Lone Locust Productions

Author: Eugene Glover

  • Grilled at School

    I’m not even sure how to preface this story, so I’ll just plow in.

    My wife’s school had a BBQ last night. These sorts of open social events are not me scene (preferring, as I do, to sitting behind the computer and commenting on these sort of things instead) but I feel that as a school is a community, and teachers have an odd, somewhat isolated existence from their colleagues, that I should fully participate in such things for my wife’s benefit.

    Besides, what social event is complete without at least one caustic, sarcastic, witty commentator? It’s like the Muppet Show without Statler and Waldorf.

    IMG_0259 The BBQ started at 6:00 and, despite my efforts to be in-line for the food at 6:00, we were late – at 6:05, and already they were out of hot dogs. “Out of hot dogs” my evoke images of lines of people stacked down with three dogs on every tray, but, in fact, it meant that they had served in total something like 4 hot dogs. You see, the school had bought themselves a nice, new gas grill a couple weeks before, and, apparently, never bothered to check to see if it worked. Frozen hot dogs and hamburgers were being prepared at what could literally called a glacial pace – that is, exactly at the speed of global warming.

    There were “experts” trying to help get the grill working, but the consensus was that this new, fancy, large-sized grill was a piece of junk that was designed so badly that it couldn’t have all the burners turned on at once. While I have little faith in merchandise built by slave labor in China and probably sold at Wal-Mart, I also seriously doubt that the design was so feeble that it couldn’t get it all its burners up at once. It seems far more likely that the gas regulator was defective. Any way you slice it, the flames were barely visible in the darkening gloom.

    At 6:05 we were second in line to get hot dogs. At 6:20 I couldn’t take it anymore. My back was killing me from lugging around a dead car battery earlier in the day, so I let the kids hit the playground while I went to sit down and watch the ants swarm. I took this picture of the hot dog line shortly thereafter.

    6:35, I saw a hot dog being moved towards Chu-Wan and I got up to go help her manage the food. They’d only manage to cook 6 hot dogs since 6:05, and the people in front of her got four of them. We go two of our four dogs, so James and I went back to eat our dinner, while Chu-Wan continued to wait. Even after 30 minutes, the dogs weren’t cooked fully, but at that point, I didn’t care.

    At 6:45, the line was just as long, but Chu-Wan had been given two more dogs. She also told me that they had decided to go buy another grill because they had reached an almost catastrophic situation. Virtually all of the parents, teachers and school employees were just standing in line waiting for food. They decided to go for the old reliable standby – a charcoal grill.

    Oh, how the comedy potential flashed through mind at that moment. Unless you go to a nice, swanky grill shop, most modern grills required some considerable assembly, so I imagined they’d being buying those pre-made, disposable grills or better yet, going to someone’s house and borrowing a working grill. Nonetheless, did they realize that it takes a good 45 minutes for coals to get up to temperature? The party only lasted until 8:00, so this didn’t seem too viable.

    IMG_0264 At 7:30, the food line wasn’t any shorter, although they had taken my suggestion and started using the microwave ovens to at least /cookpre-cook the frozen hot dogs. The gas grill had been turned down to only one burner working to keep the gas pressure up but that meant only a couple dogs/burgers could be cooked at a time. In the cafeteria, a lone young man struggled valiantly to put together the new charcoal grill.

    At 7:45, as we were leaving, the food line was just as long, the new grill wasn’t assembled and there were parts all over the floor, but it was standing on four wobbly legs, and I heard him proclaim, “That’s good enough!”

    I’ll have to have Chu-Wan find out if they ever got any food cooked on the charcoal grill, but I can’t help wondering if they’d remembered to buy charcoal and lighter fluid when they bought the grill.

  • 24 Hours with A Snow Leopard

    Installed Snow Leopard on the Mac Mini yesterday.

    It’s alright.

  • Tied the cat in a bag and tossed him in the washer.

    Yesterday was interesting. We were forced into accelerating our purchase of a new washer and dryer, and we went ahead and got front-loading units. They’re more economical and gentler on the clothes; however, I’ve never actually observed one in action.IMG_0224

    I spent hours watching the various programmed patterns: Normal, Heavily Soiled, Delicates, Towels, etc. Each with it’s own unique way of washing the clothes.

    There’s only so much fun you can have watching 6 loads of laundry, though.

    Today, though, after the kids had left for school, I grabbed Michelle’s cat, put him in a pillow case, tied it shut and tossed him in the washer.

    Perhaps I should clarify that, lest you think me a monster: I used the delicate cycle. I didn’t want him to get hurt.

    After about 45 minutes of sloshing around, the machine stopped and there was no more movement in the washer.

