> books_per_foot = c(14,11,17,11,10,18,12,12,
          13,16,15,14,13,14,15,8,10,10,11,11)
> summary(books_per_foot)
   Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max.
   8.00   11.00   12.50   12.75   14.25   18.00
> mean(books_per_foot)
[1] 12.75
> sd(books_per_foot)
[1] 2.613225

Last winter our vent pipe froze solid and I spent a couple hours in the attic with a heat gun melting the blockage. A couple days ago I noticed that flushing the toilet was pulling water out of the traps in the sink and bathtub, so I knew the vent was getting plugged again. My attempt at a fix over the summer was to put a larger pipe over the vent on the roof so the condensation might happen in the outer pipe, which could be easily removed and cleaned out. Unfortunately, when I got up on the roof today, not only was it impossible to get the outer pipe free, but the growing constriction wasn’t in the outer pipe anyway. Mid-summer my neighbor suggested replacing the section of the vent in the attic with a much larger diameter pipe (6” was his suggestion) and then insulating it. I never got around to it; almost frozen vent pipe; a priori.

The total freezing degree days to this point in the winter season has been 2,258,^† which ought to give me a pretty good way of estimating when I’ll have another problem. Thus far we’ve had 74 days with an average daily temperature below freezing, and the average temperature for those days was 1.4°F. That’s below normal for the year: nine of the last eleven weeks have been below average. But the heart of the winter is approaching, so it’ll take many fewer than 74 days to double our freezing degree days for the season.

My first attempt to fix the clog was to insert a heat gun into the clean out and let the warm air from the heat gun melt it (shown in the photo). I don’t think this had any real effect. I kept it going for a little over an hour, monitoring the backside of the pipe to make sure the heat gun wasn’t melting it. But it was around -10°F this morning, so I’ll bet the hot air was pretty cold by the time it rose to the ice. The second attempt was using a pipe snake from up on the roof, but it couldn’t go past the constriction, and even if it had, I’m not sure it really would have cleared out much ice. Finally, I dragged a five gallon bucket filled with hot water up onto the roof. I got about three gallons into the vent before it was filled to the top. At first I was nervous that this wasn’t going to work and I’d have three gallons of water turning to ice in the vent, but the water started dropping slowly, and after a minute, the blockage gave way and hot water came plunging down the pipe. I poured the final gallon or two through the pipe, and came down off the roof.

Tomorrow I’ll put some 2” fiberglass insulation around the part of the pipe that’s exposed in the attic, which should help. And I’ll be keeping my eye on the total freezing degree days for the rest of the winter. Once it gets up to 4,000, I may want to go back up on the roof with another bucket of hot water.

I just got back from walking Nika and Piper on the Creek. I’d looked at my GPS track from yesterday’s walk on the Creek and saw an obvious shortcut (from point A to B on the map) to cut off some distance. My objective was to take the Creek out to a section line (at points D and E—click on the image to see a full size version) that I also saw from the satellite imagery for the area, and wanted a way to make the route shorter. Yesterday’s walk was more than five miles, even though a raven could have covered the distance in a little over a half mile.

We walked down the Creek, came to the start of the shortcut at point A, walked overland through the forest to point B back on the Creek, and I immediately turned the wrong direction. I’d already walked about halfway back to point A before I realized I went the wrong way. Next time, turn left!

It is amazing how disorienting the Creek is, even with a GPS. Because it winds back and forth so much, even if you know where you’re going and can see it on the little map your GPS is showing you, it’s really difficult to tell if you are getting closer to your objective. The good thing is that the Creek only goes two ways. If you went the wrong way, just turn around and go back.

I finished Gravity’s Rainbow last week. For me, it was a bit of a disappointment, not so much with the book itself, but with myself for not devoting the time to reading it more faithfully from start to finish. With the previous Pynchon I’ve read (Crying of Lot 49, Mason & Dixon, Against the Day) I started out reading very carefully, taking notes as I went along. After I got comfortable with the narrative and felt I was familiar enough with the gestalt, I blazed through the remainder of the book. This time around, I started the same way, but didn’t devote the time to reading it after the first part and I wasn’t able to keep the characters and situations in my head. So the novel wound up as a jumble. I can see the brilliance and magic at the margins of my comprehension, but that’s about it.

At this point, I’d have to place it below both Mason & Dixon and Against the Day in my list of favorite Pynchon books. Someday I’ll have to pick it up again and try to give it the time it deserves.

Since finishing it, I’ve been reading like crazy. First was Deb Olin Unferth’s Vacation, which was fantastic. It reminded me a bit of the way Paul Auster can keep you off balance and wondering what will come next as the characters start behaving more and more strangely. Then McSweeney’s 28, which was a series of entertaining short fables (my favorite was the one about the guy who kept meeting himself). Finally, Mary Roach’s Bonk. I enjoyed this one as well, even if the continual footnoted asides became tedious by the end. I was amused, and feel like I learned a lot about what science has to say about sex.

After my success at quickly completing three books, I’ve started working on 2666 by literary superstar Roberto Bolaño. I had to special order it because my local independent bookstore didn’t have any copies, and appeared to never have heard of Bolaño. They’re surprisingly out of touch with the world of literary fiction, which seems odd for a store trying to survive the big box, low price onslaught of Barnes and Noble. Maybe they make their hay selling Twilight or whatever other bestselling doorstop is popular today and forgotten tomorrow.

In any case, 63 pages into 2666 and I’m highly amused. Thus far, the story has revolved around four literary critics obsessed with a reclusive German author. If that sounds like an odd premise for a story, it is; odder still is that despite there being very little plot, I’m eager to get back to it.

More eager than chopping wood or cooking my Thanksgiving ham, stuffing, gravy and sweet potato pie, in fact.

This week both The New Yorker and The New York Times released their editorial choice for president (here and here). It’s certainly no surprise that they picked Barack Obama. Both articles are devastating in their criticism of George W. Bush and the conservative politics he and John McCain endorse. It’s too bad the media didn’t do a better job documenting the excesses and evils over the last eight years; now it’ll be up to the historians to uncover exactly how we got where we are today.

At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both changes and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.

The New Yorker  Editors, 13 Oct 2008

I remember being very excited when Clinton was elected in 1991 after twelve years of Reagan / Bush, wondering to myself whether it would actually make any difference. I wasn’t initially convinced, but after eight years, we had peace and prosperity, and federal budget surpluses offered the possibility of universal health care, fixing our crumbling infrastructure, and shoring up Social Security and Medicare for the retirement of the Baby Boomers. And where are we today, eight years later? In ruin.

Let’s hope Barack Obama will be our next president and that he’s given a chance to bring our country back to where we were before it was hijacked by the fundamentalist, free-spending, for-the-rich, fascists of Bush / Cheney.

The United States is battered and drifting after eight years of President Bush’s failed leadership. He is saddling his successor with two wars, a scarred global image and a government systematically stripped of its ability to protect and help its citizens — whether they are fleeing a hurricane’s floodwaters, searching for affordable health care or struggling to hold on to their homes, jobs, savings and pensions in the midst of a financial crisis that was foretold and preventable.

As tough as the times are, the selection of a new president is easy. After nearly two years of a grueling and ugly campaign, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois has proved that he is the right choice to be the 44th president of the United States.

The New York Times  Editorial Board, 23 Oct 2008

In the spirit of the spiteful nature of the McCain / Palin campaign, I offer this (undoctored) photo from the last debate:

My friends, it’s an easy choice.