I had to participate in an unrelated conference call in the middle of their segment, so I missed most of it. But the part I did catch was eye-opening.

Mann and Ornstein have been around forever, and they’ve played the ‘both sides do it’ and the ‘why can’t politicians be more like us sensible Washington insiders and cooperate more’ cards plenty of times before.

For this outing, though, these ‘sensible centrists’ have finally called bullshit on the Republican party.

Diane Rehm, bless her ‘sensibly centrist’ heart, sounded flabbergasted. It was as though she wanted to say “but Tom, but Norm, you guys are one of us. We don’t say these kinds of things!”, but knew she couldn’t.

I wish I didn’t have to be on that call.

(For lots of other reasons too, but missing Rehm’s sputtering really hurt.)

Munith Pinwheel Cam Video Archive

I got myself an Agri-Fab 42 inch lawn sweeper, and I am very glad I did so. I bought mine when it was still properly summertime, and I ended up saving more than $50 compared to the current price. Fallen leaf season is upon us, apparently.

Yeah, it fills up pretty quick, but you can sweep your lawn in circles, looping back to the grass-pile to dump every one or two passes.

It even picked up walnuts. Not all of them, for sure, but I didn’t expect it to pick up any.

Sailing on Tuesday, if the current plan holds up.

The boat is ready to sail.

Seriously, though, the GOP has been claiming that reducing spending (mixed with, what, Unicorn farts?) would bring the economy back around for months now. Why the shift? Oh, right, because cutting spending has done the exact opposite. It is, like, actual economics or something.

• All of the blocks have been set up and the sheets have been rove through and are ready to use.
• I finally set up the little bungee hangers (similar to these) to keep all the sheet-tails tidy (including the leeboard hauls).
• I re-assembled the Shipmate kerosene cabin heater (but was unable to re-mount it to the bulkhead; that’s a two-person job).

My car developed a coolant leak on the way home, but I made it to work and was able to get a ride home from there.
Update: The coolant leak was just a hole in a hose where the fan was hitting it (!). New hose (that will be more carefully installed) is on the way.

Poor little fried powerstrip. I hope nothing downstream got fried. I guess I’ll know in a minute.

Some lights got really bright and some others went dim. Some lights stopped working at all, and the ‘fancier’ electronics went haywire. (Power adaptors started giving off bizarre smells, other appliances started buzzing, etc..)

I called Consumers, and they said that someone would be by in the morning to sort everything out, and that I didn’t have to be here for that. The lady I talked to seem to have an idea as to what had happened here.

Reassured, I went outside to see what had happened and I saw a large, fallen, walnut-tree branch sitting on the wire that runs from our side of the street to the house on the other side of Henrietta. Yikes! the fallen branch had bent the wires down to about car-radiator height. I ran back to the phone and told Consumers about this and was told that it would be dealt with right away.

I actually stood guard outside for quite a while to make sure nobody got electrocuted. Eventually (near midnight) I gave up and called 911 to get a cop out to watch the wires. A nice one showed up and spelled me. (He even had flares to replace my expiring, pathetic candles.)

Later, a CE truck showed up and moved the fallen lumber off the wires. Cool, I figured (the activity woke me up). Not so much, actually, as I awoke the next morning to the same electrical problems as the night before. Rats. Figuring that the info I had gotten the night before was still operative, I went to work (without a shower or coffee).

Ok, so I get home from work Thursday night to find everything still fucked up. Apparently nobody from CE came by to fix our wires. Frustrated, I drove back to Ann Arbor for a shower in a hotel room. I did try and call CE again, but they were no longer in ‘storm’ mode and weren’t going to take that call. Slept at the hotel.

The next day I called CE again, and was told that ‘power was retored’ at 11pm the previous night (while I was sleeping in a hotel room in Ann Arbor). Cool! I’ll go home and turn the mains back on.

Um, nope. Got home tonight (Friday) to find everything just like I left it (just as fucked up).

Called CE around 6 pm to, er, complain a little (I was very polite), and was told that someone was ‘on the way’.

Called back at 9:20 to get a clearer definition of ‘on the way’, but the person I talked to had no access to any info on the service call (though she could see it in the system). We’ll see, I guess.

Update: Power was back to normal on Saturday morning when I returned from Laundry. Yay!