Dragon Leatherworks Gunbelt, Take 1

Calmer Half was graciously sent a Dragon Leatherworks gunbelt to wear and review. He made approving noises and tugging motions, trying to bend the thick leather, and set about getting a buckle on it for review. He'll come up with something thoughtful, profound, and accurate later, I'm sure.

I, on the other hand, after pulling it out of the box, handled it a bit, examined the fasteners of much sturdiness, and finally summed up my initial impression as follows:

"This thing has more leather than my last miniskirt!"

A plush life

I can be as dense as granite, especially when exhausted and out of caffeine. However, when my brother calls me about half an hour after the last meeting of the day, and mentions in a Very Urgent manner that one of his little spawn is having a birthday in three days, I get the hint. This is the man who knows I barely remember my own birthday, and presents are a sporadic if ever sort of thing from sheer lack of memory. Something, somewhere, probably went wrong, and a little reminding means Aunt Wing can fill in the gap with presents. "What does she want for her birthday, brother mine?"

"She wants legos. And an alligator." He paused a moment, and added reflectively, "My wife won't let me get alligator steaks." Clearly, that discussion had not gone well for him.

"Legos. Got it."

So on to the internet, to the Great South American River of 2-day shipping. And because I'd said legos, being contrary, the first thing I looked for was alligators.

Did you know you can buy a 41" stuffed plushie alligator, with 2-day shipping, for under thirty bucks? It was a hard decision; legos not only encourage budding engineers, but also would be mines underfoot for soft arches of bare feet in the dark. Revenge!

But no, no, over a yard of stuffed animal would be overkill enough, and not inflict collateral damage on my sister in law or other feet. Maybe G-d has a point in this leaving vengeance in his hands.

His name is Swampy.

He has become a bone of contention between the battling bright little things, and I think I may have set the bar for expected amounts of overkill when the next one marks another year of growth. *facepalm* Ah, well. I expect he'll call to remind me in time.

Long Road Home

Several months ago, Zercool put up a post, stating "It can't hurt to ask..." for a guy looking for a specific M1. The one issued to the gent's father in the service, and turned back in going on fifty years ago. Like many a marine, his father still had the serial number memorized.

That was a long shot, I thought, though we checked the safe just in case. No joy, and I'm afraid I didn't really give it much thought. There are lots of long shots in this world, and the odds on this one were insane.

But not hopeless.

edited to add: Sorry, thought it was Zercool's dad. But no, he just passed the request on for a gent. Still does not impact the awesomeness one tiny bit. Go! See!

A little too much honesty in Science

"The compound exploded in solution, it exploded on any attempts to touch or move the solid, and (most interestingly) it exploded when they were trying to get an infrared spectrum of it."

...

Stirring speeds varied wildly depending on ambient music. Tech with dubstep predisposition banned after 4th breakage. #OverlyhonestMethods (@BadPhysics)

I really can't do justice to the latest post at Teddy's Rat Lab. Seriously, just Go Read The Whole Thing.

But save your keyboard! Put down your coffee before you go.

Life isn't antiseptic

My housemate recently had the kids for an extended time, and while The Boy thought this was awesome, The Teen Girl appeared to have mixed feelings. Mainly, she thinks our bathroom is unutterably grossly dirty.

Fine, I'll grant you, I only clean the toilet and mop the floor every other week, and the war vs. the soap scum in the shower is a "every other shower, tackle another section", not "spend all day scrubbing once a week" sort of deal. There gets to be a light layer of dust every now and then, and when there does, I clean the sink and counters. A little dust never killed anyone, and if I'm too damned tired after a week of working over fifty hours, I'm going to spend time reading blogs and with my husband, not kneeling on rebuilt knees and scrubbing tiles. If a little mold comes up on the shower curtain, it gets bleached and left until I get to scrubbing that section of the shower.

Now, I was born and raised before the fad of hand-sterilizer gels and anti-biotic everything really found its legs and started to run. My chickenpox vaccination was playing with a friend with chicken pox, and a week of misery and chicken soup. I've run barefoot most of the summer, out in the woods, and swum in ponds and lakes where you couldn't see six inches down. My mother is an ex-pat of a place where you whitewash the house once a year to cover the latest layer of mold, and saw nothing at all abnormal about messy, muddy, and slightly bloody children turn up starving twice a day all glorious summer. (Once I discovered the adult side of the library, I often turned up a lot cleaner and slightly less ravenous from sitting cramped at the base of the library shelves, reading everything that I was "too young" to check out.)

Calmer Half is from Africa, and has been all over that continent.

The Teen Girl, though, is of a generation that thinks "anti-bacterial facial tissues" are normal, and everyone should carry a bottle of hand sanitizer with them at all times, like some pagan charm against all illness.

The week before, when she knew she'd be subjected to this duress, she took a swab of the bathroom and used it for an example for biology class. When she brought the petri dish home from school and whipped it out with great ceremonial unwrapping from the plastic, she gave many warnings of the container wasn't to be opened, for it would smell a stink so foul as to make the heavens cry. I smiled. "Of course. Biology is messy."

She presented the evidence of my misdeeds to me, in petri form. I raised an eyebrow, then grinned. "Hey, cool! It's a monoculture mold!" I was completely unsurprised at the mold - after all, I fight it on the shower curtain pretty regularly. I was surprised that it was such a consistent monoculture, no hint of anything else there.

"But..but... it colonized the control side of the dish!"

"Yeah, that's pretty interesting - you can see how it grew on radial lines."

"But... It's disgusting! I showed it to the whole class and they were disgusted by the bathroom being so gross! The boys even went eeew!"

"Heh. Why don't you go show it to Calmer Half?"

