Ouch, Again

     On second thought, forget it.  Shouldn't you be out playing in traffic or something?

Between The Walls...

     Looking up the alley between Bent Rail Brewery and a building full of techitude (The Speak Easy and Developer Town).

There's a very busy cell tower just across the Monon, behind a storage center.

      Tam and I had dinner at Bent Rail Brewery last night. She had the charcuterie plate, which offers a nice assortment of meats, cheese, crustini and pickled vegetables including bright green Italian olives.  I went with pulled pork with a nice barbecue sauce, served on thick, toasted bread and topped with apple-cabbage coleslaw, a nice combination and just a bit askew to the ordinary.   Good food, friendly staff and a very large space that inlcudes a pinball machine (under repair) and an interesting tabletop shuffleboard game, about 2/3 scale.  It's right along the Monon ex-railroad trail -- and they do have a bent rail.  Is it the eponymous rail of bendage, or just a contractor's pun?  I don't know.

Tiny Spider Update

     Thanks to an anonymous commenter, it appears that the critters spreading barely-visible nets in the medium-height grass of the back yard here at Roseholme Cottage are dwarf sheetweb spiders -- and I should be flattered they stick around: "These tiny spiders (usually 3 mm or less) commonly balloon even as adults and may be very numerous in a given area on one day, only to disappear the next."  Yes, they're airship spiders!

Early Shift/Artsy

     There's this about working the stupid-early* shift: normally-busy city streets are nearly deserted:

      Nice as that is -- at least until you have a flat tire in a tough neighborhood -- I prefer days.  It's not always an option, and so in I go, to help resolve the myriad tiny disasters of the Skunk-Workings at full steam and hope to successfully overcome that whatever larger troubles may loom.  Help is only a telephone call away -- and will have had even less sleep than oneself.  Even that has a shiny tinfoil lining: most of us have gotten better about writing down our arcane knowledge and filing it on various shared databases and document servers: the early awakening you save may be your own!

     Too, the early mornings are a chance to play at art, like the images in this post.  They're all snapshot with my smartphone under circumstances where it's struggling to keep up, occasionally when there's no chance at all of fumbling with any control but the simulated shutter release and there's something like a 5:1 ratio between taking photos and getting usable results.  It's a form of cheating but I'm happy enough to get some image instead of nothing at all.

     And, eventually, the sun rises.

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* Not just a turn of phrase.  Sleep deprivation and sleep-cycle upset will leave you cognitively impaired to some degree.  It's possible to adapt to it, especially if you start early, something the world's militaries know in depth and detail.  As do their trainees.  Me, well, I'm what you call a civilian.  Especially as regards sleep.

Eggs In Purgatory

     That's what the Italians call it, anyway.  This morning, eggs poached in Rao's Homemade Garden Vegetable Marinara: O...M...G!

     Look, I'm a Midwesterner; my ancestry is not drawn from your marinara-producing peoples.  So I grew up on Prego and Ragu and adding some meat and herbs (rosemary, fresh basil if you can get it), and there's your spaghetti sauce.  It's good enough but--  Let's say shelf life and ease of mass-production are concerns.

     Fresh Market, our more-or-less neighborhood market, does not stock common brands; my choice came down to several fairly expensive varieties.  I was sleepy and kind of went by which one had the most appealing label.

     It was a felicitous choice.  Rao's plain marinara gets rave reviews from people who live where fresh marinara is readily found.  The Garden Vegetable version adds peppers, mushrooms, carrots, I don't know what all else and not just a little of them -- it's crowded!  And very, very good.  Poach an egg in this stuff and it's happy to simmer.

     I browned some sausage and added it, which was entirely unnecessary.

And On The Next Morning...

     Poblano, a little white onion, one egg, just a few pieces of Emmentaler cheese and an individual-sized serving of corned beef hash.

     It's not to everyone's taste but it suits me.  Started the corned beef early, added onions, then followed with egg and poblano after the onion had cooked a bit.  So it was nice and crunchy on the bottom but not burned and the poblano wasn't overcooked. Lifted out on a wide spatula in nearly one whole section. A dash of mild hot sauce and it's ready.

The New Normal

     That doesn't look scary, does it?

     Does it?

Busy

     I'm cooking breakfast: Roseholme Hash!  Potatoes, eggs, bacon, green onions, a poblano... Yum!  I hope.

The La-bor-a-tory

At the doctor's office, getting lab work done, which I have been putting off.  Blood draw, mostly.

     Their equipment is not cooperating. But the tech is good with a needle.

    No food for 12 hours. Bagels beckon!

Spiderettes? Spiderlings? Spetite?

     I don't know what to call them and the moment was fleeting.  I went out to the garage this morning and scattered across the back yard, I saw what looked like tiny, insubstantial patches of fog, nestled in the grass.  If I got too close to any one of them, it vanished.

     From the back door, with the sun at my back, I could see many of them and I took a bearing on one of the thicker-looked.  At medium distance, it appeared to fade away, and even looking start down on it, it was barely perceptible.  Bending down, I finally saw it again at bifocal distance: the thinnest of spderwebs, woven of strands so fine they glimmered like elongated rainbows.  There was no sign at all of the web-spinner, but if it is sized proportionately, the little spider would be about the size of a dust-mote.

     What do they seine from the morning air, do you suppose?

Fone Phixed?

     So it would appear.  There was an AT&T line tech up on the pole when I left for work Wednesday morning and he assured me our service would be fully restored that day.  Along about 11:30 a.m., Tam called me to announce that lo, a miracle had been wrought and we were connected both POTS and Teh Innerwebs.

     Will it last?  I don't know.  But I am cautiously optimistic.

"AT&T, how can we fail you?"

After over a month of no plain old telephone service, Internet service followed it down the tubes yesterday morning.  Attempts to get the level of tech previous AT&T repairpeople have told us is necessary failed yet again; they sent out a data tech, who was kinda surly and quickly found -- yet again! -- that it needed a higher level tech to fix. This would be the same tech who dropped the ball Sunday, marking the issue resolved without actually doing anything. So.... That guy was right on the ball this afternoon: from the evidence, he "checked" the problem from his desk and marked it fixed again.

     AT&T called me to share the good news. I asked them to wait while I confirmed.

     I own two cellphones. Called Tam: nope, phone and Internet still dead. When I shared this news with AT&T, they offered only vague assurances.

     Tam has taken to Twitter. Please pile on.

     Posted from my non-AT&T smart phone.