Irrelevant Cheetah

So I’ve been suffering slightly from a creativity crisis.

“No, really?” you ask. “We couldn’t tell, judging from the huge outpouring of posts from Irrelevant Cheetah lately.”

Really. Believe it.

It’s not that I’m not writing. On the contrary - I’m actually writing quite a bit lately, and it’s actually helping to pay bills. Yay me! However, it’s mostly boring, mundane, non-fiction stuff that requires no creativity. You know, How to Edit a Registry Key in Windows XP, or All About Voltage in a Battery. When it comes to writing creative, interesting, sometimes-fictional stuff, the well hath run dry, it seems.

And nothing particularly interesting has happened here lately. I could post more pics, but this isn’t really a photo blog. There’s better places for that stuff - Montucky’s blog is an excellent example. I’ve been keeping my head down and behaving. I’ll be doing a 20-mile bike ride this weekend, so that may have some interesting connotations that you may hear about on Monday, but we’ll see how that goes.

So. Keep checking in, I guess. I do appreciate your support.

You see, summer in Alaska is an interesting time. It’s a four-month stretch of not-winter, and Alaskans have to take advantage of that fact by packing as many activities into eighteen hours of daylight as we can. Thus, indoor activities such as… oh, I don’t know… blogging, for example… tend to take a backseat to getting outside and soaking up the sun.

It’s not all fun and games, however. I thought I might share some of the things I’m forced to put up with during these grueling times.

On our trip to Fairbanks last weekend, I was forced to endure vistas such as this:

I was also forced to share the road with this guy:

After that, just outside of Fairbanks, I had to put up with driving through this:

You see? I don’t deserve your scorn. I don’t deserve your snide comments. Rather, I deserve your pity. Pity for the trials and tribulations I’m going through at the moment.

Pity expressed in the form of pictures of dead presidents would be especially welcome.

More to come.

To: The General Mills Company

Re: Betty Crocker Bac-Os

Yesterday I was enjoying a salad, and had decided to embellish my salad with some of your delicious Bac-Os brand bacon bits. My salads are normally full of less-crunchy items, such as cucumbers and hard-boiled eggs, and I have discovered that your Bac-Os add a wonderful element to the culinary landscape that is my salad.

After I added the Bac-Os and put down the bottle, I noticed that it states on the side: “Refrigerate after opening for added freshness and convenience.”

Now, I understand the “freshness” part. I agree that most things tend to stay fresher when you keep them in the fridge (except for my old gym teacher, Mr. Bob - he just got stale and cranky, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.) I keep my vegetables in there, and my milk, and - after reading your package - my Bac-Os.

But “added convenience?” How do you figure? What if my normal storage location for my Bac-Os is in my ever-present Salad Utility Belt, loaded with nutritional goodness, ready to be unleashed upon any salad in the immediate vicinity at a moment’s notice?

No, I’m sorry, Ms. Crocker. Try as you might, you cannot approach that level of convenience. As a result, I am now torn. You see, I love the convenience that my Salad Utility Belt offers me. (I’m thinking of trying to market it.) I rejoice in the fact that, like a culinary Batman, I can “bring the heat” on a salad woefully lacking in croutons or non-refrigerated oil-and-vinegar dressing. (I just watched a great cops-and-robbers movie, and now that phrase is stuck in my head.) But now I am forced to choose between freshness and convenience.

It’s not an easy choice. How do you tell one of your children that you love him more than his sibling? How do you choose between “tastes great” and “less filling?” How do you choose? How?

I eagerly await your solution to this dilemma.

Yours,

Wolf

One of my hobbies is keeping aquariums. I’ve got two, and my plan is to put some puffer fish in the larger of the tanks. Interestingly, puffer fish have teeth that are not unlike rodent teeth. They keep growing, and unless the fish is fed something hard, the teeth must be kept trimmed.

As a result, many puffer fish owners breed snails. Puffers love snails, and the shells are perfect for keeping their teeth in good order. The guy at the fish store told me to get some snails, throw them in a bucket of water with an air stone, feed them occasionally, and I could breed them easily for my puffers.

Snails, conveniently, are hermaphrodites. They’ve got both male and female parts. If two snails “meet for coffee,” they both go away pregnant. They’re like the rabbits of the aquatic world, only more prolific. I don’t have any puffers yet, but I thought I could get started with the snails early, so I’d have something to feed my new fish when I did get them.

We went to the pet store and got six of the black snails, thinking it was a good, round number, and a small fish bowl to keep them in. Within a few days, one of them died. (I could tell because there were little “x”s where his eyes should be, and he was rolling around on his back in a decidedly unsnail-like manner.)

The other five, however, thrived. I fed them fish food and lettuce, kept the air stone going, and waited to be a snail godparent.

I waited. And waited. And waited. And still there were no bundles of snail eggs anywhere to be seen. “Perhaps I should play some Barry White,” I told The Wife. “Put on some mood lighting, the whole nine yards.” I swear she’s going to pull a muscle if she keeps rolling her eyes that way.

