Darkoshi

up in the dark

2022-11-28T07:09:54Z

I've discovered that heights bother me less at night / when it is dark. Today I cleared pine straw off the roof, using an extensible pole with a rake-like attachment while standing on a ladder leaned against the roof. The sun set before I was done, so I continued while wearing a headlamp (yay LED bulbs which can shine bright for hours without using the batteries up).

Usually doing the side above the garage feels scary to me. But today in the dark, notwithstanding the flood lights and headlamp, it didn't bother me. Doing this task after dark has another benefit - not having the sun glare in my eyes.

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It reminds me of an amusement park ride I was on as a child. I'm not sure, but it must have been Space Mountain at Disneyland. It was like a roller coaster, but indoors and in the dark. Normal roller coasters terrify me due to my fear of heights. But this ride didn't bother me and was fun.

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reaction to unexpected noises

2017-07-23T19:32:28Z

The other night, while checking the thermostat in the hallway, I heard a thump against the front door. Both dogs were inside, in the other direction. So the sound gave me a momentary fright. (Who is out there?? Did someone throw something at my door?) But it might be the neighbor's dog which occasionally gets loose (he can climb/jump fences like it's the easiest thing in the world, but he's friendly so I'm not afraid of him)... I walked to the door and looked outside, first through the window, then by opening the door. There was nothing there, even though it had only been but a few seconds between me hearing the noise and looking outside.

I sometimes hear similar thumps from other parts of the house, as if something is hitting the outside wall or a window. It must be due to thermal expansion, or maybe sometimes squirrels or birds.

The curious thing is that no matter how odd and unexpected the sound, and how much it makes my heart jump into my throat, once I've determined that it's inexplicable and there's no apparent danger, I quickly forget about it. "Don't know what it was, no way to find out, got other things to do."

Today while in the bathroom with the door open, I heard a distinctly fluttering sound from the next room. Like a bird fluffing its wings. Followed by silence. There's definitely no bird in that room. Oh well, who knows. Maybe the dogs in the room at the other end of the hallway made some noise, and it only sounded to me like it came from the nearby room.

There have been other times I've heard other more inexplicable noises. Things which people who believe in ghosts, might attribute to ghosts. But I don't have any clear memories, just the knowledge that it has happened before, more than once, and it's not that unusual.

There was one strange noise which I did figure out. This one has happened both in my cube at work and in my kitchen at home - an intermittent quiet hissing noise from close nearby. It's from air escaping out of (or into?) the top of a bottle, when I haven't tightened the cap all the way, and the temperature difference between the bottle and surrounding air is right. At home, I store tap water in liter-sized glass bottles in the fridge, because I like my drinking water to be cold. But sometimes I'll leave a bottle standing on the counter. When I go to work, I take a small glass bottle of water with me, and during the day, fill it up from the drinking fountain.

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snap crack

2017-02-16T03:29:25Z

Two months later, and my neck is still doing that weird cracking thing every time I twist it in the right way. Fairly often during the day, I feel the need to do a quick twist of my neck to make it crack and momentarily get rid of that feeling of stiffness.

I'm getting so used to it that I've even started doing it while other people are around, at work. Today it occurred to me that I should take a video of myself doing it, to see how bad it looks/sounds. Because maybe it's something I really *don't* want to be doing around other people.

So I just took a video. Yegadz! It sounds awful! I should really go to a doctor or something. Except that I can't imagine a regular doctor being able to do anything about it. Heck, my spine has been cracky like that all my life. But when I stretch/unstiffen my back, it's good for a while. It doesn't keep on cracking like my neck can do. Maybe a chiropractor could do something to help, but the few times in the past when a chiropractor has adjusted my neck, it was scary! It makes me tense up... I'm afraid they might break my neck. So yeah no, I don't want to go to a chiropractor either.

It doesn't make sense to me, why my neck would have started doing this all of a sudden, without me having suffered any injury or trauma. If something had happened to cause it, surely I'd remember it? Unless it came from falling asleep in a bad position, maybe.

