My preference is that I receive the notifications by text message to my cell phone, rather than via email.  This is primarily because my email to cell phone link isn’t always the most reliable.  The RPIN system has a cell-phone notification option but the online form does not allow phone numbers to be entered, just email addresses.  The work-around to this is as follows:

1. Point your web-browser thingee at the Regional Public Information Network website (yes, click that now).

2. Click the link to Subscribe to RPIN “Sign Up Today”. You will see the form to enter email addresses and Notification Type:

3. In the email address box you need to enter the email address that can be used to send text messages to your phone via email.  This varies by carrier, but here’s a quick list I just pulled off the internets.  If your carrier isn’t listed, call them and ask them for the email format:

Verizon: 10digitphonenumber@vtext.com
AT&T: 10digitphonenumber@txt.att.net
Sprint: 10digitphonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
T-Mobile: 10digitphonenumber@tmomail.net
Nextel: 10digitphonenumber@messaging.nextel.com
Cingular: 10digitphonenumber@cingularme.com
Virgin Mobile: 10digitphonenumber@vmobl.com
Alltel: 10digitphonenumber@message.alltel.com
CellularOne: 10digitphonenumber@mobile.celloneusa.com
Omnipoint: 10digitphonenumber@omnipointpcs.com
Qwest: 10digitphonenumber@qwestmp.com

So, if my cell number was 253-555-1212 and my carrier was Verizon, I would enter

2535551212@vtext.com

4. Select “Cell Phone” under notification type.

5. Enter more cell phones, if you want your spouse or 12 year old to know about the imminent disaster.

6. Enter the types of emergencies you want to be notified of, and the geographic areas you are interested in.

7. Click “Subscribe”.

8. You will need to agree to terms and conditions on the following page.  You’ll then receive an text message to confirm your registration.

“Sudden Service” was a concept that Les Schwab used in his tire stores… one of their service people should run out to your car to help you when you pulled in.  At my local store, all they can muster is a slow meander, and it’s never even close to being in my general direction.  The cast of  “The Night of the Living Dead” could kick their collective ass in a foot race.

Wooed by promises of great service and great product, I’ve been coming to your store and emptying my wallet for several years now.  Today I had a slow leak in one of those tires you sold me.  “Sudden Service” happened when I went inside, and stood around the counter until you “suddenly” came over to talk to me after a few minutes.  “We’ll fix your flat, be about an hour.”

70 minutes later, and my car hasn’t moved from where I left it in the lot.  “Excuse me, but we’ve passed the golden 60 minute mark, and my car hasn’t moved.”  “Well, that’s why we say “about an hour”.

Soon after, the car indeed moves into the garage, followed by “John? I can fix the back tire, but those front tires we sold you not too long ago are shot, you really should get some new ones… we can do that for you right now…”

“No thanks.”

“But it will take the same amount of time.”  Uh huh.  You expect me to believe that you can mount and balance a new set of tires in the same time-space continuum as the repair of my slow leak in the rear.  Tempting, but then I’d be stuck with

• Two more tires of inferior quality, and
• Another promise of “Sudden Service” when the dang things get a puncture.

Terri comments: “Boy, they are really busy today.”  John replies “They are always this busy, sort of.  It’s like this every time I come… any day of the week, any time of the day.”  My theory is that they deliberately understaff.  They keep the level of customer-no-service low enough that they can keep you waiting for 1-2 hours eating stale popcorn and watching the endless repeating news loop that is Northwest Cable News, but high enough that you don’t leap across the counter and stick a tire pressure gauge up someone’s nose to get their attention.  Those bags of “Quick Fit” tire chains could come in handy if a customer decided to throw a fit, quick, and whop you upside the head with them.

For one reason or another, I’ve made this little pilgrimage to Les Schwab’s house of pain 5 times in the last 18 months.  I’ve never gotten out in less that 90 minutes, and the record was about 3 hours.  Today was the speed record, at 90 minutes.  No more.

hand-carved camry tracks

Originally uploaded by JohnCalnan.

