line of thinking was that the topsoil was quickly swallowed by the pit and I was left to try and fill the remaining space with large chunks of unforgiving clay. By the end however Alex and I were both reasonably satisfied with my efforts and we stood quietly and tearfully over the remains of Walt and said our goodbyes.

Fast forward two weeks to approximately one week ago. We have had rain everyday of the two weeks following Walt's funeral except for the weekends which have been extremely warm.

The mound on top of the grave has sunk - I guess the cardboard box has finally collapsed and the remains have no doubt got rather wet, extremely decomposed and then nicely warmed on the weekends...

Monday morning last week I went into the bathroom and threw open the windows before taking a shower.

The ghost of Walt leaped through the window and smote me directly in the olfactory gland!

Oh my god now that is some very special shit right there and talk about staying power.. The extractor fan in the bathroom had the undesirable effect of spreading the odor throughout the entire roofspace whereby it proceeded to fall in large clumps from every available unused penetration in the ceiling, to slap us rudely about the face!

So it would seem that though he may be gone Walter Tipuna Wawatai has not yet finished extracting his final pound of flesh.

And I have been sagely reminded of two important facts:

1) Dead things stink to high heaven whether once beloved or not.

2) Don't be lazy when burying said dead things.

Currently listening to:

The Prodigy - Baby's got a temper.

Taylor Swift - Fearless. (don't be hating)

...of crappy cars

I was sitting having a few wines with a friend the other day, she was telling me that her car was a 'piece of shit'.

For my part I tried my best to convince her that a car that started reliably, ran reliably, didn't cost a fortune in fuel bills and didn't cause you to have to walk to work was in my humblest of opinions, a whole load better than having to hoof it!

She was not persuaded to believe me but did eventually concede to it being reliable.

It not only reminded me of another story but made me remember many of the 'pieces of shit' cars I had owned.

There was the '69 Gremlin, the '74 Corolla, the mark 3 Ford Zephyr (three speed column shifter, only second gear was missing so it became a two speed consisting of low gear and high gear - imagine it.. I was either tearing the ass out of it in first or laboring it like a pinky old tractor in third!!! Oh yeah, that's right, and it wouldn't key start so you always had to park on a hill so you could roll start it and you always had to carry a minimum of three passengers, that way if you stalled on the flat you had plenty of push power to get started again), a communal 50cc scooter, a borrowed Honda City and last but not least a Nissan Bluebird 2 litre turbo automatic. Stylish motoring indeed!

There was one thing all of those vehicles had in common. Not only were they ugly in shape and color and entirely embarrassing to be seen driving, but it appeared the designers had also decided that something that disgusting must now last forever so that your shame might continue for many, many years.

To that end it seems they made the motors, gearboxes and running gear indestructible!

I lived with a bunch of guys once, there was about 5 of us living in a big old house in St Lukes and our house transport was the aforementioned 50cc scooter.

We utilized this pathetic excuse for mobility for one reason, namely, pot pickup and delivery. You see, cops hardly ever pull these puss ridden shitters over because generally they are only ever carrying Grannies, Asian university students or homo's so there was every good chance that if you were heading home with the house stash, that you would not get pulled over and possibly sprung.

Eventually over time we came to realize how incredibly tuff this little turd of a motorbike was.

We had a giant front yard approximately the size of the standard rugby field. One half of it was flat and well mowed but the other half had been let go and seemed to be littered with piles of "stuff" that the grass had simply grown over, it appeared that half our lawn was made of lumpy grass hillocks.

It was in this section that we built, 'the track'.

The 'track' was filled with muddy challenges, bone shaking corrugations and gnarly jumps. It soon became the scene for many a drunken 'time challenge' and even the occasional exceptionally drunken night time rally. The biggest of our bunch was a monster of a guy, 6'4 - 200+ pounds called Gary. I'm not shit'n you that poor little bike survived the track with Gary perched tenuously astride it. From memory the worst that befell it was the loss of the rear mudguard due to an overenthusiastic wheel stand attempt by one of the lads.

The crappiest car I have ever had the misfortune to drive was lent to me by a friend.

A red Honda City - oh revel in the glory of its awesomeness!!!

I think the fact that I could lift the back of it off the ground by myself could have been the reason I so despised the little horror. Driving this vehicle on the motorway was frightening, something akin to flying a spacecraft made from balsa wood and cling wrap through a meteor field!

Nonetheless this vehicle was, like all the other shitters of the world - indestructible!

One night, midway between travelling from my mate Johns place to mine I decided to prove the indestructibility of this little vehicle to him.

I bet him that I could drive the remaining five or six kilometers home without lifting my foot from the full throttle position...

...and so we went, stopping at red lights to sit beside our fellow road users with the engine screaming and us, with tears pouring down our faces laughing fit to burst .

Shifts between gears had the same effect on us.

It was during a particularly rough upshift into third, heading up the second to last major hill before home that something went wrong..

By wrong I mean the engine simply stopped - dead!

Oh fuck! Still quite a way to go to get home.

Damnit - I hadn't quite considered this possibility.

Oh well - out we get, up with the bonnet, hmmmmm give her a bit of a crank.

Whooooa sparks everywhere - cooool.

O.k looks like the main lead from the ignition coil has come out the top of the distributor cap. See if you can jam it back in there John and I'll just go and... CRANK THE IGNITION!

Poor John - that shit really hurts.

So we threw away the stupid 'spark booster' which is some sort of magical device that plugs into your distributor cap and mystically makes a more powerful spark (what a load of rubbish) and stuck the lead straight into the dizzy.

What do ya know. One crank and she fired up again.

Foot straight to the floor! Engine screaming - off we go again! Yeehaa look out!

Well we got home and yeah, o.k. so she was running a little warm but honestly, I reckon that little car would have done that all day. Legendary.

So next time your hurling obscenities at your 'piece of shit' car just think about how many times it has let you down and left you to 'foot it' and maybe you might feel a little better about it's color or it's shape.

Currently listening to:

Supergroove - Postage

Cafe De Mar - Dreams

Alex had her braces fitted today.

Perhaps I'm showing my vintage by saying this but..

When I was at school getting braces was almost unheard of and those that did have them hated that fact and spent most of their day hiding behind one or other of their hands whilst blushing profusely.

The secondary school I attended was one of the largest in Auckland at the time but you could've counted the kids with braces using your toes.

When Alex was informed by the dentist that she would be sporting a mouthful of stainless steel for the next two years I thought she would be mortified - instead she seemed happily overcome with joy???

