Jump Start

At the end of a long, productive day, the first thing I wanted to do was get on the road home. So, I hopped in my car (his name is Arthur Dent), stuck my key in the ignition, and <dramatic pause> nothing. The ‘check engine’ light didn’t even come on. That can mean only one thing. Yup. I left my lights on all day. 8.5 hours. That does bad things to a car’s battery.

I wish I had one of those cars that beeped at me when I left my lights on. I do this at least once a year, and sometimes much more frequently. The main problem is that I leave the house at 6:40 AM, when it’s still dark enough to require my lights. However, by the time I get to work at 7:20 AM, the sun is pretty high, and I don’t notice that I have my lights on. Couple that with no “hey dumbass, your lights are all” alert from my car, and I’m just asking for trouble.

Fortunately, jumper cables aren’t a problem. I grew up in Minnesota, and any respectable (and not-respectable) car has a set of jumper cables. Of course, I didn’t have them to combat the frigid cold. No, I had them because even then I had a tendency to leave my lights on.

The worst part about a jump, though, is finding someone who will let you use their car battery. I was at work, so I just went back in and asked JD. Though this has the consequence that a work-friend knows what a idiot I am. On the other hand, it still beats hanging out in a parking lot asking complete strangers if you can jump off of them.

I try to pay back jump-start-karma whenever I can; though, I’ve really only had the opportunity twice. Once it was after Andrew and I had flown into BWI after a trip to visit my family in Minnesota. It was late, 10 PM or so, and we were in the ultra-economy lot. We were also the only other people in the lot, besides the poor smuck who needed the jump. Also, it was a good thing I had cables, cuz he didn’t. The other time was while I was driving home through New Mexico on my way back from Minnesota (I lived in NM at the time). I stopped to get gas just inside the state line, and a trucker needed cables to try to get his refrigeration system started. Unfortunately, the problem was more than a good pair of jumper cables could handle.

(Are you thinking to replace the existing car which troubles you often? wowloans are ready to chat with you here).

New Camera (Whoo-Hoo!)

Since I’ve started putting more and more pictures on my web pages, it seemed silly to continue scanning all of them by hand, especially since I can still get nice 4×6 inch prints of digital pictures through iPhoto or Shutterfly. So, when I saw that my federal tax return had appeared in my checking account, I decided to go get one. We tried this weekend, but after much frustration at the local Microcenter, I ended up at home, ordering through MacMall .

It arrived today! I love FedEx package tracking, cuz I knew it was going to arrive today. At 6:30 AM it arrived at the Dulles airport, and by 7:40 AM it was on a truck that I knew would be stopping by my house before close of business.

Anyway, here’s my first pictures:

A not-too-great zoom-in of Ares.

A much better picture of Artemis (with Ares in the background)

And Duncan cleaning himself. Awww.

Kite Flying

It seemed like the perfect kite-flying day — there seemed to be plenty of wind, the sun was out, and the temperature was finally warm enough to stand outside comfortably for more that 3 seconds. But it never quite works the way one expects.

We actually had two kites — my dragonfly kite, and a little “finger” box kite that I had put in Andrew’s Christmas stocking a couple years ago. Unfortunately we couldn’t get either one of them flying. We had more luck with Andrew’s little kite, but it never flew for more than 30 seconds or so.

We think we might need to modify my dragonfly a bit to get it to fly — the tubes holding the wings out only connect on the two ends of the wings and at the center of the kite. We’re thinking that we need one more connection between the spine of the kite and the tip of the wing, to let the wind take the wing better. We’re also wondering if the tail of the kite (which doubles as a storage bag for the collapsed kite) is too big for the rest of the kite.

It could also be that there just wasn’t quite enough wind to make the kites fly — it seemed to come and go.

We’ll probably try again tomorrow, or next weekend, assuming the weather stays nice and the wind picks up.