If you're familiar with Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy ... you'll get this.

If not, you may smile, chuckle, and wonder why you did.

Or, you may think: "This tripe and rubbish is precisely why Xanga is being shut-down!"  In which case, you are probably a Vogon.

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The Domain Expiration Ships hung in cyberspace much the same way that bricks don't.

"People of Xanga, your attention, please. This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Internet Cyberspace Planning council. As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Internet require the building of a hyperspacial bandwidth express route through your web server. And regrettably, your website and blog are among those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less than two of your Blogging minutes. Thank you."

Wailing and gnashing of teeth ensues.

"There's no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local cyberspace planning department in the basement of the Washakie County Courthouse, in Worland, Wyoming for the past 5 years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now."

A commotion of hands cupped to mouths and shaking fists ripples across the land. In one Mississippi County, Agnes Smith-Wortz's dog howls and wets himself on her new Wal-Mart throw rug.

"What do you mean you've never been to Worland, Wyoming? Oh, for heaven's sake, Xangans, it's in the continental United States, you know. I'm sorry, but if you can't be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that's your own lookout." Turning to the First Officer, "Energize the demolition beams."

"I don't know, apathetic bloody bloggers, I've no sympathy at all."

There was a terrible ghastly silence.

There was a terrible ghastly noise.

There was a terrible ghastly silence.

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Much later, most of the surviving Xangans were assimilated into the evil FaceBorg Empire. "Resistance is futile."

A few rebels holed up in the Google+ Federation Alliance, and are still looking for hacking plans to defeat the FaceBorg.

The rest either died of apathy or became outlaws on other free websites that would soon suffer the same fate as Xanga.

Saw the following on www.Quara.com, and thought it was a gem:

Who you marry has the largest impact not just on your emotional life, but also on your lifestyle.

Both the large and small things in your daily life and long term plans will be impacted by your significant other's likes, dislikes, habits, schedule, health, personality, moods, job stresses, financial security, family, and situation.  

For instance, how often will you go on vacations, and where will you go?  What type of food will you eat, and who will cook it?   Where will you live, and how clean will the house be?  What TV shows and movies will you watch, and how often? When the toothpaste or toilet paper runs out will your partner get more or expect you to?  How much sleep will you get?  How many children will you have and how will they be raised?  How many cars will you have, and will you lease or buy?  Will you be in debt or have a large savings?  

Lucky for me, I married my best friend and someone who fits my lifestyle.  Jay Wacker, who loves to travel, cook, watch Game of Thrones, take pictures and who can be silly and serious.  

He also introduced me to Quora.  

  

What's the best piece of advice your mom ever gave you?

 

What were you good at when you were 8-years-old?

When I was eight - I liked finding crayfish in the creek and building model airplanes.

I wasn't especially good at either.

This young lady is amazingly good at what she does!

I don't place a whole lot of stock in reincarnation, although I believe that with God, ALL things are possible.

But when I see something like this - HO - LEEE - COW!!!

The girl is Ukranian - singing in English.

She's singing with amazing strength and ability.

And she's got incredible stage presence.

Wow!

So, the search for a used Dakota Crew Cab or Ram 1500 has stalled. 

The most recent prospect turned out to have an odometer rollback of 80,000 to 100,000 miles, by my guess. I don't like paying for CarFax, but it just paid for itself on that one.

This leaves me with my truck, in which I just invested $500 for completely new rear brakes. Apparently, I got them fixed just before they failed completely. Praise God for His mercies. 

My truck also has a small exhaust leak from the "donut seal."  I had this investigated a few months ago, and our mechanic said it probably wasn't worth the money to fix it. The seal closes when the exhaust system heats up, so it's mostly noticed only on starting the engine.

For those, like me, who don't know that these things are intuitively, here's a picture:

The Exhaust Gasket (aka "Donut seal") is what connects the exhaust system piping to the engine exhaust manifold.

One would think that's not a big deal to replace: unbolt the fitting, replace the seal, and bolt it back up. 

But one would be wrong if one thought that. One would have bolts rattling about in their head would one think such a thing!

No - it involves taking a torch, heating the studs until they are "glowing red" and then disassembling and so forth and so on. In short, it's about a $300 repair job by your local mechanic. Probably more like $500 from a dealer shop.

Back to my truck.

The day after my $500 brake repair, the donut seal failed completely. All the exhaust flowed around and into the cab of the truck, to the delightful sound of every piston firing, which isn't unlike a rapid-fire paintball gun.  Not pleasant.