Finally, a few days ago, she spotted what looked like some brown specks on the side of the bowl. “I think those are snails,” she declared. She pried a speck from the side, and with the aid of a magnifying glass we determined that it was, indeed, a miniature gastropod. Now that we knew what to look for, we scanned the bowl for more. Sure enough, they were everywhere. Apparently my snails had been making whoopee after all, and had managed to successfully conceal their pregnancy from everyone.

I decided to count the babies. It’s difficult, since they’re about the size of poppy seeds, but I managed to get a ballpark figure of about six gazillion.

That’s when we realized that there were white, globular clusters of eggs plastered everywhere as well. I did some quick mental calculations. “If every snail in this bowl is capable of having babies,” I muttered, “and if all of these eggs hatch into viable snails that are also capable of having babies, that means that inside of a month I’m going to be in some serious trouble.”

Which is how I found myself, early this afternoon, performing snail abortions with a Ziploc baggie and a plastic spoon.

Carefully maneuvering my surgical instruments around the bowl, I was precise. I was careful. I was deadly. Gelatinous blobs of snails-to-be were scraped from the side of the bowl and deposited into the bag, while the scads of babies were (mostly) left alone. My killing spree resulted in a mostly clean bowl and a baggie that was quickly deposited in the trash. Now I’m left with merely the original six gazillion + five.

I better get some puffers quick, and they’d better be hungry.

Sure, any idiot can slap some butter and jam on some toasted bread and call it good, but only if they want to send the nearest OCD sufferer screaming from the room. The following instructions will ensure that your lovable obsessive-compulsive will enjoy his/her toast without getting the heebie-jeebies.

1. Toast bread. A medium setting is preferable. Set the darkness lever 0.56 inches to the right of “Light.”

2. When toast pops up, be ready! For proper results, the toast must be on the plate, ready to be buttered, within 0.4 seconds of toasting completion. Any longer and the bread will have begun to cool, making butter-meltage difficult, if not impossible.

3. Begin to butter toast. This is probably the most important step. Use thin slices of butter to ensure maximum meltage. Thick chunks of butter do not melt evenly and do not cover the bread correctly. For optimum butter distribution, all butter must be melted and evenly covering the bread, to within 0.0625 inches of the crust.

4. When butter is melted - and not before - spread jam. Ensure that jam coverage is uniform, not too thick and not too thin. It is acceptable to take excess jam from one slice and add it to another slice, particularly since it is not acceptable to have the amount of jam on differing slices of bread widely disparate.

And there you have it! OCD toast! And you thought it might be difficult, didn’t you?

Next time on Recipe Thursday, we’ll discuss the proper way to prepare and serve waffles.

The Wife and I have decided on a card that I can carry in my wallet in case of emergencies. It will read:

Hello. My name is Wolf. If I have done something incredibly stupid and am lying here bleeding and/or unconscious, please call my wife Rebecca at xxx-xxx-xxxx. Thank you very much for your cooperation.

Maybe I should find out what my blood type is and throw that in there too.

It was the middle of the evening - 9:00 or so - and the Wife and I were watching some mindless TV. The Offspring was in bed.

The phone rang. We normally don’t get many phone calls after 7 (yeah, our lives are that exciting,) so we looked at the caller ID. “Evergreen Helicopters,” it said.

I looked at her. She looked at me. I shrugged. She shrugged. In an unspoken agreement, neither of us answered, and we let the machine get it.

Four rings later, the machine kicked on. “Um, yeah… This is George at Evergreen,” said the tinny voice coming out of the speaker. “We can’t find one of our helicopters, and we were wondering if you might know something about it. Call me when you get in, would you?” Click.

The Wife’s head swiveled a full 180 degrees, and the diameter of her eyeballs was matched only by the rapidly escalating pitch and volume of her voice as she zeroed in on me. “WHAT. DID. YOU. DO!?!?!?”

My hands flew up as I attempted to protest my innocence. “Nothing! I know nothing!” Unfortunately, something like this would be right up my alley, so I was at a distinct disadvantage.

Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t say anything, and I pressed onward. “Honestly, dear. I’ve never heard of Evergreen, and do you really think that if I did know them, and if I had done something with their helicopter, I’d give them my home phone number?”

She appeared to relax a little. “You’re sure?”

I shrugged and reached for my most disarming smile. “Honest. I’m innocent. But I’ve been meaning to tell you that we need more camouflage tarps, and I’ll be out of town tomorrow for a bit. The less you know, et cetera et cetera.” Her eyebrows went up again, but (thankfully) she knew by then I was joking.

We never heard from Evergreen again. I hope they found their helicopter.

So. As is probably self-evident, lately I’ve been doing all sort of non-bloggy things and then, well, not blogging about them. And it’s not like I planned it that way, it’s just the way things have worked out.