I shoveled out this little track so that I could get up my hill, and out of my house (first time today since Saturday). Once freed, I had a couple of beers and a burger at The Ram, so the effort was worth it.

Staff in these places either have had hours cut, or maybe soon will. Empty tables means empty tip jars, too. If you haven’t been to your local “joint” in a while, please do… and leave a tip!

My latest discovery is weekend breakfast at the Copper Falls Restaurant at the Auburn Golf Course. They start serving at 9 a.m., and the chef makes the greatest breakfast potatoes I’ve ever had. While there are a couple of other famous and not-so-famous breakfast places in Auburn, this one deserves better patronage because of the quality of the food, the excellent service, and it’s the only one of the three that can serve you a bloody mary!

The “residue” of this action was that the outside doors on the north and south walls (3 of them) were a pain in the ass to open and close. The door to the back yard would stick on the bottom, requiring a 2-hand/1-foot maneuver to open it. The door on the north side of shop/furnace room required a 2-handed-lifting-slam so complex that (apparently) I was the only person qualified to take out the kitchen garbage. The south facing door from the shop was also hard to close, and it scraped across the concrete floor with a metallic grinding that sounded like a million fingernails on blackboards. Consequently, we never used that door.

I have my “handy” moments, but re-alignment of doors while maintaining structural integrity isn’t on my resume, nor did I stay at a Holiday Inn Express. Yesterday, renovator and handyman extraordinaire Geoff Hazel came over to make a little holiday cash straightening out all my doors.

The difference is amazing. It just goes to show that you can put up with some amazingly stupid crap for an indefinite period of time and you never realize just how crappy it was until you don’t have to put up with it anymore.

I’m going to go open and close a few doors now. Maybe later, I’ll ask Terri to take out the trash. Yeah, right.

Brunch on Sunday was great, and the rest of the trip was fairly uneventful. Hollywood has come to a dead-stop with the start of the Writer’s Guild strike today. Not even Leno will dare to tell his own jokes for a few days until they settle this thing. I suppose that, if he were to in effect “scab-write” his own material, he’d end up with nothing but fart jokes when the writers actually returned.

Then there was this thing, which needs no comment from me. Behold:

Only in Hollywood. Back on the bike tomorrow.

• “having seasons is cool”
• “green is good, even if it is a layer of moss on your car”
• “palm trees are boring”
• “yes, it rains a lot, but it is not the sort of rain that gets you wet”

Hogwash. I’m contemplating the glint of sunshine off the hotel pool at the moment.  If only I could be this bored all the time. As I contemplate the day ahead here in the Greater Los Angeles area, the forecast is for sunshine and 85 degrees today. It is November4th. Boring, my ass. Sure, the hillsides catch fire every year, but we have fires in Washington too. I’m wishing I’d packed my Lemond, so I could take a ride out in the valley somewhere, or maybe head down to my old stomping grounds in Palos Verdes. Alas, that is not to be, so I’ll have to suffer through cabin-fever here by the pool. Someone bring me a drink with an umbrella, so I can drown my sorrows.

Today is “brunch day” for the Calnans. Mom and Dad go to brunch every Sunday at the Market City Caffe in Burbank. There’s good food, great service, and a string quartet. The windows will be open to the patio and street because it’s warm. Being Los Angeles, there will be plenty of interesting people-watching to be had as well.

Tomorrow will be that whole messy “back to the cold weather” thing. It’s awkward to step off a plane in shorts and sandals when everyone else in the airport is in long pants and coats. The shuttle bus to the car can get a bit chilly as well.

We still get the occasional call, mostly from charitable organizations that don’t have to pay attention to such things since it is their primary source of funding. Once in a while we’ll get a call to participate in a market research survey. We got such a call a couple of weeks ago, and the call was a bit later in the evening than Terri thought appropriate. She let them know, politely, that even if we did want to participate in their survey about radio stations, we wouldn’t want to do so at this late hour. End of conversation.

