When we were all first buying houses one of my friends properly decided "puttering around the yard" applied to any outdoor activity related to landscaping that you could accomplish while holding onto a beer. Mowing the lawn or raking, then, wasn't puttering, but watering was as was wandering around, plucking the occasional weed or kicking at things with the toe of your boot.
It was a good distinction then and it remains one I use today.

A few months back I bought a conspicuous consumer item, one of those lawn hog mulcher / blower things. I never had any use for a blower (I use a rake), but I was tickled by the thought of vacuuming my yard clean of all the leaves deposited by my neighbors with trees. The contraption is a noisy beast and fairly ungainly, but it works passably well.

It is, of course, designed more for providing the finishing touches on lawns that resemble golf courses, where it would be excellent if you had a long enough extension cord, which you couldn't, but its biggest advantage is it turns whatever it manages to suck up into tiny pieces. It used to be that a good raking would overflow my one furnished green yard bin, but now I can fit about three times as much into it. Although you might conclude that I, therefore, do three times as much yard work, you would be wrong.

Even though the thing pretty much requires two hands (one to hold it and one to aim it at the ground), it's still puttering in my book. You could, if demanded, operate it with just the one hand since the bag on the business end of the thing has a handy strap that fits over your shoulder. It's quite fun to turn the thing on and immediately experience the flat and empty bag explode four times its size as it fills with air in an instant.

The drawback is that it has its limits, as do we all. Twigs and large pieces that it refuses to accommodate hang around the opening and act like a filter. You have to occasionally shut the damn thing off and remove them or else nothing it can handle will be sucked into the vortex of mulching. It's not bad, but I've learned that over time unless you rake this stuff up it quickly becomes the majority of what you're trying to handle. Right now on the side of the house there's a mass of one part leaves to about six or seven of twigs.

One of the other benefits to the gadget is that whenever I use it all the neighbors know I'm cleaning things up. They may not think so, otherwise. I find Saturday or Sunday mornings the best time to fire up the beast since I imagine it interrupts their pleasant breakfast conversation about what a slackard I am. I'm sure it doesn't stop their complaining, but it lessens it in one regard.

The other thing is that it easily sucks up as much dust and dirt as it does yard matter. The advantage to that is I resemble nothing so much as a coal miner after using it for a bit, which makes me look as if I've been working.

When, all along, it's just puttering.

It's nearly July and that can mean but one thing: hunting season. I just printed up my hunting license to kill (the small version) and was preparing to begin my annual onslaught against the ants when a singular event occurred. I was in the kitchen scouting out ideal locations for the sweet, sweet nectar of death that ants crave when a rodent bumped into my ankle.

It surprised me more than her (or him), not the least because I don't, in fact, resemble the old lady from the nursery rhyme. Also, and more importantly, it led me to exchange my ant hunting license for the varmint variety.

Although I didn't leap onto a chair, I didn't get a good look at the critter, either. It may have been a mouse, it may have been a small rat, but I wasn't convinced there's any functional difference, anyway. It was an unwelcome guest in my kitchen.

Ideally I'd devise a means of catapulting the critter out of my property. I've had luck in the past with putting a handful of dry dog food in the bottom of a plastic bucket near the steps that lead to the back yard, but not often. What's ideal about that method is the mouse smells the food, steps off the step to get it, and ends up trapped in the bottom of the bucket. Then, it's a short ride in a shoe box in the early morning to the refuse bins behind some fast food place I never go to.

But that takes two things: luck and time. While rodent hunting season, I've decided, doesn't officially begin until the first of the month, housecleaning may begin this weekend.

I went to the store and bought some traps. Two of the old, wooden and baitable variety and two plastic ones ("Power Kill Rat Trap") that trip when stepped on. I think that should be enough, but I'm never convinced they're ruthless enough. A cat or terrier, I think, would be much better at hunting down my enemies.

It would be better, of course, to use poison, but there's a couple problems with that tactic. One, if successful, there ends up being a smelly corpse stuck in the wall or under the house half the time and while that stench doesn't last long it's hardly conducive to enhancing my appetite. The other is that I have the unwarranted fear that one of the dogs will find and eat the poisoned remains and follow the little rodent over that rainbow bridge.

Yeah, I know, it's completely unrealistic. My dog has never eaten roadkill or even expressed much interest in it, but it's not a logical impossibility. These traps will have to be set in places the dogs can't get to or step on, but I'm optimistic that they'll be more successful than I would be if I got a pellet gun and played Rambo.

So, the traps are set and while you're reading this, I'm huting.

Today I had the solemn duty of burying a pet. A very small one, I admit, but the one who'd been with me the longest.
About twelve years ago I attempted to fix my childhood and fill in a gap by getting a lizard. Not too far from here there was a reptile store that had moved in right next to where I'd worked in a Mexican restaurant in high school. A dance studio also moved in, but I wasn't as interested in that.