Turns out that braces have become the 'must have' fashion accessory for teenage girls and Alex was kind of tired of being the odd one out.

Dang - humans are strange critters.

Currently listening to:

The Beat - Industry

Rest in Peace Walter Tipuna Wawatai

Today marks the loss of a beloved family member. Our cat of 10 years died peacefully in his sleep last night.

I'm truly gutted.

He was my friend and a great source of comfort and peace.

Alex and I will never forget him so I guess in that sense he will never really be gone.

So gutted...

...of large butane bottles

Is it just me or have others noticed that whenever you attempt to show somebody how excellently awesome you are at something, it all goes pear shaped and lemon smelling.

I'm sure you know what I mean; 'Dad, look how fast I can ride my bike', 'mom, see how high I can climb up this tree'.

You know what I mean?

Well yeah, it happened to me a lot.

It still does.

At my high school we had several art classrooms. One of them was equipped with a large gas fired kiln. It was used for firing and glazing ceramics. It wasn't part of the classroom as much as it was only accessible through the classroom.

This classroom had a set of double French doors that gave the students access to a small courtyard and within this courtyard, the far corner of it, was where the kiln was situated.

Our art teacher was one of those strangely abstract women who seemed to be stuck in a continuous daily cycle of reinventing herself. Don't get me wrong she was a fantastically warm woman and we loved her dearly - it was just that her randomness always had you wondering who she would be when next she stood in front of the class!

The thing I liked best about her was that she held strongly to the belief that everything everyone did was just simply a form of artistic expression struggling to be let free.. To this end she saw the fact that I smoked cigarettes to mean that I was struggling with some sort of artistic self destruction that really only needed to be harnessed.

Anyway, one of the reasons I loved her, more perhaps than most, was that she would let me smoke out by the kiln in the courtyard during our classes with her.

It was during one of these highly irregular 'smoko' breaks and accompanied by one of my friends who also had a propensity for tobacco that I discovered two newly refilled gas bottles that had been delivered earlier that day. It appeared that the two being used to power the kiln were nearing empty and the replacements were ordered before the old ones actually ran out.

These bottles were not unlike the one sitting below your BBQ at home only they stood about 5 or more foot high and didn't have that guard thingy around the valve on the top, so they looked more like gigantic dive cylinders - I'm pretty sure I've seen bottles like this around recently so it must just be the ones for home use that have the guard around the valve - who knows.

I had learnt from experiments I had conducted at home on the gas bottle attached to the front of my parents caravan, that a most spectacular and self sustaining flame could be generated by opening the valve on the top of these bottles and applying a lit match to the valve outlet. In fact the bottle at home when newly refilled had managed a flame a good 7 - 8 foot long and I could only imagine what length flame we could get out of these freshly delivered monster bottles sitting so temptingly available in the art class courtyard...

Having already dealt with gas before I was well aware of the need to strike the match first before opening the valve so after having told my friend to move to one side a little so I could show him something 'excellently awesome' I struck the match.

Now as I said these bottles were quite tall - or at least tall in comparison to us, so I actually had to reach up a little above my own eye level in order to put the match near the valve outlet and I couldn't really see what I was doing exactly.

Nonetheless I turned the valve on hard and waited for the stream of gas to ignite..

- nothing -

Hmmmm.

There was certainly the sound of much gas escaping, plenty of it.

Suddenly it struck me... idiot!

I was holding the match on the wrong side of the valve!

No worries, that side was clear of everything, we both shuffled a little to the left and I moved the match to the other side of the valve...

I still cant really remember the exact sound - it was more like a feeling really, much like the feeling you get from an excessively powerful sub woofer. I think that the ground might have actually shook.

There was a dull blue flash at the same time as the sub woofer feeling and then a very brief sensation of extremely intense heat on my face, neck, ears and hands.

When I opened my eyes I found myself looking at some strange brown fuzzy critter that was standing where my friend had been a couple of seconds ago, not only was this strange beast brown and fuzzy but most alarmingly it was smoking! Every part of it was smoking! The clothes were smoking, the socks were smoking the brown fuzzy head was smoking! There was even smoke coming off the eyebrows!

A little too late I suppose I turned off the gas valve.

Holy sheeeet!

"Man - that happened quick" was all I had.

"Fucking right!" was all my friend had.

His name was Malcombe Jones and he used to be shock blond - now it seemed there was only the shock left. Almost exactly half of his hair from the front to the middle of his head had gone a funny type of ginger and looked markedly shorter than that hair which remained his normal blond. His eyebrows and eye lashes were the same matching ginger brown. Being blond he had very light skin but this was quickly turning a majestic shade of puce. He looked for all the world like a cartoon character who had just had one of those little black round bombs go off in his face. In retrospect I suppose he had just had a bomb go off in and all around his face!

It took Malcombe a few minutes if that, before he started pointing at me and laughing. I suppose it was just the relief of knowing that we had just had a very near miss but we both started roaring with laughter.

As it turned out my hair, and not just half of it but most of it had changed color to rusty brown as well and I was sporting matching eyebrows and lashes all of which were smoking!

The worst of it was yet to come - when we rubbed our newly tinted eyebrows and hair it all fell off!

Inconveniently the wind had blown the smell of burning hair straight through the open French doors and filled the art classroom which, when combined with the explosive thump had brought our beloved art teacher and half the class haring outdoors and into the courtyard where Malcombe and I stood half bald, eyebrow less, scorched red and smoking.

Even more inconveniently another teacher of a less understanding nature had now appeared on the scene and after quickly appraising the situation sent both of our scorched asses off to see the headmaster. The headmaster upon listening to our tale proceeded to cane both of us and inform our parents of our indiscretion.

When I arrived home that afternoon I was treated to a rather sound tongue lashing from my mother and a bloody good hiding from my old man.

So to recap, we both now had hair that made us look like monks from an old fashioned Kung Fu movie, we had no eyebrows or eye lashes and our faces looked like we'd both fallen asleep in a sun bed. The headmaster had caned our bums till we couldn't sit properly and to add further insult to our injuries our dads had kicked our already highly tender and broken butts.

Could always have been worse I suppose but all in all, rather a grim outcome for a bit of "see how awesome I am" I thought.

...of electric fans

Today is officially the warmest day we’ve experienced this spring.

In my work place the heaters are being put away and the fans are coming out.

Hmmmm fans...