I thought it was some other hole in the exhaust, so I crawled underneath (after the truck cooled down) to take a look. I saw my donut seal close up .. and I began pondering.

One of the things I learned in the Navy (that wasn't in the recruitment literature) is how to "make it happen."  That was a phrase officers used for us enlisted scum to do whatever it takes and not tell them how it was done. Carte blanche. If you're good, it can win you great favor. If you fail ... well, not so much.

I wasn't an expert - but I was pretty good. My philosophy was always "don't be further than one step away from an explanation."  

But, back to the truck.

It seemed to me that all the seal needed was something to hold the pipes more tightly together. And what might do that? A clamp. And guess what, it just so happens that I do have a small C-clamp in my eclectic tool box.

So ... instead of $300 to repair the leak, I've invested about $2 to achieve this lovely feat of engineering:

@JoyousWind had a good laugh when I told her about it. She called it a "hillbilly repair job."

I call it "don't ask, don't tell" applied engineering.

We don't know what our mechanic would think, but we suspect it would elicit a wry smile from his usually concerned demeanor.

Flying Squirrels, Spent Nuclear Fuel, Dodge Dakota, 3D, Published Article, Moon Garden, and "Where's Waldo."

Writing challenge #407 - use all the above in a description of your past couple of weeks.

Where to start?

I was on shift work much of this past week. My hours were from 5:30 PM to 3:30 AM, to accommodate movement of spent fuel assemblies from our reactor.

I guess I'll start there.

Spent Nuclear Fuel

A lot people think spent nuclear fuel glows green. It doesn't. Glow-in-the-dark toys do. Spent nuclear fuel glows a royal blue when submerged in water. If it's not submerged in water, and you're looking at it, you'll be green very soon, and dead shortly thereafter. If you happen to put one of your child's glow-in-the-dark toys in the bathtub and it glows royal blue ... well, let's not go there, but you might want to check that it wasn't made in North Korea.

But I digress.

One of the perks of having finished my 18 month certification course was to be able to supervise part of the fuel movement out of the reactor core and into our spent fuel pool. It looks a lot like the picture below:

That's a much better job than hauling around radioactive laundry and trash.

The operators inside the containment dome flood the compartment with the reactor in it, remove the top of it, and then pick one fuel assembly out of the vessel with a small crane. The crane moves the assembly to a transfer cart that lowers it to a horizontal position, sends it through a transfer tube, and then raises it up so a similar crane on the spent fuel side can pick it up and put it in a designated location in the spent fuel pool. This takes about 10 - 20 minutes per assembly. In the reactor we just defueled, we have 193 assemblies and it took us about 38 hours, which is a very good time frame. My job is to be a second-check to ensure the assembly goes into the slot it is supposed to be stored in. I also direct traffic in the area around the pool, so that no one interferes with their progress. 

Right now, I'm off shift-work until we are ready to refuel the reactor, which should be around the week of April 22. Kind of depends on how things go.

Some subterfuge and intrigue is going on in the training department while we refuel the reactor. Long story short, my former supervisor "M" is on the backside of the political favor stick. She's about to lose one of her people to the operations side of training (where I work) so he can work full-time on 3D training lesson plans. It may well be that her group is completely dissolved, and the positions reassigned - but that's speculation.

So what's in that for me?

3D Training

Well - Shane (who she's about to lose) and I have long been lobbying for advanced online training that includes the use of 3D technology. I even went so far as to write and industry white paper on it, which is still posted with 3D Internet. (http://www.3dinternet.com/NUC%20WHITE%20PAPER.pdf)

Mostly we got pats on the head and sent on our way. Well, the "right" people finally saw a training lesson plan which used this technology and had an epiphany. "All of our lesson plans should look like that!"  It's kind of like when a parent give a child a piece of wisdom and you get, "whatever, mom." But when Sally's cool mom says it, "Wow! Guess what I found out!!" 

But Shane and I don't care. The idea is moving forward. He's learning how to create the 3D graphics, and he's lobbying for me to be the developing instructor, if for no other reason than he's not qualified to do that. Since I've also been using a more advanced online training software (Articulate Storyline) for recent training modules, and it's been well-received, it's very likely I'd be helping with that. If so - that would excite me a LOT!! There is a barely tapped potential in and out of the nuclear industry for this kind of product. For example:

Published Article

And speaking of articles, the International Society for Performance Improvement (http://www.ispi.org/) is publishing my article in their April edition of Performance Improvement Journal.