I plan to remedy that, however. One of the things I’ve always wanted to build is a Van de Graaf generator. This, for those of you not in the know, is that funny-looking machine with a metal sphere on top that shocks you when you get too close, and which will cause your hair to stand on end if you hold on to it for any appreciable length of time.

Now that I have some (too much?) time on my hands, I finally decided to build the damn thing. I took stock of my extensive inventory of electronic odds and ends and came up with a layout similar to this:

There is surprisingly little information on how to build one of these on the internets. There’s a lot of kits, and info about how they work, and even some “Here’s the one that I built but I’m not going to tell you how,” but not a lot of instructions. So I was going a bit blind, and there was a lot of guesswork and fumbling and flat-out mistakes.

The first result, which I didn’t picture, was pretty disappointing. It barely built up any voltage, and I quickly realized that the motor was too slow. This meant that I needed a motor with more power. I also needed a more uniform, smoother sphere, because if it’s not perfectly smooth, charge can “bleed off” rather than collecting on the surface of the sphere. My original design of two metal salad bowls soldered together was bunk. I finally managed to find a smooth metal globe in a garden supply shop, and I cannibalized a small automotive vacuum cleaner for the motor.

And you may feast your eyes on the final result:

Don’t these things just look awesome when they’re done?

It came out pretty well. As far as I can tell, it builds up a potential of more than 100,000 volts, which translates to a pretty decent shock. You can see the spark jump from the sphere to your finger across about 1/2″ of space. I haven’t been able to make my hair stand on end yet, merely because it turns out that this is really loud when it runs, and I don’t have the patience to listen to it long enough to let a big charge build up.

Perhaps the most amusing thing about this is that I’m not sure what to do with it, now that I’ve built it. If I decide to improve it, my next step might be finding a quieter motor. I would really like to make my hair stand on end, and the Offspring would like the same thing.

On the other hand, I have some more projects in the works, all of which are bloggable. I’ll have to see.

I have bad news for all of you wolf-groupies out there. I don’t have a Twitter account. Nor do I plan to get one. So you’re stuck checking here for any updates during the course of my oh-so-exciting life. (Blogging on a Friday afternoon, for example, when I know darn well that nobody reads blogs again until Monday.)

I was thinking this morning, though, that if I did have a Twitter account, it would probably be filled with the following “tweets.” (Go ahead and picture me saying that with the air quotes. (Unless you don’t know what I look like - in which case it’d be hard to picture me doing anything, and I direct you here.))

So where was I? Oh, yes… my tweets. The following would be a good example of my daily tweets:

7:45 AM: I’m having a good hair day.

8:15 AM: What did I have for dinner last night? Because I’m paying for it now.

10:23 AM: This vacuum cleaner needs more power. I think I have a spare motor sitting in the shed.

10:32 AM: Who knew that a weed whacker motor was imcompatible with a Hoover? You’d think that be in large print!

10:47 AM: $15 for some medical gauze and Neosporin? What a racket!

10:53 AM: If video phones ever come into widespread use, I’m a goner. As far as the Wife knows, everything here at the house is FINE.

12:15 PM: Wish I could speak “dog.”

12:49 PM: Got a request for some copywriting clips from an ad agency! Yay me!

1:13 PM: Look! A squirrel!

3:42 PM: Wow. They’re right. Vitamins really do make your pee bright yellow. Wonder what would happen if I swallowed a purple hi-liter?

7:00 PM: Note to self: reprogram thermostat tomorrow. And pick up some cat litter, and some 50 microfarad capacitors. And some super glue.

8:09 PM: Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?

So tell the truth: how many followers do you think I’d have? If there’s enough of a call for it, I’m open to accepting donations to cover the cost of opening a Twitter account…

About twenty miles north of Anchorage and about 4000 feet straight up is Site Summit, one of the last surviving intact Nike Missile installations (abandoned) from the Cold War in the United States. It’s an amazingly barren place, since the treeline at 63 degrees latitude is, as you can imagine, pretty damn low. In the winter, winds routinely reach 100+ miles per hour, and wind chill can dip below -70 degrees F.

It makes an excellent hike, both in the summer and in the winter, as long as you go on a good day. Several weeks ago the Offspring and I made a snowshoe trek to the top of the mountain, and as promised, here are some pics. Several times I was accused of trying to kill him. This is rather humorous, since not only is it easier for him to dance on top of the snow while I slog through it, but I also wouldn’t bump him off because he’s not worth very much unless he’s breathing.

It’s easier to reach the top in the winter, since you don’t have to weave around the bushes, you go over them:

One of the bunkers that was used to store ammunition and nuclear materials. The insides are filled with graffiti from vandals and squatters:

In my opinion, any squatter that makes that hike is in pretty damn good shape and has earned the right to stay there for a few nights.

Here’s a look at most of the installation from the neighboring mountain. This summer I’d like to make another trek and wander through the buildings themselves with my camera.

And finally, this is what makes the hike worth it: