Water...

In days of yore, the seldom-mentioned days of legend and lore, I was a child. All this was going on in the sleepy little town of Fairbanks, Alaska, where running water outside of town is a rarity in home-built houses.

My mother and father built our house, with help from friends. It was all done and ready to move into by the time I was in school: they'd started it sometime after I was born.

But there wasn't any running water. We had to trek up a hundred yards to the well, which was by the garden, and haul water in jugs down to the house. We had to go into town for drinking water, as our well water had a touch too much arsenic for growing kids.

Around when I was in third grade or so, it was finally time to get running water in the house, now that all the electrical work had been more or less finished. My parents hired Mike, who later became a family friend, to dig a trench to run the line to the house. All that got finished by winter. We were left with the end of the copper pipe coming into the house, hooked up to the pressure tank, and a garden hose coming off, held on securely with electrical tape, to actually dispense the water.

In the deepest, darkest parts of Alaskan winters, it gets cold. The ground freezes. Anything that's in the ground freezes, including water pipes. Fortunately, my father had put heat tape on the pipe, so it wasn't a big deal when no water would come out: we just plugged in the contraption that let us run the heat tape (my electrical skills are fuzzy, but things didn't work right unless something else that drew a lot of power was activated on the same circuit when the heat tape was on) and waited for the ice to melt.

Did I mention that this was the first time that the water line had frozen up?

We heard the shifting, groaning noises in the pipes that meant that the ice was moving, and we cheered. The festivities were short-lived, however, as the building pressure of water behind the ice shoved and shoved -- and there went the hose and the electrical tape, and 1" cylinders of ice, and free-form ice-water, showered all over the bathroom.

FatherSir must have yelled, and must also have unplugged the well controller box, because the pumping stopped, and the flow diminished. Narcissa and I scuttled into the pantry to grab the rag bag, and Mama and FatherSir and Narcissa and I cleaned up the mess. Narcissa and I were crowing over the thing the whole time, giggling about the way the ice and water had gone all over.

Last year, when the apartment's water-driven climate control system chose to bust, and chose our apartment to bust in, Nephew got to share an experience very similar. I'm sure he'll treasure it equally.


After everything was cleaned up, FatherSir installed a proper fixture for the hose to attach to, somewhat to Narcissa's and my disappointment, because we thought it was quite exciting, and would be delightful to have happen every once in a while.

Things not written down, but still remembered.

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Miao?

That isn't the sound of cats.

...I miss Darkside.

Class action suit against Windows-lookalike pop-up ads

http://www.lukins.com/bonzi/index.php?pid=home

Stories

the Naked Barbie Club
Mr. Vacuum-cleaner Salesman
the swingsets, and flirtation: snow dump, one-man comedy show
The Talk in the Hallway (complete with audience)
Mama & Galadriel's mom running the Science Fair (and the marvelous fun with the metal jumping things)
Dumping Stuff on Jimmy Ward
The Diarreah Song (and Mrs. Banks)
Why You Don't Ask Joan to Date You (she'll hit you with a book)
the Shawn Stories:

• The air tazer
  
• the toaster
  
• the lawnmower
  
• the can of beans
  
• the cacti
  
• the threesomes
  
• my Drunken Computer Science Major
  

Rocket Science camp

...all of these stories, and more, will be brought to you courtesy of lasayla's request that I tell more stories from before she discovered my LJ, preferably funny ones, maybe from when I was a kid.

bookmark: funny WIP

http://www.gryffindortower.net/Library/Anya/naked8.htm

LJ suckage: why you may not be able to post or comment

Two machines just died, so free users' ability to post/comment was what got the axe for the duration of the emergency. The two machines are in the same cluster, which is major suckage, and why the free users got the suckage, rather than just lag for us all. It may be that it's just free users for that cluster, because evidently some free users are able to post.

news post

Status site is currently not being very informative, but should be updated from time to time to reflect the actual status of things.

Bad Things happen when you deprive me of my TV time

Having missed last Sunday's episode of "Malcolm in the Middle", my mind decided to cheerfully generate one for me in my afternoon nap.

It didn't start out as that, though. No. It started out as riding on trains and/or buses throughout the city on some very busy freeways, and then something involving a cartload of bricks and a scarecrow-type dummy that was political action in a marketplace/parking lot. After that, there was stuff going on at a swimming pool. I am actually aware of the segué: I was putting away underwear and bathing suits, and then one of the bathing suits was my old one from the inter-school swim competition, that I had participated in (in the dream) years and years ago. Suddenly I was there, wearing the suit, and competing. I was the fastest in my lane, but then I realized that I was in the wrong lane: I was more of a parent than a kindergartener. So I got out of the lane and walked over to the one labeled parents, but there was the big round hot tub, and I got in, and this annoying woman was talking with my mother. I didn't realize this until later on, but my mother was now Lois, the mother from abovementioned sitcom. I dropped my glasses into the hot tub, and my mother dove down to get them for me, and then closed up the bottom panel of the hot tub, which was supposed to be covering over the heating elements.

The annoying lady precipitated a feud with our family, (this involved me trying to smash a packet of orange candies on the annoying lady's face, and by smash I mean I was holding the packet up to her face and punching it, and I was trying to break the candies, and the candies weren't breaking because I couldn't punch hard enough, and then Dad used a baseball bat to the same end); our family suddenly included the Weasley boys rather than Malcolm and his brothers. We all piled into the BIG van (used only in special cases and emergencies: none of us had actually seen it used in the longest time) and Mom tried to drive off without Dad, who threw himself on the car and made the usual panic-face/kicking legs/clinging arms scene. (Same dad from the show, too: my father's always called FatherSir.)

It was ... odd.

Teachers

yaksha42 has Ashford for Ethics. I suggested my effective way of messing with him, the spoon on nose, and Yakko cracked up. Ashford is very easy to mess with.

Fic

Found I couldn't print out the fic I wanted, as Websense thought it was an adult content site. Well... it was.

Heh.

I like reading fic in class.

Evil evil evil

My fic bookmarks win me none-too-veiled death threats from those who become in great pain from laughing too hard.

amberfox is my source of most fic recs. Just so y'all know.