Several years back the company that employs me bought a shipping container to use as a radio resistant chamber. I shan’t bore you with the details, suffice to say after minor modifications we set this behemoth down in a far corner of our workshop and set up an emission measuring laboratory within it.

In order for the chamber to be completely free of any type of radio emissions we decided a refrigerated container would be best because internally they are completely lined with stainless steel. This combined with the outer steel casing provided us with a large room that was immune from even the most powerful of radio transmissions and rendered all cell phones useless if taken within it.

As you may or may not have noticed, refrigerated shipping containers come complete with their very own chiller units (rather like air conditioning units on steroids). The ones fitted to our container needed to be removed before we could put it into use as they allowed openings in the chamber walls that let radio signals in.

We stripped these chillers off and they lay about the shop for sometime before myself and our German design engineer took an interest in them.

The motors were large and completely waterproof and had fitted to them rather large (500mm) extremely dangerous looking, stainless steel fans.

It didn’t take us too long to figure out how to make them run and we were astonished at the absolutely phenomenal amount of air they could shift. They were immediately banned from the work place as the fan blades were completely un-guarded and spun at a ferocious leg chopping 4000rpm! If you cant imagine why 4000rpm of spinning steel is so dangerous try tipping your lawn mower on its side, jamming the throttle at full and grabbing the spinning blade – and it’s doing nowhere near 4000rpm.

I kid you not, the wind coming off these things would have a woman’s skirt off at 50 metres and being that I lived in a small, extremely hot and poorly ventilated house I figured one of these bad boys would be just the ticket at home where Occupational Health and Safety had no jurisdiction.

I clearly remember the day I took it home – I was ever so eager to show my overheated and sweltering flat mates and it would be hard to imagine a better day for a demonstration of my newly acquired ‘mega fan’, it was scorching!

I decided that it would be safest to situate the beast in a corner of the lounge so that nobody could approach it from behind and accidentally lose a leg or foot to the fan blades. It seemed obvious that nobody would be unaware of it when approaching from the front because the wind coming from the bastard nearly took you off your feet!

- Once when I was a small boy my friend and I were throwing sand balls at each other at the beach. Unsatisfied with the impact my sand balls were having on my friends head I decided I could have a much more telling effect if I simply put a big rock inside one.

The minute I threw that sand ball, the instant it left my hand, I wished I could have it back...

..and so it was as I flicked the mains switch on at the wall.

It’s hard to describe the order of catastrophic events that occurred given the degree of chaos that ensued the moment that switch was thrown.

It became obvious to me immediately that running these fans in an extremely large warehouse as opposed to a very small lounge room was an entirely different kettle of fish!

It seemed that in an instant, every ash tray in the room (‘there were many and they were all full’) emptied themselves into the available air space within the room, and I don’t just mean the ash, no - butts and all were being swirled around the room. The dogs howled and made a desperate bid for freedom adding further to the furor by knocking several housemates to the floor.

In the next few moments, while we were all temporarily distracted by the cigarette butts and ash in our eyes, the window drapes, conveniently bunched in the corner behind the monster fan were then drawn into the back of the ghastly monstrosity. The drapes were doomed from the moment the very tip of one touched the fan blade.

Being that the motor itself was very heavy and powerful meant the unfortunate drapes simply wrapped around the fan and motor shaft without unsettling or slowing the fan in the least! And so with a horrendous tearing noise the drapes, mesh curtains and curtain rails were torn from the wall and attempted to wrap themselves around the cursed fan. At this point there was so much shredded curtaining and pieces of curtain rod trying to spin around the fan that the fan had become larger than the motor that spun it and it crashed sideways to the floor and began galloping in frighteningly random circles around the lounge floor space smashing tables and tearing furniture into large chunks!

We fled.

Honestly, I was frightened.

My housemates on the other hand, were livid!

Thankfully the trashing ended reasonably quickly (albeit dramatically) in a burst of sparks when the fan managed to cut through the lead from the motor to the wall.

I was permitted to stay – but sadly my fan was banned (I was certain that with a little more experimentation it could be tamed, but my suggestion was not met with a great deal of enthusiasm).

I gave it to a friend who works as a car painter; he uses it to extract paint vapors from his garage and to this day nobody has suffered any injury,

yet...

Currently listening to:

Blips by http://blip.fm/DirtyUrine

...of thieves

It was with some degree of amusement that I observed the neighbors dog trashing some sheets and clothes that were hung on her owners washing line whilst downing my hot chocolate this morning.

Amusing because despite my yelling and jumping up and down on my deck and generally looking foolish flailing my hands and gnashing my teeth, the dog seemed only mildly interested but if anything was spurned on to even greater levels of destruction - to the detriment of the unfortunate washing!

I suppose I should have gone over there and made a more sincere attempt to stop the ruinage but the idea of the neighbors returning home for some reason to find me in their back yard with handfuls of their torn washing, running from their dog did not inspire me to act gallantly...

It did however; remind me of a little incident that happened many years ago when I was sharing a house with several friends.

There were fours of us (all guys) living in a lease property, sharing the rent, power, phone etc, etc. We had been living there for several months before we began to notice a sure and steady decline in the number of jeans and T-Shirts that we possessed. We finally twigged that one of us didn’t have a huge pile while the rest of us were in deficit and it was to our bitter disappointment we discovered that we were all less two or three pairs each and many more T-Shirts also.

It took us some time to deduce that our clothes were being filched from our washing line during the night and further investigations revealed that the thieves were coming over our back wall, through the vacant part of the section at the bottom of the yard and up to our washing line situated in the middle of the used part of the yard.

We decided collectively that the first element of our defense would be to clear away some of the vines and climbers that had over many years become greatly overgrown and thickly covered both sides of the back wall. This it seemed, allowed intruders to observe our movements while remaining virtually invisible to us from the house and also from casual onlookers or people in neighboring houses.

After this relatively simple operation we were delighted to find that underneath all of the overgrowth was a three line barbed wire fence at the top of the wall. Which, having now been freed from the entangling vines appeared as an impromptu second line of defense for our washing line.

The other lads however had got to talking about this one day while I was at work and arriving home one afternoon I was approached on masse to offer my opinion on electrifying the barbed wire fence. Being quite a lot younger than I am now the idea of an electric barbed wire fence fascinated and appealed to me...

So, using our combined ingeniousness we set about insulating the wire from the fence strainers using sections of garden hose and I was dispatched to the nearest automobile wreckers to obtain a cheap CDI ignition system from a car.