    I removed Sawyer (the cat) and placed his limp, soggy body on the drying rack, for an air fluffing.IMG_0225

    An hour a good brushing later, Sawyer almost looked like new.

    Sawyer is, of course, a stuffed toy cat, but you knew that already, didn’t you?

    IMG_0226

  • Math can be hard…


    … when you’re working with those tricky decimal places!

    OK, I’m just posting this because sometimes, somebody needs to publicly shamed – otherwise people will just continue to wallow in stupidity.

    Mind you, I think the caller wasn’t doing the best of jobs trying to make his point, either.

  • Post Office – Following directions

    You’ve got to love it when people can follow directions.

    Sometimes they don’t, though, and other times they get it so wrong you think they must be doing it out of spite.

    Case and point: notice exactly where this important piece of mail has been bent.

    Yes, that’s right, exactly on the words, “do not bend.”

  • Nerdy dad moment

    Here’s one of those “father moments” where I really feel connected with my kids.

    The kids are running around being generally annoying and making roaring noises at each other.

    James: I’m a baby coelophysis! Roar!!

    Michelle: I’m a troodon!. Roar!

    James: I’m attacking you! Roar!

    James starts to run towards Michelle, imaginary claws drawn. Michelle at first runs, then stops and stands her ground.

    Michelle: You can’t attack me. We’re from different geologic periods.

    I started laughing so hard and I had to explain to Michelle the old proverb, “The acorn doesn’t fall far from the oak tree.”

  • The Priceline Experience

    Now, I can make my final judgment on our recent experiment using priceline.com to book our hotels.

    A brief recap:

    • We decided to book our hotel(s) on a San Diego trip via Priceline’s name your price program.
    • We bid for 3 nights at a minimum 3-star hotel at $75 per night – fully expecting to be rejected
    • We “won” the bid, to our delight at the Woodfin San Diego.
    • We decided we could afford another night at that rate and attempted to extend the day an additional day at the same rate.
    • Priceline could not match the $75 and instead was able to offer $116. We decided to decline.
    • We thought we’d be clever and tried to extend the stay the other direction and arrive one day earlier.
    • Having already bid on an extension at the end, Priceline would not allow us to try to arrive earlier, either.
    • We decided to bid separately for another night, knowing it would be at a different hotel.
    • We again bid $75, but this time chose only 4-star hotels.
    • Again to our surprise (and even greater delight) we got a room at the Omni San Diego.

    Actually, before we attempted to extend the stay at the Woodfin, we checked the place out online. The hotel seemed just fine, and we noted that most of the rooms at the hotel were actually suites with a bedroom, living room with sofa bed and kitchenette. We inquired with the hotel and learned we could “upgrade” for $20 more a night. The kitchenette meant could prepare our own breakfasts and save nearly $20 each day, and a sofa bed for the kids wouldn’t go amiss.

    We took that into account before we bid on the extension, so, in essence, we were prepared to pay a total of $95 per night (still cheap by San Diego room rates available online.) That meant that the $116 became $136 and that was just out-of-bounds.

    The hotel itself was perfectly acceptable. It was clean, quiet and close to several of the places we wanted to go. It was also close to fast food and other restaurants, a Fresh & Easy for shopping and a park where we took the kids to play in the evening.

    We were never troubled in any way by staff or other guests. There was the fire alarm incident, but you can’t hold anyone to blame for things like that.

    If I had any criticism of the it might be that one evening we called and asked for extra towels and they said housekeeping would bring them up and they never did.

    Priceline Experience 1: Woodfin San Diego. Good price, good room, no complaints. If this is an example of the typical Priceline experience (especially if you don’t go trying to change things after you’ve started) then it’s all recommended by me.

    Now, on to the Omni San Diego…

    Largely what you might expect from the Omni would be a top-class hotel, and indeed it was in every way. The facilities were immaculate and well designed. The staff were all friendly, efficient and almost comically eager to please. I described elsewhere how they found Sawyer the Cat for us. The hotel also provides a toy bag for each child staying in the hotel. the bag, somewhat mysteriously, also contains a kazoo. Who in their right mind would give a kazoo to kids in a hotel?

    Being just an “ordinary” room with two beds, we didn’t have nearly as much space as we did at the Woodfin, but it was more luxurious (I’m not sure that’s quite the right word but it will have to do.)

    The stay wasn’t quite as uneventful as at the Woodfin. The first night (and remember, we were only booked for one) there was a room party of some kind 2 doors down. It didn’t sound exactly like a big party, but the music was a bit loud (enough to come through the walls from two rooms down) and two or three children kept running out of the room, slamming the door, and running up and down the hotel corridor every few minutes.

