The locusts may swarm away; thanks to all. And some suggested reading.

View 808 Friday, January 31, 2014

Another day consumed by locusts, but things are developing for the good. It’s a long story. The past few days have been grist for the writing mill, but not of a science fiction writer. More like a noir writer.

It all started when my wife smelled gas in her bathroom. We called the gas company. They came out, and we thought they had inspected the floor furnace under our house. In any event they stuck a red danger sticker on the thermostat and the cutoff valve to that floor furnace.

We called our furnace man, who is very reliable – he has kept the 70 year old floor furnaces in our 80+ year old house going, converting them from pilot lights to electronic ignition, replacing old valves, and the like, for years and years. He looked at everything inside, went outside, and came back to say there was no way under the house. Surely, I told him, that isn’t true. “You’ve been down there before, you were the one who put in the electric replacement for the pilot light.”

“No way down there now.”

I went out to look. Sure enough, somehow the cap to the inspection port in the sewer had vanished. It had not come off, for it was nowhere to be seen under or around it; but since the access port was installed in exactly the place where the access to the underground would make it easy to look at, and it was on the side, not the top, of the sewer pipe, a major portion of the outflow from the back bathroom had deposited itself under the house just where you’d have to crawl through to get at the floor furnace, and no one in his right mind was going to crawl through there. And it looked bad.

Meanwhile Roberta’s reading glasses had broken and she couldn’t read anything: newspapers, computer messages, nothing. So there was nothing for it but for me to go out to Kaiser to get them fixed, which in fact they did, but it was getting late when I came back. I picked up a gluten free dinner on the way home.

We were trying to figure out what to do. We certainly couldn’t let raw sewage sit under the house. We thought it must be about two years’ worth of output from the back bathroom, which isn’t used as often as the other bathrooms but still, it’s used a good bit…. And of course my head is not working very well and Roberta caught her cold later than me, so she’s in worse shape.

Which by the way, is another story: Could the sewage exposure, just under the breakfast room, have anything to do with the odd respiratory disorder which I got and Roberta apparently got from me? What if it wasn’t flu? We’ve both had our flu shots. And no one quite knows what we have. Anyway, we are slowly recovering from it, but the emphasis is on slowly.

At which point enter my son Alex, who got here late enough that it was sort of dark, too dark to see what all was going on under the breakfast room, but it was painfully obvious from a glance that no one was going down into that until it was cleaned up. So he called USAA.

USAA has been my insurance company since Mr. Heinlein told me about it in the 1970’s, and over time all my sons have inherited membership and they use the company too, and we don’t among us have any complaints at all. So USAA said they would have an inspector call us and see what they could do.

Came morning, and Alex also called Mike Diamond, the plumbing company that installed the modernization inserts into our 80 year old clay sewer pipes. That has all worked well. It cost a good bit, but no one was going to do it for cheap, and we were very satisfied. But they were the last people to work on that sewer piping, and since the inspection cap hadn’t come off but was plumb gone, it seemed reasonable that it had been taken off for inspection, the work was done from the front end of the house (and impressive it was, too; really high tech) and a new inspection port was put in up there, that was all finished, and no one went back to put the cap on the port in back. That seemed reasonable, but it was only a supposition: the truth was that I had not the faintest notion of how that port came to go missing its cap.

Mike Diamond sent a plumber. He looked at it, was pleasant (and smelled good), and called for a manager. The manager came out, said our supposition was reasonable, but there was no evidence for it, and didn’t think they were liable even though the work was done three years ago and there is a five year warranty – but he’d check with his boss. A few minutes later the door bell rang. It was Mike Diamond’s manager: he had talked to headquarters, to Mike Diamond himself, and they decided that they’d take responsibility for this and had arranged for a “Restoration Company” to come clean out the poop and sterilize the place.

A few minutes later USAA called and we told them all this, and we agreed they could stand down until the Restoration Company had done its work, and probably there was nothing for USAA to do, but if there were, they assured me they stood ready to do it.

Which is where we stand now. We’re waiting for the restoration people to call or come out; they are said to be coming before the end of the day. We also looked more closely at the overflow, and it appears that we don’t have two years of sewage from the back bathroom although there’s a lot of toilet paper under there. The inspection port is high enough that with an ordinary flow from a toilet flush nothing happens. As far as I can make out, what it took to cause an overflow would be the washing machine sending in a lot of water not long after a toilet flush. This would raise the level above the bottom of the inspection port, and there being no cap on it, out would come whatever was in the pipe, which is just about level anyway so it always has something standing in it. This is grim, but it’s not as bad as having two years’ worth of sewage under the house.