Using this piece of equipment as the fence energizer had the combined advantage of being both cheap and our intruders would be spared the need to touch the bare wire as the voltage and available energy from the ignition system would mean, coming to a distance within half an inch of the wire would see an extremely high energy discharge, straight up your ‘tender bits’.

We stashed the whole contraption complete with old car battery in a nail box and concealed it with a pile of the vines we had ripped off the fence and sat about for the better part of the night waiting to see if our efforts would be rewarded.

Nothing.

So I recharged the battery during the next day and set it all up the following evening.

Nothing.

And so it went for the next three nights. By the sixth night everyone had pretty much lost interest and I persevered only because I thought it would be a shame to give up now and have the thieves come back and rob us again the night we didn’t have the battery charged.

Sometime just after midnight on that sixth evening we were alerted by the dog, who until this time had failed to detect our ‘midnight shoppers’. She was whining and clawing at the back door and although we could hear nothing, her interest in getting outside attracted the attention of us all.

We armed ourselves with an assortment of ungainly objects (I had a rock...??? Oh yeah we were hard core!) and after letting the dog go first we made our way across the back yard.

Somewhere around the clothes line we heard the first sounds of a frantic scuffling and heard the dog growl and then howl and we were nearly bowled over as she came scuttling past us heading quickly in the opposite direction, tail tucked firmly between her legs, ears flat down on her head.

Generally speaking, people who take on snarling dogs within the dogs own territory should be approached with a great deal of caution! We needn’t have worried.

Two young men were trapped in the barbed wire fence and every second or so they would twist and writhe like a pair of synchronized monkeys in a tree. We assumed that the dog had attempted to bite the shoe of the guy closest to the ground and had shared a little in the energy that was making such beautiful blue sparks on our two captured crims.

Tempting as it was to leave them both there making funny noises and flexing like a pair of retarded bodybuilders we started to worry that they could end up badly hurt. There was already an odd smell of burnt hair or flesh and also the ozone smell you get after a big electrical storm. I disconnected the battery while my flat mates informed our hapless criminals that if they tried to make a run for it we would light their dumbasses straight back up again.

I guess it was a testament to the pain they must have been through because as soon as I turned the fence off and they could speak properly they started pleading with us to never turn it back on again. They were a little cut around the legs and hands from the barbs in the wire and both seemed to have bitten their tongues or cheeks and were bleeding slightly from their mouths.

Such had been the extent of their writhing and struggling that we had to cut them free and so destroy our beloved fence.

Under the threat of much violence we tied their wrists with sticky tape and dragged their now very sorry asses back up to the house where we gagged them with more sticky tape and applied even more tape to their legs. When we felt that escape would be impossible we heaved them into the bathtub one on top of the other, removed their gags and questioned them about our missing clothes. Having recovered a little by this time they became adamant that this was not their intention and that they had never been over our fence or into our yard before.

Collectively, none of us was convinced; they had attempted to come over the fence in exactly the same place that we had deduced somebody had been over before. I went back down to the bottom of the yard and recovered the nail box with our DIY fence energizer and battery, took it back up to the house and put it down on the bathroom vanity where both of our would be thieves could see it.One of the other lads put the plug in the tub and turned on the tap…

Nobody had said a word during this process but the intention was apparently clear enough and the confessions were readily forthcoming! They admitted to stealing from us on several occasions and had hocked our gear off at one of the local op-shops. Disgusted, we re-gagged them and locked the bathroom door.

For some time we considered calling the cops but I was unsure how we might fear in a legal sense with regard to having installed a barbed wire electric fence which by no means came anywhere near fitting the legal safety requirements that local councils dictate in their by-laws.

What we decided on in the end was the old ‘scare the shit out of em’ approach, so two of us took the ‘good guy’ role while the other two took the ‘badass’ approach and we staged an argument complete with scuffling and apparent pushing and shoving outside the door of the bathroom.

The ‘badasses’ tried to convince us that we should just break a spade over each of their heads and bury the bodies down in the vacant overgrown part of the section where nobody would ever know.

We, the ’good guys’ tried to reason with our counterparts saying that these guys would no doubt be missed, that others were bound to know what they had been up to, inevitably sending trouble our way and that we should just call the cops and be done with it.

We let this to-ing and fro-ing continue all the while knowing our sneaky little friends could hear every word. We culminated the argument with a shouting match that saw the ‘badasses’ storm off, apparently pissed with us for being so soft and leaving the house in a huff.

The two of us remaining went back into the bathroom – un-gagged our pair of thieves and asked them for their names and addresses, the address they gave us was only two streets away from ours so it seemed to add up. We dragged them outside one at a time and released them, telling them that they had 30 mins to get home and make anyone else in their house aware that the police were on their way.

We never called the cops – tempting as it was, common sense prevailed and we figured we would probably be the ones in the most trouble.

But hey, we never lost anything else off the washing line for the remainder of the time we lived there and I always wonder if those two chaps ever stole anything again – EVER!

Currently listening to:

The Black Crowes – Shake your Moneymaker

http://blip.fm/jennyleepenny

...of lessons

I have meandered through my life gathering qualifications as I go.

To date I am a reasonable mechanic, a trade qualified electrician and a trade qualified television, radio and consumer electronics service person.

By profession I am a reasonably talented electronics engineer.

My trades have taught me a great deal about dealing with other people.

My profession has taught me even more about dealing with myself.

Some of the important lessons have been,

1) Consider - everything

2) Never overlook - anything

3) Allow for outside, above and beyond all that you have considered.

But the most important of these lessons has been:

4) You can never forsee everything!

Sick

Bah!

I'm crook.

In all honesty; I feel like the crap that some crap, crapped after eating too much crap!

It's nothing really - just a common flu I should imagine. Nothing that a tall glass of 'harden the f**k up' wont cure.

But I got to thinking that if I could just make a powerfull enough magnetic field

... Nah, nah I'm just messing with ya!

Although...

*********

I've decided to take a couple of days off work which was probably wise given that the new flu remedies we're forced to buy if we want some form of relief these days has some quite spectacular side effects! This combined with the facts that I can barely hear, I haven't slept properly, my head feels the size of a planet and I work with high voltage, convinced me to just rest up and get better.

...but I wanted to say something about the side effects I get from these new flu pills.

Firstly there's the bizzaro dreams and secondly there's the, "non drowsy" claim.

The dreams are AWESOME! but really fragmented.