    Unfortunately, the doors to the room opened inwards, and I was unable to swing it open and give them an “accidental” face full of door as they passed our room over and over. They quieted down by 10:00PM. That’s a little late when you’ve got small children going to bed at 8:30, but not excessively, so I hadn’t reached the point where I would call the hotel. Either they voluntarily shut down before I decided to call, or the hotel shut them down.

    Despite that, we decided on the first night that we were going to test Priceline again and try to stay yet another night. We realized we wouldn’t get the kids to the beach if we didn’t add a day.

    Here’s another restriction we learned about Priceline: You can only extend a stay by the same number of day (or less) of the original bid. In other words, we could have attempted to extend the stay at the Woodfin up to three more nights, but we could only try to extend the stay at the Omni by one night. This was no problem because we only wanted one night, but it’s good to know for future reference.

    We weren’t hopeful we’d get an extension. We were scheduled to depart on Friday morning, and so we’d be trying to book into a weekend slot, which is no doubt busier and normally more expensive.

    Once again, Priceline couldn’t get a $75 extension, but came up with $94, which we felt was reasonable enough to accept.

    Indeed, the next day the hotel was noticeably livelier. It turns out that the Omni is next door to Petco ballpark. Sadly, they don’t play cricket there, but instead that baseball game that’s all the rage in this country, and there was a game Friday night, so the whole area was packed, and, from our window, we could watch the left fielder (cow corner) play ball.

    So, the Omni itself was just about perfect. Just about. My complaint? I think the complaint is more about Priceline. It’s hidden costs… the Omni charges $30 per night for their parking (which is valet only.) That would have effectively bumped our $75 per night room to $105, or a 40% increase over what we bided and accepted.

    We parked at a garage across the street for less than the $30, but that was still an unexpected additional cost “gotcha.” At no point in the Priceline bid process do you have any opportunity to specify any form of minimum requirements such as “free parking.”

    So, Priceline Experience 2: Omni San Diego. Great price, but hidden costs. Exceptional experience otherwise.

    In conclusion

    Overall I’m quite pleased with the Priceline experience. It reduced our costs down so much that we were actually able to take a short vacation, which we had pretty much concluded was not going to be able to happen this year due to finances. In fact, that worked so well, we were able to take a two-day longer vacation than we originally planned.

    I would; however, take from this a couple of lessons.

    The first is to be wary of hidden costs, and plan accordingly. I don’t know any way you prevent them from happening based on the system they’ve got and I don’t know how often these things happen. I’m sure that 99.9% of all hotels in California have free parking, so this was just “one of those things” but it does seem like it might need to be taken into account.

    The second is to go with the 4 star hotels and bid low, really low. The same room we got at $75, booked online at the Omni’s website costs $219 per night – but includes “complimentary valet parking for one car per night”.

    Third, plan your vacation a lot better than we did. Figure out exactly how many nights you’re going to stay, in advance, and stick to it. Even if you have to say to yourself, “We’ll stay five nights if we can get $75 and only four if it is over $90…” etc, and then bid accordingly. Save any further thoughts of extending your stay until you’re in the room.

    Next domestic trip, I can assure you, we will be using Priceline to book our rooms.

  • Fuzzy Kittens

    I recognize that my previous post was a bit of a rant, but, I can assure you, dear reader, that had it written it immediately after the event, it would have been positively vitriolic, even by my standards. As it was, it still took three complete re-writes (from scratch) before I thought it down to PG-13 level.

    To help soften things up a bit, I thought I’d tell this tale of a fuzzy little kitten, named Sawyer.

    Sawyer is a stuffed cat. Not a stuffed previously-live cat, but a stuffed toy cat. He is a fluffy white toy given to my daughter when she was very young by a friend. The cat is very soft and droopy. it’s also permanently positioned in a reclining, lying-on-the-side resting repose. It looks, for all the world, like a dead cat lying along the side of the road.

    I named him Sawyer long before Michelle could talk. Someday, I suppose, she’ll get the Tom Sawyer reference. The name has stuck, but quite often she just calls it, “kitty.” That could be a genetic throw-back to my dad, who named every cat we had some variation of “puss” or “kitty”.

    We left the hotel for the beach and, with a little persuading, got the kids to leave their toys behind in the room. They’d no doubt get lost or destroyed at the beach.

    Later that day, when we returned, nobody really noticed that Sawyer was gone.

    The next morning; however, Michelle was in fits being unable to find the cat. We searched the room with no luck. All the other stuffed animals that had been in the same place were still there, so we concluded that Michelle had taken Sawyer the car in the afternoon/evening. The car was parked in a garage across the street and as we were getting packed up to leave, I headed across to search the car. Sawyer wasn’t there.