The reptile store was a very cool place to hang out. It was, as could be expected, filled with glass cages holding all kinds of cold blooded, dinosaur-looking beasts and a good number of snakes. I'm not sure why I selected the one I did, a cuban anole, but it may have been a combination of things. One, it may have been less expensive than some of the more exotic offerings, or it may have been its bright green color and size.

I ended up building an enclosure for him and spent a great deal of time at the lizard store, as I called it, buying crickets and pinkies. The owner of the store, a young guy, was very cool and one of the snakes on display was his personal pet. Annie wasn't for sale, but she was (one of?) the anacondas they used in the movie of the same name.

Yeah, she was HUGE.

My anole, Andy or Little Green Guy, was the least active reptile on the planet. I think he was lucky to have been captured, since I doubt he could have lived more than a week in the wild. He wouldn't hunt, wouldn't even seek out, anything to eat or drink but was literally content to wait for things to drop into his mouth. Oh, he might move his head to grab something tasty next to him, but that was about it.

His only other trick was to bite me every time I grabbed him. He'd sometimes fall from one of the branches in his habitat to the bottom and, being too lazy to climb back up, would lay there until the big pink hand would come in to rescue him. Then, he'd bite it.

With my success with raising him, I next bought a basilisk for $100. Yes, I had a notion that some day I might see if he could really run on water, but he escaped  before I could try him out on a pond or pool. What happened, actually, is I was picking him up and he got loose and ran out of the house at an ungodly speed.  I gave up looking for him after about a minute, and bought a replacement who managed to live a few years without ever being introduced to a body of water.

Then, it was just little green guy. Since he never moved, he was indistinguishable from green art, which is how I usually referred to him. In his later years he could no longer handle pinkies, then couldn't even deal with crickets, and ended up on a diet of worms and hamburger or other bits of meat.

Twelve is, I think, a lot of years for an anole to live. I also have to say that my home is quite a bit emptier than you'd think a lost lizard could be responsible for.

The money I saved on my car by filling the radiator with coolant instead of buying and installing a new water pump, thermostat, sensors, or engine block has been spent on a new DSL Gateway. So, it seems Ramen and I may be friends for a while longer.

At first, starting earlier this week, I'd lose connection and my joyful little green LEDs were replaced with red ones, or ones not lit up at all. Then, after struggling for a bit, they'd return and I could browse to my heart's content and check my e-mail for important penis growth formulas, opportunities to assist Nigerians, and purchase Rolex watches and great stocks.

Then, I couldn't do any of those as often as I wanted, and, today, not at all.

I was able to get connectivity restored by wiggling wires and unplugging and re-pluging the various cables, but as it turns out that was a false positive. Today, instead of flashing green LEDs or the hated red ones, I had none at all. The whole thing was dark, even the power indicator, and I realized that it had surrendered to old age. This didn't really surprise me since the phone company that had given it to me is also long gone, having been gobbled up in merges a couple times since I signed up.

The component I'd been using, an Efficient Networks Speed Stream 5260, had been furnished "free" by my telco when I moved to their DSL service from ISDN. I'd gotten a few of the ISDN parts over the years I had that service seemingly because every time I lodged a trouble ticket with that service it triggered a "send out some parts" flag. My DSL service, however, only got me one set of parts.

When I saw my unit was dead I naturally panicked. I don't even know the official name of the part, only that it serves as the DSL version of a modem. It can't be a modem since the telephone line it connects to is digital, and I had no idea if my telco ever had to do anything to get my old one to work.

Not that I ever let the telco come anywhere near any of my phone lines or inside equipment. I can do that very well myself, thank you, and save myself the embarrassment and the shrugs of techs who aren't allowed to recognize linux. So, although I remember needing to know lots of arcane things having to do with spids and whatnot for the ISDN line, I have no idea how the DSL line ever worked.

So, with nothing better to go on than a hunch and optimism, I went to Fry's to see what they had in the way of parts. Once there I saw many cable modems (another misnomer), and very few DSL equivalents, but the important thing is they had them at all. I had two brands to choose between, neither of which I'd ever heard of before. One, ActionTec, came in two flavors, being either two or three "products in one." The two-in-one features an ADSL modem and router, and the three-in-one has those and also built-in wireless access point for twenty bucks more.

Although none of my computers have wireless components, I splurged and got the 54 Mbps Wireless DSL Gateway. One never knows, and I may someday choose to join the twenty-first century.

I followed the needless instructions, and it works! I say "needless," but if you haven't spent your life around things like this I guess it would be helpful to know how and what to plug things in. Not surprisingly, you have to plug the power in, connect the gateway to the DSL line, and connect any computers you wish to have access the Internet to the gateway.
The only step that gave me pause was when I was asked for my username and password. My username, sometimes, depending on the application, wants both my name and the name of my original ISP (Pacbell). The password, fortunately, is the same one I use for my e-mail with them, so I was glad I didn't have to do any memory searching.