Each one ends in a different type of cliffhanger, it wakes me up sweating with, what I can only imagine, is a startled look on my head - like the one you get when you run blindly across unknown terrain in complete darkness!

Four or five times a night...

..Gnarlyyyyyduuuuuude!

So that makes me tired.

It would also seem, that the 'non drowsy' bit kind of works when your trying to sleep...

About the 'non drowsy' bit.

In some ways it's true; you don't get drowsy in the least - you just get smashed the fuck out!

Yesterday I was trying to remotely log on to my company server so I could send a global email. But there seemed to be some issue with maximum numbers blah, blah, blah, bleh. So I decided to finish a blog I was in the middle of while the connection to the company server happened.

No shit - I got my blog document open.. The next thing I know is it's forty minutes later, my blog doc is several hundred blank pages longer and I drool copiously if I fall asleep face down.

To summarize, it seems that this stuff is 'non drowsy' but only when you want to sleep. And it is 'non drowsy' when your awake but may cause temporary Narcolepsy.

I liked the old flu capsules a lot more. Fall asleep during the day? Not bloody likely!

Man, you could really get some shit done when you had the flu in those days. Not a lot of what you got done was right admittedly but at least at night time you were so exhausted from your massive ephedrine day rush that you crashed out for the entire night!

Better that I think, than waking up four or five times a night looking like a strangled turkey.

I'm off for that tall glass... cya.

Currently listening to:

http://blip.fm/SevenTenths

Morning observations...

Monday 10th August 2009

So a couple of things came to mind this morning and I thought it best to write them down before they vanished into the depths of my woeful memory.

The first was just an observation; something I had noticed before but didnt really think about.

Alex and I were driving past the gas station on the way to the train station and a police car was stopped there. One of the officers was re-fueling their vehicle, a marked police vehicle. As I said I had seen this before but it suddenly occurred to me that there seemed to be something a little skewed about this. It just seems odd that their vehicles aren’t somehow or other always filled with fuel...

I quite often see police vehicles tearing up the road that this particular gas station is situated at the top of, lights flashing and sirens blaring. And for a moment I imagined the scene inside one of these vehicles:

** Unit 452 responding to the incident logged at 16:42 by Comms central. Incident number 23392. Complainant has witnessed offender’s breaking and entering neighboring property at 415 Gt North Road we will be on site in approximately 2 mins. Awww shit, sorry Comms we’re going to have to stop and get some gas.**

Wait... what?

*****************************

The other thing that came to mind this morning was how much we take for granted the ease of telecommunication these days.

If I could have imagined the ability to carry around a portable communication device that would connect me with the rest of the world and was powered by a battery that would last upwards of a week when I was a boy, I would have considered it only that – imaginary!

I became involved with electronics when I was a very young boy somewhere around 9 or 10 years old.

The Z80 processor was the height of computing technology in those days. Communication with my best buddy who lived next door was restricted to wet strings attached to tin cans and even then we had to go outside to use them in order to keep the string stretched taught and in a straight line so it couldn’t touch anything else. In fact by raising our voice a little more than what was required in order to use the tin can phones we could hear each other anyway!

A year later we had managed to string a four cored wire between his house and mine by utilizing the fence around my family’s swimming pool and the very large back lawn that separated his house from mine.

We then connected several old telephone handsets and some batteries to the cable to form the basis of a very crude telephone. This was entirely more satisfactory and a vast improvement over the tin cans and wet string. Unfortunately it did make us extremely unpopular with my buddy’s father when shortly after the initial installation of this ground breaking cable laying his father decided to mow the lawn... It took him several hours and a great many Dutch cuss words to disentangle the mower blade.

So for me this tiny mobile device I carry in my pocket is still a source of amazement despite understanding the complexity of its operation.

I like that feeling.

I recommend standing back from oneself and looking at that small device and being amazed.

It wasn’t always like this, remember...

Currently listening to:

Nightmares on Wax - Smokers Delight

...ahhhhummmm

Today, Thursday August 6^th is to be the official first day in my quest to remove “ummm” from my spoken vocabulary.

It need only be removed from my spoken vocabulary because funnily enough it has never been something that I would write. Sure I might use it deliberately if I wanted to but it never pops up in my prose of its own apparent free will, unlike the manner it does whenever I’m speaking.

I tend to use ‘ummm’ as a filler in normal conversation to ‘stop the gap’ in those micro moments of awkward silence between words.

I also use it, embarrassingly, to fool myself into believing that I am improving the continuity of my speech.

Being of a somewhat ‘know it all’ disposition I have also learnt that continuously fitting ‘ummm’ into a conversation at the right time will not allow the person I am speaking to any chance of getting a word in, thereby allowing me to continue on telling them where something is at without fear of distraction by sidetracking interruption or the facts!

By the same token I often get so carried away with myself that my mouth seems to take off at a hundred miles an hour leaving my brain in the dust because it can only muster a piddly forty miles an hour. ‘Ummm’ then gives me the time I need for my brain to catch up with my mouth.

In reality I have no need for ‘stop the gap’ tools as in all honesty I quite enjoy awkward silences, it gives me an opportunity to observe facial expression and read body language so that I can determine honesty, genuine behavior or lack thereof.

As far as improving speech continuity; that is bollicks! From my viewpoint men whose speech involves a lot of ‘ummming’ present themselves as uncertain and lacking in confidence with regard to the topic of conversation they are currently engaged in. And when it comes to using ‘ummm’ as a means to do all the talking in the hope of convincing someone of how right you are – well that is just wrong! Likewise, if your mouth out distance’s your brain whilst talking you could be setting yourself up for a well deserved punch in the face!

So today hopefully will be the beginning of a much improved me and all I have to do is stop saying ‘ummm’

We’ll see...

...of genetic stupidity and corned beef

I was standing in my best mate’s kitchen the other day while his wife was cooking corned beef and I was reminded about the tale of Brendon and the corned beef of slow and painful death...

I had recently separated from my partner of many years and had moved into an old friends place.

This was pretty much the epitome of 30 year old bachelor pads; grubby, untidy, unkempt, boozy, loud and furnished with mostly tired and decrepit second hand armchairs.

Oh yes and there was the dog, which for the most part had the run of the place and didn't hold much in the way of respect for cleanliness!

One of the blokes that spent a great deal of time with us during this time owned a small farmlet. From time to time he would manage a home kill which saw us all overloading the death out of our freezers in an effort to fit the better part of quarter a butchered cow in them.