    I knew a storm would be brewing. Michelle can be very emotional about such things and Sawyer would be her first lost “major” stuffed toy.

    I stopped by the front desk, working on the slightest possible chance that she’d dropped Sawyer in a hallway or the elevators, and, to their credit, they made a bit of a production out of checking with their housekeeping and such. They checked their logs and asked around, but alas, Sawyer was gone.

    Michelle freaked out. We did our best to convince her that everyone was doing everything they could to find Sawyer, but we knew in our hearts he was gone. We knew that she must have dropped him somewhere, but she continued to insist that she’d left Sawyer in the room and that someone had taken him.

    We explained that the only people in the room would have been housekeeping, and they wouldn’t take Sawyer. There were other stuffed animals and even electronic equipment in the room. If they’d been thieves, they wouldn’t have taken Sawyer.

    As we were preparing to leave, the head of housekeeping called our room. They had found a white cat, that had been scooped with all the white comforters, sheets and towels the day before and it was found as it was being prepared for the laundry.

    Yes, it was Sawyer, and Michelle was overjoyed to have her kitty back.

    And that is the heartwarming tale of Sawyer the cat and the staff of the Omni, who get a lot of points in my book for saving a little girl’s fuzzy kitten.

  • San Diego – Day Five – Our Fate was Sealed

    Sometimes people need to learn to pull their heads out of their butts.

    Personally, I’ve had to hold back this narrative of our last full day in San Diego because of how pissed off I get every time I sat down to write it. I’m just going to divorce myself from commenting on it in any detail.

    The kids wanted to go to the beach. Fair enough, I’m told there’s one of those ocean things near San Diego, and in some places that sand stuff gets washed ashore. The children are not particularly strong strong swimmers in a swimming pool. In a moving body of water, they have to be considered strictly non-swimmers. A quick google looking for “best kids beach near San Diego” quickly hit upon something that sounded perfect. A beach with a man-made break water designed to make a calm, safe place for kids to go. Known as the “Children’s Pool Beach” – you couldn’t get a more perfect description of what I was looking for.

    And so we went to La Jolla, where we discovered that a bunch of frickin’ seals, who apparently also think that beach is a great place to take their children thanks to the man-made breakwater, have taken residence in the area.

    It seems that allowing those nasty human children on the beach (must I remind you? that was built for them) disturbs the seals. To help further the goal of breaking down the very fabric of human civilization, a group of dedicated crackpot, whack-a-loons…. (sorry, I promised not to editorialize)… concerned idiots… (nope, try again) fucktards (Yeah, that’s the word I wanted, “fucktards”) have seemingly setup a vigil to stop people from using the beach.

    The city has been forced to put up official signs (I noticed the other beaches didn’t have them.) that say, in effect, “This public beach is for the public use at any time.” It has the same tone to it as the Los Angeles airport’s continual PA announcements that say, “You don’t have give money to any panhandling, religious nutjob organization begging for money in this airport at any time.” The signs are clearly in response to a chronic, ongoing problem with harassment.

    IMG_0154
    You don’t have to look far to find it. The seal fucktards have erected signs all over the place, craftily worded to make it sound like you’re not allowed to go on the beach. Result of their efforts: No one was on the beach, not man nor beast, just lots of parents with their expectant children standing up at the top of the cliffs, looking longingly down on the inviting, yet stubbornly empty beach and the calm, placid waters beyond.

    I have nothing against seals. I mean, what’s not to like about seals? They’re furry, cute, cuddly (until one decides to kill you) and they juggle and play the bicycle horn a lot better than I do. It’s seal fucktards I don’t care for. If a swarm of mosquitoes infested their children’s schools (assuming these people can even procreate) they’d demand them to be eliminated. (The mosquitos, not the children, although I wouldn’t put it past some of them to even get that backwards.)

    If a great white shark had setup patrol in the children’s pool beach, they’d be all for getting rid of it. (Not because of the danger to children, of course, but because it might eat the seals), but apparently we can’t run the seals off from a man-made beach designed for children.

    There’s a word for that kind of “conservationist”: (in addition to “fucktard”, that is) hypocrite.

    And so we, and all the other parents, gave a small victory to the seal fucktards and moved on to another beach which wasn’t nearly as nice. (Bitter? I’m not bitter.)

