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Yesterday was pretty crazy. I went to work per usual and work was less than pleasant per usual. EL calling me with the news of the water problem at home was not exactly the type of thing I would want to get me out of work, but it had the same effect. Getting a commuter bus mid-day is near impossible. The schedules are reduced to once an hour or less. When I arrived at the house, EL told me that the plumber's definition of "emergency service" is "same day service". They said someone would be out after 1:00 pee emm! Unreal. EL had shut off appropriate valves to stop water pressure and cleaned up most of the water that was standing upstairs. She also had placed pans and buckets below drips from the ceiling below. I climbed a ladder under the most prominent drip and poked a hole through the sheetrock with the blade of a pair of scissors and the water gushed out like a faucet. I think we filled half of a large bucket with the water that shot out of the ceiling. The livingroom ceiling didn't collapse or break apart and hang... it just sagged a little. When the plumber finally arrived, he checked everything out and gave it is blessing before he left. Well, maybe I should back up for a minute. When we were buying the house, the home inspection had a blurb about the A/C unit in the attic needing a dedicated drain line outside. We asked the sellers to put one in and they said no, so we said we'd have a line run after we moved, but we wanted it inspected. They claimed to have called an HVAC repair guy come out and do a complete tune up and inspection. After we took possession of the house, EL noticed a small spot on the ceiling of the living room one day and called the home warranty place to send a plumber out. A plumber came and told her someone must have forgotten to paint a spot of ceiling and that since it was dry, there was no problem. She explained that it wasn't there before and he needed to check things out more thoroughly to which he laughed and basically said she was crazy and left. It costs us $50 to have this guy come out and insult my (then) fiancé and pretty much nothing else. EL immediately called the home warranty place and told them she wasn't going to be responsible if there is a larger problem in the future because of this bullshit and that if they had to come back out for the same thing, she wasn't paying another 50 bucks. They wrote it all down in our account and understood. Ahem. So she calls on this most recently water thing and they send the same plumbing company. They want to charge us the $50 to come out again... not. It took a few calls, but EL managed to get it waived. This time, a different plumber comes out. He finds a clogged drain line in the upstairs A/C and signs of water leakage into the attic from the overflow pan. Ok, so whether that is where the water came from or not doesn't matter to me at this point. We were told the A/C had been professionally inspected. It obviously had not. We could have avoided this catastrophe if the first plumber guy they sent would have done his job instead of being an unprofessional dick. Regardless, there is ceiling damage now and the plumber says we need to tell the home warranty place it needs to be replaced and repaired. EL calls the home warranty place and they say... hmm... the ceiling sounds like secondary damage and that's not covered... fuck off. WTF? We are still fighting this one, but basically we are looking at getting stuck with the bill to repair the ceiling. I went to UPS and paid $20 to ship a letter air priority overnight. When I get home, the UPS place calls me and says it might not get there for a couple of days because of the hurricane. I said that was acceptable since they couldn't do anything about it, but asked if I could get refunded the difference between priority overnight and 2 to 3 day ground service if it actually takes 2 or 3 days to get there. They said not a chance in hell. Greedy bitches. Yee haw. I hope your day was better.





Make his fight on the hill in the early day
Constant chill deep inside
Shouting gun, on they run through the endless grey
On the fight, for they are right, yes, by who’s to say?
For a hill men would kill, why? they do not know
Suffered wounds test there their pride
Men of five, still alive through the raging glow
Gone insane from the pain that they surely know
For whom the bell tolls
Time marches on
For whom the bell tolls
Take a look to the sky just before you die
It is the last time you will
Blackened roar massive roar fills the crumbling sky
Shattered goal fills his soul with a ruthless cry
Stranger now, are his eyes, to this mystery
He hears the silence so loud
Crack of dawn, all is gone except the will to be
Now they will see what will be, blinded eyes to see





I completely forgot to mention yesterday that there was another really cool Engines yesterday morning. It really provoked thought about how we are motivated to learn. Check out what Dr. John H. Lienhard had to say:

"Today, a new take on ignorance. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.

Questions Questions fascinate me. Try five familiar ones:
First: Have you stopped beating your wife?
Second: Hi, how are you?
Third: What is that supposed to mean?
Fourth: When does the next bus leave?
and finally,
Have you considered the Gertz lemma in your calculation?

That last questioner clearly thinks that you've made a damaging oversight. But then, the only real question in this list is "When does the next bus leave?" "Hi, how are you?" was never meant to be answered. The other three are intended to trap, to accuse, or simply to show off.

I'm pretty sure that the only real function of a teacher is to guide students in asking and pursuing questions. Once a student develops the rare talent for seeking his or her own ignorance, teachers become irrelevant. But it's hard to look at your own ignorance. And it's not easy to ask a true question. It feels like humiliation.

So let's liken the flow of knowledge to the flow of water. Water flows from high places to low places. It flows from a region of high pressure to one of low pressure. Knowledge likewise flows to the point of greatest ignorance.

Years ago I asked what the second law of thermodynamics was all about. My textbook put it this way: You can never build a heat engines that takes energy from a single heat source, does useful work, and has no other effect upon its surroundings. I thought I had an answer to my question -- that I understood the second law.

Then I heard someone say that the second law of thermodynamics gave an "index of the order of the disunity of the universe" (whatever that meant!) Now I had two wildly different answers to one question. My ignorance opened up before me, and knowledge was ready to flow in a way it had not flowed before.

When I owned the first answer I felt smart. But my smartness was a dam, preventing additional knowledge from flowing to me. Having two answers that didn't match, set up discomfort and dissonance. Where I'd been smart, I was now ignorant. The dam broke. I really began learning.

History offers many such cases. The checkered history of identifying the gas oxygen traces all the way from ancient alchemy to nineteenth-century atomic-based chemistry. At each troubled step, one more dam of expertise had to crumble so some bright person could again be blessed with the frustration of ignorance -- with the needfulness that gets honest questioning.

The word ignorance carries so much negative freight. We use it to mean a lack of desire to know, or an inability to know. Well, put all that freight aside: To be ignorant and then crave erase that ignorance -- that is power. Whatever my business might be, I'm best served when I begin by finding the place where I know the least. If I begin as the expert, I learn nothing. But, when I start out ignorant, then the fun really begins."

Anyhoo, it made me think about it. I love that radio program. I have already turned in my morning report, eaten half my packed lunch, and am ready for my next gallon of coffee. Tomorrow is Friday and I'm ready for it to be here now.