So this being the first time Brendon had had to deal with this amount of meat he went about it all wrong and rather than apply any type of intelligence to the sorting and stacking of the different cuts he simply piled it all in a la one humongous lump.

It wasn't until nearly 24 hours later that I thought to ask him if he had remembered to turn it all so that it didn't just become one enormous frozen lump completely locked together and irremovable from the freezer.

Of course he had not.

So we set about trying to separate the bags of assorted cuts from each other. Fortunately the sheer amount of meat involved and the reasonably small size of the freezer meant that most of the meat had not completely frozen solid and with a bit of effort we managed to unlock the bags from each other and the freezer baskets and unload all of it out of the freezer into piles which we stacked on the nearest available armchairs. I then sorted the cuts out and we re-loaded the bags back into the freezer where they could safely continue the freezing process with out fear of becoming locked together.

What neither of us realized was that one of the several corned silversides we had stacked on one armchair had slipped down the back of the chair and being old and tatty had fallen straight down the back, come out the bottom and landed on the floor under the chair. This old chair was one of those rocker types that you would find old men smoking a pipe in at night and had a little type of skirt around the bottom of it that was supposed to hide all the ugly mechanisms that allowed it to rock and swivel. So although the packet of meat had fallen to the floor it was invisible under the skirt of the chair.

I don’t know how it is everywhere else in the world but in New Zealand raw corned meat often comes in vacuum packed bags that contain some of the brine the meat was originally corned in.

These bags are tough so as not to leak at any time and this was proven to be the case as the bag sat undiscovered beneath the chair until discovered by Brendons somewhat eccentric mother several months later when she happened to push the vacuum cleaner head under the chair (cleaning was never high on our list of priorities) and scooped it out.

Now the bag, being of the toughest type, hadn't ruptured (although I can only suppose it must have gone through a ballooning stage) so there had been no leaks on the floor or therefore smells and Brendons mother swears, despite her actually picking it up and carrying it to the kitchen sink, that it didn't smell at close proximity. It did however have a definite green tinge but the foolish old woman neglected to deem that as important and merely considered that this was something Brendon had taken out of the freezer for dinner, she also wrongly assumed that the ill mannered dog had swiped it off the bench and hidden it under the chair for treats later, when able to sneak it from the house.

So having made an ineffectual attempt at cleaning the un-cleanable mess that was Brendons house she buggered off leaving the festering lump of several months old meat to continue its steady decay in the sink.

When Brendon arrived home from work later that Friday afternoon he spied the dubious lump in the sink and dimwittedly assumed that his mom had taken it out of the freezer for him earlier that day. (Yes, yes I know, what was his mother doing in his house cleaning when he wasn't there etc, etc – that’s another story...) Anyways – I wasn't there at the time but I can only assume that during the aforementioned ‘ballooning’ of the bag the smell was contained and the lump had become so fetid that it had gone beyond smelling or that Brendon was just as big of a moron as his mother, because without further ado he put it in a pot with a couple of litres of water and began the process of cooking it.

Again, having not been there at the time I will have to assume that either the water or the boiling process re-energized the smell because when I did return later that evening with our mate John there was a distinct odor to the place. When I questioned the hapless Brendon as to the source he commented rather inconsequentially that it had been a lot worse during the first stage of boiling and had gotten a lot better with subsequent water changes! Hmmmmm.

The friend John who I had been out with also happened to be the supplier of the meat and we were both fairly puzzled as to its distinctly greenish tinge around the outer edge and the curious odor which I thought I might have come across once before whilst working in a morgue. But being young and hungry (and a bit pissed and stoned) and seeing how Brendon had already scoffed nearly half of the chunk, we decided there was nothing to be lost by trying a little bit...

I managed a slice but decided it wasn't anything like the corned silverside I had ever tried and the spicing of it was downright funky. John, who I suspect was acting on guilt managed several slices before giving it away as “a little strange” and declaring that Brendon had added something to it whilst it was cooking and for lack of better words, ‘made a right fuck of it’.

John and I trundled off to his farm a little later on and proceeded to get thoroughly drunk which had the net result of my not heading back to Brendons until much later the following day after making a partial recovery.

Both John and I had noticed a degree of gassiness the previous night but nothing that you wouldn't expect when ‘tipping in’ the amounts of beer we were accustomed to.

When we finally made it back to Brendons it was to find him asleep in the fetal position dressed only in his under shorts on the grimy floor of the toilet.

Strange.

...and a little disturbing.

So of course we left him where he was amongst the dirt scum and pubic hairs and set about having a few beers to settle our hangovers. At some point he must have roused himself and headed off to bed. He emerged many beers later to inform us of the terrible plight that had befallen him, punctuated by his being interrupted every few minutes by a need to rush to the toilet and dry retch in sphincter clenching bursts that made my eyes water.

Well of course John and I nearly laughed our cocks off and spent quite awhile slapping each other on the back and coming to grips with that strange gassiness we had experienced the night before. We then spent several more minutes laughing at poor Brendon until finally he took the easier option and went back to alternating between his bed and the toilet.

We were tempted to clean up some of the vomit around the place but I had a sneaking suspicion that the dog was up to the job anyway because she had promptly developed a nasty dose of the shits and there were definately wet patches around the place that looked like they might have been vomit piles at one stage but now had the distinct appearance they had been cleaned up with a wire brush...

John and I decided to head out again later that evening and just as we were about to leave we heard a weak and frankly, rather pathetic wailing coming from Brendons bedroom.

“John... John”

so we stop and John hollers out a hearty “yeah mate?”

...”could you get me... a glass of water?”

Yeah, yeah I know it’s not all that funny but were all reasonably hard blokes back then so it was pretty amusing to us at the time and it took us both a few seconds to compose ourselves so as to not appear too callous, before John shot through to the kitchen to get the poor bugger a glass of water.

In all fairness as we were getting to the top of the street we did stop and ask each other if we thought he was going to be o.k. – only for a second mind before the lure of beer had us on our way.

We got back to Brendons late Sunday night to find his condition was quite a lot worse!

Luckily his mom had got wind of his illness and decided to come and check on him. One glance at his woeful condition and she whisked him off to the A and E at Auckland hospital where he was diagnosed with a severe bacterial and viral digestion tract infection!

They had kept him over the Saturday night and had released him Sunday after having pumped him full of anti-bacterial drugs and loaded him up with so many pills if you would have shaken him, he would have rattled.