It's working now, but that's just because I just got it up and haven't done anything with it yet. My old router, a discrete component, is now in the pile of no longer used components and the old DSL modem is in the trash. The new ActionTec, according to the box, has a built in firewall and can function as a NAT box, and I may need to find out how to access and screw up those features.

Then I can be without Internet again.

Every man, it's said, has a plan that will not work. This is useful because it keeps people like me from getting a swelled head.

Today's humbling entry comes to us from the area of automotive transportation.

My little car, Timmy, has been overheating. When I first got him, about nine months ago, his running temp was about one-third up the gauge located in my instrument panel. This, I felt, was an ideal temp.

Then, a month or so ago, two things happened which may or may not be related. On one trip he jumped his idling speed momentarily to double its normal rate, all the way up to 2000 RPM. It soon went down, but I noticed after that incident that his temp would stick around the two-thirds mark. It would, sometimes, drastically descend, which made me feel better, but it was higher than I'd grown used to.

Then, a week or so ago, it started climbing into the red zone and brought me a lot of panic. I quickly figured out that the electric fan that pulls cool air through the radiator wasn't turning and figured that to be the culprit.

I checked that, with an eye toward troubleshooting the problem and re-attaching some loose wire, and soon discovered the wiring under my hood was unlike what the wiring diagram had led me to expect. Evidently someone previous owner had experienced the same thing and had jury rigged the system to work.

I took a few days to think things over and get some electrical wire fixing things, a new soldering iron, various connectors, and testing cables, and with a expectant heart dove back under the hood. I found an old connector sealed with electrical tape and opened it up.

Actually, it's only half a connector. The other half is missing and the wires had been jammed into the remaining half and held in place with the tape. I was hopeful that I could figure out how it should all properly go together, but was simultaneously afraid that I might give it my best shot and fail. It hadn't worked the first time I tried putting the pieces back together (even though I felt it should), but I blamed that on one loose wire that I couldn't figure out where to put.

So, I spent a few days analyzing things out and feeling crappy from the safety of my front room, but today I realized I needed to get things working. In short, the fan is once again turning at breakneck speed and it looks as if my efforts were successful. I drove out and was dismayed to see that the temp is still high, near the red zone.

I don't know if it will stay at that temp or climb even higher, and I'm unwilling to risk it on a longer trip. I know the fan works, and that's what I thought the problem was, and there's good reason to think the thermostat is okay since the upper hose is hotter than hades.

So here I was, all excited about congratulating myself on solving yet another problem, when all I did was eliminate one of the problems. I'm thinking now, of course, that maybe the whole electronic control chip is bad, but I'm not even sure if my car has one.

I guess I could try flushing out the radiator.

A couple weeks ago I got a call from my dental student Shervin that surprised me. We don't have much of an arranged schedule, but this call was totally out of the blue and he wanted to know if I could come in the next day for a hygiene lesson.

I wasn't doing anything, surprisingly enough, so I agreed even though I wasn't feeling particularly well. I went and, when he came into the lobby, we exchanged a nice hug.

When I got up to the chair I learned that it was to be our last meeting, ever. He graduated last week and is on his way to USC to further study. The good thing about that, as I told him, is that blood doesn't show up on the maroon (cardinal, they call it).

Shervin's always been on my side and has handed me some work, too. This visit may have been part of that, or maybe he honestly thought I didn't know how to brush. I have a hunch he needed to do one final hygiene instruction or something, and picked me out because it would give us a chance good-bye and he could load me down with free dental goodies.

Which he did.

He gave me the instructions under the watchful gaze of a professional hygenist or something, and a large handful of exclusive dental supplies. I now have my very own proxy brush, which is the coolest thing I ever seen. It has a handle like a toothbrush, but instead of bristles it takes a replaceable thing like a miniature pipe cleaner. It works between teeth, like floss does, only it has a handle. I also got some samples of some stuff to use between brushings, powders that I'd seen advertised but wasn't sure if they were hype or not. I also was given an "end-tuff" brush, which is more like a toothbrush but only has a small circle of tough brushes instead of the larger rectangle of them. It's great for brushing one tooth at a time!

Best of all, in my mind, was a metal tool, which looked professional. It's brass or bronze and has a conical rubber tip on the end.

I was very grateful to get all these things, but was sad that my UCLA Dental experience would no longer contain my favorite dental student. The other students I've seen are all competent, but none of them talk to me or seem to think as highly of me as I think everyone should. To them I'm just a mouth, a bad one, a case.

Shervin was my friend, and I wish him all the best.