    (As an aside, I’ve done a bit of further research on this beach thing and have discovered that it’s quite a hot debate – go figure, some people have nothing better to do. They should start blogs instead. May I suggest blogs.fucktard,net? In any case, it seems the courts came to the right decision and ordered the city of San Diego to force the seals off the beach, but that’s been stalled by headline-desperate politicians, bean counters and… well, a damned stupid idea of dispersing the seals by playing recordings of dogs barking at the beach from sunrise to sunset for years to come. As I said, some serious head-from-butt-ectomies need to be performed.)

    After a not-as-carefree-as-it-should-have-been day at the beach, we headed towards the Dumpling Inn, a somewhat famous local establishment serving northern chinese style dumplings, potstickers and the like. I could have eaten a couple more trays of their potstickers. They were really quite good.

    IMG_6501 We finished the day staying close to the hotel and a Cinderella carriage ride around the Seaport Village, which Michelle really wanted to do. Well, how could a father refuse his little princess such a small thing?

  • San Diego – Day Four – We’re Movin’ On Up!

    It was goodbye to the 3-star Woodfin today and hello to the 4-star Omni San Diego. I’ll relate more about the ultimate Priceline experience later, suffice it to say the Omni is a nicer hotel, right next to the Gaslamp district and the convention center – for less money per night.

    We got out of the Woodfin by 8:15AM, knowing full well that we couldn’t check into the Omni until after 3:00PM. As the Omni is near the zoo, today’s main destination, we decided to see if we could leave our luggage at the hotel until check-in time. The idea of leaving all our luggage in the parking lot at Balboa Park all day didn’t sit well with me. However, we were in luck as the Omni checked us in early and we were in our room by 9:00AM.

    This was followed by a better part of the day at the San Diego Zoo, which is, entirely consistent with their worldwide reputation, still one of the best in the world. Although, being that the Wild Animal Park we saw yesterday is their breeding program facility – there’s a lot of duplication between the two. I was well and truly “zooed out” by the end of the visit.

    A recent change to the park rules prevented us from brining our own food, so we decided to get out shortly after 1:00PM to get (another) late lunch.

    By 2:00 we’d arrived at the San Diego Chicken Pie Shop. This was a restaurant that was within walking distance of our hotel back a few years ago, but we never went there. Largely because it seemed so weird and was an almost complete non-entity on the internet. We couldn’t figure out what the place really was. Was it nothing but chicken pot pies? Or was it something else? or something more?

    This time, although they still seem to eschew joining the internet era, we were able to determine that there’d be food for everyone in the family and we decided to give it a try.

    What an interesting place! it’s been a San Diego fixture for over 70 years – yes, seventy years. Their menu hasn’t changed much, either. Prices are up, but still very cheap compared to other San Diego restaurants. Rather than being an emporium of dozens of different chicken pies, they have only one: Chicken, turkey and gravy in a pie. They also serve other old-style family restaurant staples, like chicken-fried steak, chicken noodle soup, mashed potatoes and various homemade (dessert) pies. Nothing spectacular, but good, solid, filing and cheap.

    After lunch it was back to Balboa park and the Ruben H. Fleet Science Center. The kids had a blast at the science center. It’s tiny compared to the science center in Phoenix but oh-so-much superior in every way that matters. With a floor filed with hands on experiments that emphasize doing rather than reading, it was more like a playground, which children enjoying themselves everywhere. it was clearly very popular with the locals.

    I’ve documented my gripes about the Phoenix Science Center before, and this just re-affirms them in my mind. What really was driven home to me was that I’ve never been a big fan of science fairs. Most science fair projects that I’ve seen consist largely of one of those three-piece folded bits of foam-core board, with artwork, perhaps a few charts photos,narrative, maybe a button and light or two or a plant in a dish. It is precisely what you’d expect of a 10-year-old putting together a presentation. What I’ve realized about the Phoenix Science Center is that most of the exhibits are exactly at that level – they’re just professionally constructed. Since many of them are supplied by “sponsors” of the museum, I can’t help but wonder if these exhibits literally are just science fair exhibits from the sponsors’ employees’ children’s projects that have been re-built by the sponsor.

    Perhaps you might think the “playful” exhibits aren’t educational enough? Let me respond by saying that more than once I heard both my children and others’ children playing with one of the exhibits and using the phrase that tells me they are a complete success: “How does it do that?” That’s what I want from a science center – to fire the curiosity and inspire the desire to inquire… (ouch, that was a bit overdone on the alliteration, wasn’t it?)

    Back at the hotel, we decided that one night simply wasn’t enough and we used Priceline to try to extend our stay at the Omni another day. Although we couldn’t get $75 for another night, we got $96 and that was good enough for us to book it for another night.

    Yelp and the iPhone lead us to The Kebob Shop for dinner which was within walking distance of the hotel and delicious!