It took him nearly two weeks to come right but to be honest after this episode I could never look at either Brendon or his mother and think they could actually ever be right.

Currently listening to:

del Amitri – Waking Hours

Ben Harper – White Lies for Dark Times

...of Range Rovers and work vans

I thought it was time that I took a break from being the object of ridicule for awhile.

Yes I did receive a couple of emails saying ‘ohhh do tell the story of the heated handle bar grips’ but that was some fourteen years ago and it will take a little time for me to recall the details exactly.

In the meantime I thought to recount the unfortunate tale that befell a friend of mine who shall, in the interest of discretion remain nameless.

O.k – So let me set the scene, because that for me is the true essence of this particular fail/tale.

My friend; lets call him, “friend X” just to make things easy, had lived all of his life, along with myself and most of our other mutual friends in the area commonly referred to as West Auckland.

Auckland is divided along the four points of the compass and by being extremely and rudely stereotypical can be surmised thus: North Auckland is home to the more professional people of Auckland with large expensive homes, harbor views and rates to match. East Auckland has a wealthy Asian population also sporting expansive new homes and rates to suit. South Auckland houses the lower socioeconomic groups, mostly Maori and Polynesian and is sometimes, perhaps unfairly, described as the violent crime quarter of Auckland. West Auckland is seen, to a greater degree by the other quarters as the fast car, loud party, hard drinking, drug centre of Auckland. (I did say it was going to be stereotypical and rude!)

As with any area in which you spend most of your life it becomes, ‘home’ with most of the downsides minimized so that you become reasonably attached, in a territorial kind of way regardless.

Not so for friend X.

He had decided that he was tired of the loutishness and ‘hoonism’ that in my opinion adds a degree of charm and interest to the area. And so he decided to make the move upwards to the north of Auckland and so be free of cars doing burnouts in the middle of his street in the dead of the night or waking up to find somebody had lost control of their vehicle in the early hours and taken out the better part of the front fence and accompanying shrubberies.

Fair enough I suppose. But somewhere in the back of my mind a little voice kept saying “good one, I wonder how your new neighbors are going to feel about you moving in and completely lowering the tone”.

Anyway; a week after moving in and friend X is quick to extol upon us the virtues of living in his more up market place of residence. “No more loud cars, reckless drivers, roaming dogs etc, etc blah, blah, blah" - whatever!

Now friend X was the owner of several vehicles one of which was a rather grumpy looking Range Rover powered by a 400cu Chevy big block which had been ‘uglied’ up by having a Series 2 Land Rover body perched upon it and a roll cage thrown in for good measure. He was also a tradesman and had a long wheelbase van for use in the day to day running of his business.

One evening in that first week of moving in, he returned home from work in the dim light of early dusk and still being a little inexperienced with the steep driveway of the new house, misjudged the width of the driveway and ended up with two wheels off the edge.

Given the speed of the descending darkness he made the decision to leave the van where it was until the morning when he could, with some assistance from his housemates haul the vehicle back onto the driveway proper.

He awoke reasonably late in the morning to find that while he had slept his housemates who needed to be at work much earlier that same morning - had left. Not wishing to face his ferocious waking temper (or breath) they had chosen to let him sleep on. The grounds for this decision being fairly based upon the premise that he knew they had to leave early and if he required assistance he would ensure he was ready when they were.

By keeping to the very far left of the driveway they had squeezed past his trapped vehicle and merrily headed off to their respective workplaces.

Now, being a reasonably practical sort of chap, friend x took it upon himself to recover from this predicament unassisted.

He went about it thus: He backed the Rangie down the driveway from the house and parked it within towing rope distance from the front of the work van. He then attached a stout 4WD recovery strap to the back of the Rangie and the front of the van.

I know what your thinking – how does one person tow two vehicles? Put that to one side for a moment because that is really only half of the picture – we’ll come back to that.

Let me attempt to paint you a picture of this driveway.

Not only is it very steep but at the bottom of it and running perfectly perpendicular to it was a fairly busy road. This road merely divided the steep hill that friend x’s house was situated on the top half of. Directly across this road was another driveway which was equally steep but of course was headed down the hill. At the bottom of that driveway was what you would call “the neighbor across the roads” house. Hopefully you get the picture – steep hill, road running across it, some houses up from the road, some houses down from the road.

Now where was I... Ah yes – so how does one person tow two vehicles? Or more appropriately, why would one person want to tow two vehicles on their own given the circumstance!

Well lets face it we’re men and we may all be brave under pressure but you would be foolish to say we were the smartest of the sexes... Enough said.

So friend x piles himself into the four wheel drive from hell and figures that just a gentle yank ought to do it as he has no intention of attempting to pull the van anyfurther than simply back on to the concrete.

Well this proves to be a little tougher than at first expected due to the rut the vans spinning tires have created multiplied by the thickness of the driveway concrete.

Thus begins the real tale of woe.

Having unsuccessfully given the van several light tugs (if such a thing is really possible with 400cubes and a low range gearbox suited for climbing vertical glaciers) friend x not known for his tireless patience makes the foolhardy decision to bury the go pedal.

Yay! - The van pops magically out of its ruts, one more small yank and she will be on the driveway completely.

Funny isn’t it, how disaster always strikes when success is so close you can taste it.

With a sickening lurch the Rangie leapt forward just as friend x had suspected it would when the van finally rolled up on to the driveway – but no.

The van had in actuality made it up on to the driveway but at almost the precise same moment the towing rope came undone at the van end!

Unlike most stories where in situations like this, time seems to slow and everything else slows with it, this was not so for the van and its phantom driver.

Being that it was rolling backwards down a very steep driveway and the steering wheels were at the back it simply followed the contours of the driveway picking up speed at an altogether alarming rate.

By the time friend x had clambered from the Rangie and begun to run frantically after the fast retreating van it had accelerated to a frightening 50 – 60km/h. Not daunted by the fast approaching end of the driveway the van appeared to gather even greater speed before launching itself out of the driveway and tearing blindly across the road where as fate would have it, the neighbor’s driveway lay in wait with welcoming arms.

A horrified friend x had sprinted to the bottom of his driveway and across the street in time to see the accursed van gather ever more speed on the neighbors driveway only an instant before burying itself with a horrendous smashing of glass, crashing and tearing noise, half of it’s own length deep into the neighbors house.

As he stood there wringing his hands in woe and wondering which emergency service to call first two things happened.

