Lots of Snow

As you can see from the above image, from Sunday night, through all of Monday, and into Tuesday morning, we got about six inches of snow. My roof is piled deeper with snow than I think I have ever seen it before. The snow on my front lawn is two and even three feet thick in places, and the same goes for the back yard. My neighbor across the street, with whom I had a brief chat whilst taking this picture, is eager for spring because he is running out of places to put all the snow. My front yard is bigger than his, and there is a lot of open space to the east of me, so I don't have that problem, but I heartily agree with him. My main problem is my driveway. It has been cracked in many places ever since I bought this house, but this winter it has a terrible case of frost heave. It's so bad under the garage door itself that today the door didn't want to close. I finally managed to get it shut, but I imagine I'll have to adjust the closure of the door if things get any worse. One thing is for sure, come spring I'm patching as many of those cracks as I can. I know of a kind of tar rope that you shove down into the cracks and then melt with a torch. It's much better than caulk or plasti-crete.

As if that wasn't enough, my car is in the shop for a leaking brake line. I borrowed the truck from Chris (actually, legally its mine, so I guess I just reclaimed it), but it's being difficult, running its battery down and not wanting to hold a charge. I suspect it needs a new battery. What it really needs is to be taken to the scrap yard and replaced with a much newer truck, one that doesn't drink gasoline like there's no tomorrow and leak transmission fluid.

On the bright side, though, I did get the truck to start today, when I thought it was done for. I had gone out to start it, but it would only crank, not fire. On the third try it kept cranking, even after I turned the key off, until it died. Amazingly, an hour or so later, when I tried it on a lark, it turned over and caught. Strange.

Avatar (review incl. spoilers)

Just got back from seeing Avatar with Chris, and wanted to share my thoughts on this movie that seems to be taking america by storm. I give it 5 out of 10 stars, for its impressive visuals. And they are impressive. James Cameron did a great job in that area. Chris and I saw it in 3D, which was...okay. It was my first 3D movie, and while at first the effect startled me a few times, it quickly became amost unnoticable and/or annoying. Also, there was some kind of artifact in the center of the screen, like a cloud of insects, that was visible whenever that part of the screen was light.

It was too long, the characters were one dimensional, the plot was predictable, and said plot had gaping holes.

On the characters, the bad guys were so obviously bad that I never even suspected that they might have changes of heart; while the good guys were so obviously good that I never really doubted they would lose. Even the nominally bad guy chick pilot was set up from the get go as a sheep in wolf's clothing.

As for plot predictability, there were no real surprises. Not a one. Oh, there were some visual surprises, but no plot plot surprises. Head Badass proves Too Tough To Die before The Final Duel; check. Scientists side with the natives, check. Lone outsider becomes part of the tribe, check. And so on and so forth.

Plot holes. James Cameron has a very broad imagination, but not a deep one. If he did he would have realized... Well, it was said in the movie that "The aliens were sent back to their dying world." The implication was that Humans had wrecked the Earth (natch). The thing is, a race capable of rapid interstellar travel (six year journey from Earth to Pandora, where there is an economically viable mining operation that exports back to Earth) would have no trouble at all engineering their world into a garden paradise. Terraforming the Earth, Mars and Venus would be trivial compared to travelling to even the nearest star. And any race capable of genetically engineering something like Human/Na'vi avatars could probably create from scratch any lifeform they needed back home. That's the biggest plot hole.

Others include: ever hear of shaft and drift mining? No need to bulldoze the native village, we'll just tunnel under it, and they'll never know we were there.

That deposit of unobtainium (that's what they actually called it) under the native village is the biggest within two hundred klicks, but is it the biggest on the whole planet?

Gotta destroy a native village or a secret sacred place? Send in the atmospheric flyers (so the natives have a chance). Or, how about a nuke, or maybe a kinetic strike (drop a rock on 'em from orbit)?

When telling a story, if a character or side is capable of doing something, either by explict description or by implication from other explict capabilities, then when it is appropriate or logical for the to do that thing, they'd better do or at least try it, or you better have a good explanation why they don't. James Cameron didn't.

The Old Home Town

I went back to my home town of Lake Mills, Iowa, today, partly to apply for a job, and partly to see it again, as I hadn't been there in five or so years. The job was a bust, for now, as the starting pay was only $10.50 an hour. That's not worth an eighty mile round trip every day, not until I get desperate.

What was interesting was that the job was at a company called Dielectric Corp. I hadn't heard of such a place before, and it was much bigger than I expected. I thought it might be like a tool and die shop operating out of a pole shed not much bigger than a two car garage, but instead found a good sized building made of cast concrete. It seemed to be doing well, judging by the number of cars in its parking lot, and it wasn't the only one. Lake Mills appears to be doing quite well, business-wise, both manufacturing and retail. There are four convenience stores, a supermarket, large auto parts and hardware stores, restaurants, and so forth. It wasn't anything like the ghost town I expected after I heard Cummins, the largest employer, was shutting down its plants there. I don't know if they changed their minds or what, but the place seemed as busy as ever when I drove by it.

There were changes, of course. There are a lot of new houses, some of which I would describe as mansions. The old Holiday Bar and Grill on the southeast corner of Main St. and Lake St. is gone, replaced by apartments. The Dairy Queen is gone, its building taken over by Norsemen Trucking. The park by the Post Office with the Sherman tank has been remodelled. The funeral home that was just west of said park is also gone. Don's Motor Mart, where I spent a lot of time playing video games, has been completely rebuilt and is about three times bigger than it was before, as well as set back a bit farther from the highway.

Change, for good or ill, is inevitable. The changes I saw in Lake Mills are, I think, for the good. The town is trying to grow, and seems to be succeeding. Mason City could learn something from my old home town, methinks.

Bleach smells like bacon...

How do I know this, you ask? Well, today I had to run out to Menards to get a new filter for my humidifier. When I removed the old one to install the new one, I noticed a coating of yellowish goo in the bottom of the humidifier. Apparently there is some kind of bacteria that likes humidifiers, and that is what the yellow stuff was. Since I already had a sink full of hot soapy water from doing the dishes, I went ahead and washed the base. But the yellow stuff didn't come out quite as well as I'd hoped. So I ran some more hot water into the base, poured in a splash of bleach and let it sit for a few minutes. A quick rinse and reassembly later, the humidifiers was doing its thing. Then I noticed an odd scent in the air, a scent that reminded me of bacon. Sure enough, it was coming from the humidifier. Why that should be is a mystery, but that's how it is. Weird.