The title: "The Expanding Role of Human Performance Technology in Corporate Sustainability."

Yeah - it rolls right off the tongue, doesn't it? 

Needless to say, unless industrial human performance is something that interests you - this wouldn't be your cup of tea. Briefly, I'm looking at the need for more attention on human performance in industrial setting to prevent things like Deepwater Horizon oil spill, space shuttle explosions, and accidents like the recent fatality at the Arkansas Nuclear One power station. (http://rt.com/usa/arkansas-nuclear-plant-accident-170/) Most of the real research data has been measured by sales, inventory, manufacturing time, etc. More needs to be done to study how an error made by one person can set up a sequence of events, or trigger one that has been set up, that would result in tragedy.

For me - no money involved. I'll get free copies of the magazine and the satisfaction that my writing was worth their printing.

3D Jurassic Park

And speaking of 3D, @JoyousWind and I went to see Jurassic Park 3D. She was only seven years old when it first came out. Needless to say, mom and dad weren't too keen on letting her see people get eaten by dinosaurs, so she never saw the film until long after it was on ... VHS.  Yeah - remember video tapes?  Remember the first video cameras??

She was thrilled to be able to FINALLY see the movie on the big screen. It was worth a 20 year wait. 

Dodge Dakota

Those of you who follow @SaintVi know I'm looking to trade in my 224,000 mile 2000 Dodge Dakota. I'm looking for another Dakota Club Cab that's in the 100K to 130K, has 4WD and is in good shape. And after test driving a few - it has to be a V8 and not a V6.  For a 2 mpg gas savings, they castrated the power in the truck to the point that it's almost impossible to pass anyone at speeds above 50 MPH.  Not a good quality on a busy interstate.  So far, I've not seen a "home run" deal. The best one going is a 2001 model with 111K on it and in really clean shape and a good price. There are a couple of very minor condition issues (much, much better than my current truck). The one real reservation I have is that the engine sounds "loud." Maybe that's my imagination (but I don't think so) Maybe it's a small exhaust hole. Maybe something else. I'd like that sorted out before I buy it. Here's what it looks like:

AND ... it has a cassette tape player!!

Garden

The weather has finally, finally shaped up enough for me to tend to my gardens. This is what it looks like in bloom in late autumn. A lot of the flowers are gone at that point in the year, but you get a fair idea:

This is what it looked like before I did much work on it:

Pretty drab. 

Here's what PART of my work looked like:

I'm pleased to say all the beds are clean, vines and roses are trimmed, and we even have our first daffodil bloom! Yay!

I'm currently scheming to make a moon garden in the flower bed next to the shed.

My plan is for it to have white flowers that are fragrant: moon flower, four o'clocks, blooming tobacco, jasmine, and pansies. I'd also like to build a small structure in the middle for the climbing vines and to hang a bamboo wind chime. We'll see.

I think that brings me to flying squirrels and "Where's Waldo?"

Flying Squirrels

You may recall that I heard sounds in the attic that I thought were rats. I set a trap and caught what I thought must be a chimpmunk, but couldn't really figure out how in the world it got up there. I reset the trap, all the same, to see if more varmints were up there. I heard one scurrying around this morning, so I checked the trap this afternoon. This time it was alive. And again - it didn't really look like a chipmunk, but it was closer to that than anything else. I took the trap and the dog to the creek about a 1/4 mile from our house to toss the varmint over the river. If it fell in - it could sink or swim for all I cared. Instead ... I saw it do this:

"Holy Rocky and Bullwinkle, Batman! That's no chipmunk!"

That squirrel sailed easily to the far bank. I was impressed, and glad it was on the FAR bank. It was happy to be free and away from Boo, the dog. I call it a win-win.

Now ... about where they're getting into the attic?  Both they and the bats seem to have a favorite location that I'm going to have to spend some serious time looking for.

And so that brings me to ..

"Where's Waldo?"

I think you'll find this guy in church next Sunday:

Our pastor likes to have a "Holy Humor" Sunday. He will deliver a message that integrates a variety of clean jokes people have sent him. He also encourages dressing a little silly. I thought about doing it last year, but passed on it. I think I'm going for it this time.

And speaking of all those "holy" phrases. @SaintVi and I passed an interesting church the other day:

Kind of hard to read the sign on their website photo ... but it reads thus:

"Holy Maternity of Mary"

Can't you just hear it?

And with that ... I'll turn the page