One was the recalling of a vague memory to do with the parking brake in the Rangie, the second was a strange rattling noise coming from his driveway.

And so, just when friend x thought things could hardly get worse, they did.

Hello! – here comes the fucking Rangie.

In his haste to abandon the 4WD upon seeing the van making an escape from the towing rope friend x had failed to adequately engage the parking brake and now the 4WD too was hurtling down the driveway apparently intent on rejoining its escaped companion.

In a frustratingly inconvenient display of arrogance time now choose this exact moment to slow down. And with agonizing clarity and a painful feeling of impending doom friend x watch the behemoth of a 4WD sail across the road, down the neighbors driveway to plant itself with a sickening crunch two feet deep into the only remaining undamaged panels and windows in the front of the luckless van. This also had the undesirable effect of pushing the van the rest of the way into the bedroom on suite that had taken the brunt of its impact, ripping the bathroom vanity from the wall, rupturing the associated hot and cold water pipes from the taps to send showers of water over the whole rotten mess.

I suppose if there can be an upside it would have to be that through the whole debacle nobody was injured in the least, so long as injured pride is not taken into the equation.

But what will forever remain ingrained in my memory are my friend’s initial reasons to move out of west Auckland...

Currently listening to:

Pitbull – The Boatlift

SuperGroove - Postage

Of Electric Socks...

Entry for June 23, 2009

We are currently experiencing a bit of a cold snap in Auckland and across the country in general to be accurate.

The workshop that I spend the better part of my days in is rather large and the air conditioning still hasn’t been installed so it closely resembles the cool store in the local bottle shop until about one o’clock in the afternoon. By three in the afternoon the temperature begins a rapid decline back towards perfect beer temp again.

Being that our primary business is the manufacture of battery charging system for industry there is no shortage of energy available in the form of batteries and surprise, surprise, chargers in my immediate vicinity.
That, coupled with the cold got me to thinking that some electric socks would be just the ticket for keeping my feet warm while sitting at my desk.

I figured they didn’t have to be too flashy as they would spend most of the day under my desk inside shoes with my jeans or overalls over the top.
So Monday night just gone I sat myself down on the floor in my lab at home and proceeded to weave some thin nichrome wire through a pair of long woolen footy socks I had selected for the job.

It was quite a lot more work than I had envisaged but eventually, after multiple foot stabbings I managed to get the wire fairly evenly distributed around the feet and half way up the leg section of both socks. I super glued a couple of ceramic connectors just below the top of the socks to connect my power wires to and was reasonably happy that by folding the top of the socks down over the connectors the whole shebang would stay in position so long as I didn’t decide to move around too much.

I had spent a few hours that day designing and building a simple adjustment device that by my best reckoning would give more than enough control over the elements now woven into the socks. I then wasted little time connecting this to a battery of a type I knew we had plenty of at work.

Eureka!

Success is mine
Or so it did at first appear...

Because I had to weave the element through the socks the nichrome wire came into direct contact with my skin in places and although I could have simply put the electric socks over the top of another pair of ordinary socks to overcome this problem I felt that in some ways that was inefficient and to some degree defeated the point of electric socks on the whole. I figured that I should be able to adjust the power into the elements to a point where the wire was not uncomfortable against my bare skin, yet still produced enough heat to be of benefit.

It was during that adjustment that things went horribly awry!

For no apparently good reason my controller decided that it would choose that very moment to lose all semblance of control and go from near minimum to flat out!

I gauge myself as a reasonably adept electronics engineer but for some reason when it comes to experiments I conduct upon myself I show a frightening lack of foresight or consideration for potential failure and the associated consequences.

If you feel so inclined see how long it takes you to completely remove a pair of reasonably snug fitting, long footy socks...

The flurry of activity that took place on the floor of my lab was dynamic to say the least!

The socks went from comfortably warm to suitable for the cremation of rhinoceros in the blink of a now watering eye. To further add to the ensuing chaos, my cat Walt had come into the lab while I was weaving the wire into the socks and settled himself on top of a pile of magazines in one corner and at my first bellow had levitated a good two feet from the ground, doubled in size and lit out for the door, legs peddling at the speed of light.

Alas, his escape was not to be so easily executed for as soon as his frantically scrabbling legs hit the ground they came into claw contact with the pile of magazines he had been sitting upon and they proceeded to shoot out from under him like so many cards dealt from the hand of an experienced croupier and in his effort to correct his lack of forward motion he misjudged the gap in the door and collided heavily with the door frame. The impact of the collision was enough to knock him backwards and off his feet – for a Pico second!
In almost the same movement he was back on his feet and headed in my direction.
The look in his eyes was unnerving to say the least and for a moment I felt a touch of panic, only for a moment mind because within the next, he was in my lap all 11 kilo’s of him.
Despite the pain in my feet I felt every claw.
Caught between my overwhelming desire to throw him from my lap and through the half open door and the need to get the twin induction furnace’s off of my feet, I failed abysmally at both.
Sure, Walt sailed through the door but not before managing to just barely hook a single claw under the tip of one of my nostrils and drag the other outstretched paw down my arm.

I hit the floor, writhing in agony, screaming a foul torrent of cuss words and tore at the socks that now had the similar feeling I would imagine you could expect if you were wearing wasp nests as shoes.
All of this occurred in a matter of seconds and the several seconds longer it took to remove the socks seemed to be drawn out by some strange bend in the time space continuum giving me ample time to not only receive multiple small burns on my feet but a fairly decent number to my fingers in to the bargain.

I ran through the bi-fold doors that separate my lab from the bathroom and turned the shower on my feet and hands and despite my panic was relieved to find that the damage was pretty minimal with only a couple of tiny burns around my heels and several more on the top of my feet and toes.
It was while I was still standing in the shower looking wistfully at my scorched thumbs that the socks caught fire.

Shit!
Shit, shit, shit!

Get the wet flannel - back into the lab.

Shit! Sore feet!

Damnit not woolen socks after all - wool and nylon mix

SHIT!

Smoke alarms gone off!

Fuck!

YES WALT - I want to be outside too!

Oh for fucks sake the nylons melted and stuck to the floor!

FML!

...so the socks have joined the homemade electrolysis machine in the junk pile and will not be revisited.
As I said to a friend; I really should have learned my lesson from the motorcycle heated handgrip exercise because that too was an exceptional catastrophe.

– It is also, another story...



Currently listening to:

Cold War Kids - We Used To Vacation.
Sheryl Crow - Detours