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These exercises may help:
How To STOP Your Addiction To Cracking Your Neck

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boom boom boom

2016-07-05T05:04:05Z

Fireworks noise. At least one of my dogs has been acting like the world is coming to an end, and she doesn't know what to do. I had to put them both outside earlier because the small one's non-stop barking at the noise was starting to drive me batty, and I had to cook the vegetables. Otherwise I wouldn't have time to cook them til next weekend, and they'd go bad.

Interestingly, outside (probably in the garage), she stopped barking.

I went outside to check on them a little while ago, and to look at the fireworks which were getting louder. Going back inside, they forced their way in the door with me. Inside, the little one started barking again, in between running around. They both appear to have calmed down now.

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I succeed at many things, but I feel like a failure too.
The table's a non-stop mess of stuff.
I recorded mediocre audio of the cicadas and katydids (that is what the night-time tree critters are) on Thursday/Friday, but didn't have time to edit/post it.
I put up curtain rods for my mom. I put up a shelf in the kitchen.
I wanted to finally switch to the new laptop. Like the last times, I only managed to finish the "backup my data" step. Now it's almost 1am and by the time I'll have time for it again, I'll have updated a bunch of files again, so I'll have to start back over at the "backup my data" step.
I cooked the dang vegetables and made a salad with most of the cucumbers.
We went to the Santee again on Saturday. Road trips almost always leave me with headaches, and this was no exception.

I took a shower. I made lunches. I vacuumed. I washed some clothes. I swapped some light-bulbs. Oh. The boxes. I need to decide what to do with all the old incandescent bulbs. It's not like I'm going to start using them. So I might as well give them away. But should I keep some maybe, and if so how many, and which ones?
I cleaned out the cooler and washed the dog food bin.

My internet has a sporadic speed and connection problem but I don't have time to deal with it. Is there a way to determine/prove that it's a provider problem versus a modem problem? I'm afraid if I call TWC about it, they'll say that since I'm using my own modem instead of leasing one of theirs, that it must be due to my modem.

I need to sign up with a doctor but I don't have time to deal with it.

I need to start going to bed early enough to get enough sleep. but i don't but i don't

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nightmare strikes again

2016-03-26T21:20:10Z

It goes like this:

Last night:
Check TV guide to see what's on TV.
PBS is showing "1916 - The Irish Rebellion. The story of the Easter Rising rebellion...."
Do a search on something related to that. Irish Volunteers, etc.
Skim various pages.
Start wondering if the U2 song "Bloody Sunday" refers to the Easter Rising.
Do a search.
Oh. There are a whole bunch of Bloody Sundays.
One of them: Stanislawow Ghetto Bloody Sunday massacre, a massacre of 10,000 to 12,000 Jews before the Stanisławów Ghetto announcement.
Read about horrors.
Ghettos, concentration camps, mass killings, mass graves.
Click links; read about more horrors.

I never can wrap my mind around it. In a way, I don't want to. That's why I try to avoid the topic. But for my own sanity, I want to understand it. How could such things happen? How could people come to commit such atrocities? I'm terrified of it happening again. I'm terrified that it is happening, constantly around the world, in smaller versions. How can I be safe? How can I be sure that I'd never be involved in such a thing? What control do I have over the things my government is doing? Am I really any different from the average German civilian back then?

And it also puzzles me, in reading some things, as to why the victims didn't fight back more? Some parts I can understand. If soldiers come for you and your family with guns, yes, you're likely to do what they say rather than to be shot to death right there. Maybe going where they tell you to go, will let you survive in the end.

But I have a hard time understanding the mass shootings. Surely it can't be that 10,000 people would stand together in a crowd, letting themselves be shot to death, for hours on end, as some of those articles imply? Surely they would have surged forward against the shooters, knowing that death was imminent anyway? Were the shooters up on walls? Wouldn't piles of dead bodies would have gotten in the way of further shooting? Did the shooters take breaks so that the bodies could be moved out of the way? Were the Jews so starved and demoralized by that point, that they welcomed death? Who would want to remain living in a world like that?