"I don't think he'd take it as well as you did."

"Oh, I find it pretty amusing. Go on, go show him." I chivvied her down the stairs, and leaned back with a grin. She returned, pouting, crestfallen, and completely floundering at the lack of adult reaction (amusement does NOT count) to the repellant drama of the mold culture. Then she stormed off to go "properly clean the bathroom" with all proper drama and bleach. I know the biology teacher was amused; she sent the girl home with lab goggles, an apron, and rubber gloves. I didn't argue because hey, clean bathroom.

Calmer Half came up the stairs, to get another cuppa. The man who knows all too well what gangrene looks like, and what cholera smells like, cocked an ear to the teenage sturm und drang coming from the bathroom, and smiled at me. I shrugged and grinned, and he grinned back. Then he made a fresh mug of tea for me, as well as one for himself. Life is good, but not antiseptic.

Giving parts of myself away

The topic of blood donation is going 'round the blogs, and Calmer Half has already noted that he's had to stop at over a hundred units, because the American Red Cross is scared of African blood cooties.

I'm afraid I'm not even sitting on the fence on this one, I'm on the other side and leaving a dust cloud as I peel rubber in a retreat. When I was younger, I thought I'd try anything twice - the first time for adventure, the second to confirm if it was an isolated incident or how that normally is.

The first time I donated blood, after stabbing me three times in the left arm, the nurse stabbed me in the right arm and said "Oh, I can't get the needle in. It's on top of the vein. Hold still and I'll go get somebody else." That hurt like... well, later, I'd find out it was about like a shoulder right after you reset the dislocated joint. But I was young and didn't know that yet, nor had a vocabulary foul enough to properly express it yet. I got out of there before the juice kicked in, because I fainted about two hundred feet away.

The second time, I warned them that the most luscious-looking spots for the vampires, on both arms, have valves in that exact spot. The nurse, even when warned, nodded, smiled, and stuck me through the valve. And then wiggled the needle around when the blood didn't flow, while I found myself mentally cataloging her ancestry, present worth, and future prospects over the screaming bone-deep pain radiating up my arm. Then she decided it wasn't working, tossed the half-full bag, and took a full pint out of the other arm. Through the other valve. The juice that time was guava, and my body wasn't having any of this placating: it rejected everything out of every orifice about five minutes after I stood up. I still avoid guava juice, though not as strenuously as I avoid blood drives.

Which is why I signed up for organ donation when I got a driver's license, and signed up today for bone marrow donation. You can't pay me enough to get me to donate blood a third time, so I'll focus on the ones I can do, and leave the rest to you.

Flat Tires and Thinking ahead

Yesterday, picked up a nail in the tire (and it predictably went flat.) Calmer Half, who was driving, quickly decided that we were pulling over and searching for the source of that oh-so-familiar thup-thup-thup noise despite the lack of any tactile feedback you expect from a flat. (Note: I was most emphatically not arguing with his decision. You might even call it enthusiastic agreement.)

I am creaky, and disinclined to do more work on the side of a road with no shoulder and cars whizzing by mere feet away than necessary - but I've learned to work around this (it isn't the first time I've had flat tires since getting banged up.) Calmer Half, on the other hand, had a sudden stark look on his face when he realized that he hasn't had a flat tire since being crippled. He suddenly didn't know if he could physically do something that used to be routine. (Driving in Africa, including the bush. I think his youth probably had more tire changes than some mechanics...)

I hate that feeling. I hate seeing it on his face even more. No matter how used to being in constant low-level pain you get, no matter how much life settles into a new normal and you just recalibrate "fine" so life goes on, sometimes reality cuts you wide open with the realization that it's not all good, you're not fine, and what used to be a minor annoyance could now be a major complication. As inured to the slings and arrows of everyday life as I can be, seeing that look on his face cut me to the heart. But I had a plan...

When I was young and full of ignorance and energy, I thought that old folks (like my father) were crafty, devious, treacherous, cunning, and wise because they'd lived long enough to learn all the tricks. Now I realize that it's not age; it's learning to overcome problems with cunning, thinking around the problem, replaying it until you can see where to divert it before it even becomes a problem. It comes because you learn to work around limitations, and complications, small children and second lieutenants, bad nights with little rest and screaming joints from a change in the weather. Some people can grow old without growing wise because nothing ever radically changes their life. Other grow old without growing wise because they give up and let others dictate their limitations. But watch out for old sergeants, officers with gray hair, and mothers of teenagers!

I opened the trunk, and pointed out that I stashed in there not only the spare tire, but also two different cans of fix-a-flat (who plans for the spare tire not being bad?), and an air compressor powered off the cigarette lighter (mostly used for filling the airplane tires.)

Since mechanics hate working on tires with the slime from fix-a-flat on the inside, we started with the air compressor. The tire filled - and if it was slow, well, neither of us had to be kneeling on the January asphalt and fumbling with lug nuts. We could hear the air hissing out, but filled to near-max pressure (not all the way), it was plenty to get the car a mile to the mechanics, and for them to drive it around to the shop's lift.

While the mechanic behind the desk protested that "Oh, it'd have been fine if you needed to use fix-a-flat, ma'am"... The mechanic who actually drove the car around got a grin as wide as his ponytail was long when I told him we'd just hit it with the compressor so he didn't have to deal with the slime. And when they handed the keys back, he told me it was indeed a nail, and there was no charge.

I *heart* Gateway Tire & Auto. And having three different methods of backup. But most of all, I *heart* the look on Calmer Half's face when he realizes that it doesn't matter if he no longer can do something with youth, enthusiasm, and brute force: we already have old age, cunning, and technology laid in to make it even easier than it originally was.

Sets my little heart at ease, that look does...