All of which is relieving. Once the restoration people are finished I’ll have my own people go under the house just to be sure there aren’t termites or any kind of water damage to the foundations, neither of which seems likely, but it’s best to be sure. When all that is done, our reliable and dependable floor furnace guy will be able to get the heater in my wife’s bathroom working, and meanwhile she has an electric heater. The Restoration people called a moment ago and said they expected to be here before the end of the day.

And maybe I can get back to work on something, having watched the locusts, most of them, go on to bug someone else. Of course there may be Army Worms on the way, but so far I haven’t seen them. And my head is clearing out a bit.

Thanks for your patience.

My thanks to all of you who have renewed your subscriptions during this period of sturm und drang. You make it possible for me to devote my energies to something worth thinking about rather than mere worrying.

23:15 Friday. The locusts are mostly gone.

Earlier this afternoon about 1630 Emergency Services Restoration called to say they were finishing a job in Westlake Village, and they’d be here in an hour or so. They called again at 1700 to say they’d be here at 1630. We had planned to go out to dinner, but I wanted to be sure someone would be here when they got here – if they got here, I suppose I was thinking – so I went out to a local Italian place that has recently been offering a gluten free pizza. I got one for Roberta and a Large one to share with Alex, along with salads. I also noted that traffic was really heavy. We had dinner – I had forgotten just how big a Large pizza is, so never mind the salad, I’ll be eating pizza for a couple of days and still have salad if I haven’t eaten all that too. I can predict my culinary future.

About the time we finished the Emergency Services Restoration crew arrived. It was already dark. They started right in, unloading a bunch of specialized equipment, put on coveralls, and started filling bags with dirty dirt or soiled soil or whatever euphemism you like. It was cold and crowded out there, so we went in; and about three hours later they hade done more than restore the area under the house. It was disinfected and covered with an absorbent material that also sanitizes – a kind of kitty litter, I guess. You should put a tarp over it to crawl over it, but the area is sterile and safe, and our heater guy will have no problems getting to the floor furnace. It’s remarkable how much better I feel now that this isn’t hanging over my head.

There was no bill. Mike Diamond is paying them for their evening work. I did come up with a few bucks for them to buy themselves something to eat on the way home. And I’d sure call them again if I needed anything like that done.

All’s well that ends well, I guess. Roberta is feeling a lot better and I’m sure the stress relief is helping her get over this flu like thing. So am I. The residual disinfectant smell has vanished from the rest of the house, the underneath is sealed away, and all is well indeed.

And I have probably told you more than you really wanted to know. My thanks again to all those who have renewed subscriptions.

When I get suggestions in mail, or find an article I think worth your time, I tend to open a Firefox Tab. Usually I keep up with them, but the past several weeks have been a ghastly dance with locusts and army worms devouring my time. (When I was a lad on a farm outside Capleville Tennessee during World War II, one year we had Army Worms. Suddenly millions of them hatched and they spread across the countryside eating everything green they encountered. I have never forgotten them.) Anyway, I now have so many open tabs on Firefox that I will have to close some. So, in no particular order, I’ll list them here. I’ve read all these and kept them with the intention of mentioning them with a few comments, but they’ll get short shrift now.

COMPANY MAN: THIRTY YEARS OF CONTROVERSY AND CRISIS IN THE CIA

By John Rizzo

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jan/20/a-self-licking-ice-cream-cone/

Book Review. I have ordered the book.

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2011/Q2/view674.html#Monday

A past View week that had several things worth thinking about again.

Capturing Solar Energy in Space for the World’s Remotest Region

http://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/2013/09/19/capturing-solar-energy-in-space-for-world-remotest-regions/?intcmp=fbfeatures

Science has lost its way, at a big cost to humanity

Researchers are rewarded for splashy findings, not for double-checking accuracy. So many scientists looking for cures to diseases have been building on ideas that aren’t even true.

October 27, 2013|Michael Hiltzik

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/oct/27/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20131027

A few years ago, scientists at the Thousand Oaks biotech firm Amgen set out to double-check the results of 53 landmark papers in their fields of cancer research and blood biology.

The idea was to make sure that research on which Amgen was spending millions of development dollars still held up. They figured that a few of the studies would fail the test — that the original results couldn’t be reproduced because the findings were especially novel or described fresh therapeutic approaches.

But what they found was startling: Of the 53 landmark papers, only six could be proved valid.

Perhaps we need to rethink how we allocate research funds.

The Rise of Missile Carriers

Commander Phillip Pournelle

http://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2013-05/rise-missile-carriers

I am sure I have mentioned that one before but it’s a good paper.

October 24, 2013 12:00 AM

Early Skirmishes in a Race War
Officials and media aren’t being honest about the violence.

By Thomas Sowell

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/362030/early-skirmishes-race-war-thomas-sowell

Alas I have many more, but those will do for now. Good night. I am sure I will sleep well.