And it wasn't only Jews being killed. There were mass killings of ethnic Poles too, by both the Nazis and the Soviets. And masses of people being deported to Soviet labor camps. How could mass killings be so common back then? How could people so callously disregard life? Was it a state of mind? That to have revolutions and change society, you need to kill the existing society that stands in your way?

The German side of my family came from the area right near Poland, so that's another reason I'm often drawn to reading about these kinds of things.

After over an hour of that, I managed to make myself to switch gears, and return to doing my taxes.

Today:

Read an email about local events.
One event is "South Carolina survivors and victims of the Holocaust".
Am reminded of that first page I read last night. I bring up the page again, and read it again. Again trying to wrap my mind around it. Yesterday wasn't the first time I'd read those kinds of things. But as many times as I read them, it seems I'll never be able to come to terms with them.

Clicked some other links related to the history of Germany before World War II. Republic, unification, Holy Roman Empire, Kingdoms, duchies... All of history seems to be full of wars and fighting and horrors. I've always hated history.

Here I sit, in my peaceful house, in front of my computer. Relatively clean, fed, clothed, and warm. Even if I'm not particularly enjoying life, it's not particularly bad.

But the world is full of horrors, and I'm quietly terrified that someday they will strike me personally, and this relatively peaceful world will be blown to bits.

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angle grinder

2015-12-29T03:58:52Z

2 guys came by in November to check on the house repairs I needed done. They were supposed to get back in touch with me, but I haven't heard from them since. I never heard back from the guy I had used before, who had come by a month earlier, either. So the gutter still hasn't been fixed.

But they did give me another idea of how to deal with rain getting in under the garage door. I had considered putting in a "garage door threshold seal", but that would make it harder to sweep dirt out of the garage. They noted that the water was probably puddling against the door and then seeping under it. Even though the garage is on a rise, the concrete right at the bottom of the door isn't sloped enough. In the past, Qiao had wanted to grind the concrete down some, but at the time we didn't really have the right tools for it. These guys suggested cutting some grooves in the concrete to allow the water to drain away.

So I did some reading. An angle grinder can be used for cutting grooves in concrete, as well as for grinding concrete. But the tool sounds rather dangerous. I decided to first try using an old screwdriver, chisel, and mallet to cut out some grooves. I was surprised at how soft the cement part of the concrete is - moist from recent rains, it could be scratched away with the screwdriver, without even needing the mallet. But the granite chips in the concrete are much harder and difficult to gouge away. They do make lovely sparks though! Yee-ha!

I decided to go ahead and buy an angle grinder to speed up the process. I bought a flat turbo diamond blade for cutting grooves, and also a diamond turbo cup wheel for grinding some of the concrete down to increase the slope.

I'd never used an angle grinder before, and the instructions that came with this one were somewhat lacking. I did some more reading to make sure that I was attaching the blade correctly. More horror stories about angle grinder accidents momentarily made me wish I hadn't bought it. But at least the kind of blades I got are supposed to be the less dangerous ones.

Today I got up my courage, along with my safety goggles, dust mask, denim clothes and work gloves, and tested the angle grinder with the flat blade. It really does cut through the concrete easily, including the granite.

I was going to test the cup wheel today too, but that one says to use a full face mask over the safety goggles. I don't have a full face mask, and I'm not going to ignore the safety warnings. So back to the store I'll go. In retrospect, my brother's motorcycle helmets which I just gave away, might have come in handy.

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so that's what those things are called!

2015-07-03T17:43:26Z

Meet the Camel Cricket aka "Spricket".

Most years we'll get occasional roaches in the house. But there were a few years where we kept getting those camel crickets instead.

I've also seen quite a few of them in the crawlspace under Forestfen's house. It's a definite shock when you're crawling* around the dim and cramped crawlspace with a flashlight, to come upon a bunch of them on the wall in front of you. But they're not as scary as other bugs; in the crawlspace they tend to stay still or only move very slowly.

*or rather as I do it, moving around while in a squat, to avoid getting dirt all over myself. If the space is so low that I'd have to wiggle on my belly to traverse it, I'm not likely to go that way. Even having to crawl on my knees in places tends to trigger sudden claustrophobia. But as long as I can keep a squatting position, I'm usually ok.

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