Apparently not entirely. The research firm sent us this letter of apology, along with two dollars. I’m guessing we’re going to hear from them again in the near future, and the call will be earlier in the evening. Too bad, because I’m about 1.5 apologies away from buying a new spare inner tube for my bike with this new income stream.

Blog-boy called 9-1-1. The conversation was something along the lines of:

Me: “A truck has rolled down the hill and landed in my yard.”
Operator: “Is there anyone in the truck?”
Me: “No, it was parked up the hill, and rolled down the hill by itself.”
Operator: “Was anyone else injured?”
Me: “No, but I’ve got this truck upside-down in my yard.”
Operator: “Well, just get his license and give it to your insurance company.”
Me: “No, you don’t understand, it’s hanging upside down in my yard.”
Operator: “I don’t see any reason to dispatch an officer.”
Me: “It’s upside-down, in my yard, and there is gasoline leaking.”
Operator: “Oh, fine then. I guess I’ll send an officer.”
Me: “Gee, thanks.”

Within the next ten minutes, we’d have two Sheriff cars and two fire engines surrounding our house.

Because we are on a hillside and the yard drops off rather precipitously just after the lawn, the first move of the fire department was to secure the truck by tying a rope to the truck, then around a nearby tree to prevent the truck from slipping further down the hill. I hadn’t really considered the possibility, but I’m glad somebody did.

The Sheriff in charge of the scene called for a big-ass tow truck to lift the truck out of our yard. While we were waiting, we worked our way around the neighbor’s house for this perspective on the scene. Just behind the green railing is the front door, where I took the first picture:

We were starting to gather quite a crowd of neighbors by this time. Terri was pretty upset, and the neighbors brought out a bottle of wine and a bowl of pistachios so as to provide a little levity and normalcy to the chaotic scene. Nothing like a little Walla Walla Red to calm the nerves.
	Soon enough, the big-ass tow truck arrived. This guy was quite skilled with this crane device, and over the course of about 2 hours was able to pull the truck out of our yard, and place it in the street right-side up.
Here’s the carnage being dragged up the street. They would take it to the top of the hill, and load it onto another flatbed truck for final removal.
	This morning, with a little more light on the subject. This is the hill that the truck rolled down. I’d estimate it at 8 or 9 % grade. The truck was parked on the right side of the roadway, in front of the 4th house up (barely visible here). It clipped the bush in the yard of the first house you see on the right here, then turned right toward our next door neighbor’s house.
The truck deflected off this small pickup, which is parked in front of the next-door neighbor’s house. Without this deflection, the truck would have entered the neighbor’s house, either through the garage or the front door.
	Instead, the truck headed for our house. Because of this pine tree, however, the truck was deflected from it’s path. Rather than head into the side of our house, the truck dropped over the wall, coming to rest on our front lawn.
I firmly believe that this tree saved our house. I’m feeling a little more vunerable now that it is gone.

We are feeling very lucky today, and we are grateful that no one was injured. We’ve met the new neighbors, by the way. They seem very nice, and were definitely sorry and shocked at the events that transpired. Other than the truck, the damages should be fairly easily repaired. We finally got to bed about 11:30 or so.

Trust me, this entry is far more exciting than my bike ride on Sunday. I’ll fill you in on the Headwaters Century later.

Environmental crisis and calamity was averted in a 3 day process wherein they intercepted the sewage before it went through this pipe by vacuuming it out of a manhole in front of my house. While the vacuuming went on 24 hours a day in the street, another crew dug around in the swampy ground below to “fix” the leak. This fix was apparently was a band-aid maneuver that had a tactical goal of getting this crew home before Super Bowl Sunday, rather than the strategic goal of a permanent fix.

Fast-forward to May 1. Pickup trucks start coming and going again in the street, highly unusual given we are at the bottom of a dead-end hill. The sewer guys are back, and they brought friends in the form of a sub-contractor that digs holes and lays pipe on behalf of said sewer guys. “Welcome back”, says the affable fellow living at the end of the street. The friendly sewer guys inform me that work is to start next Monday, pipe arriving, chaos ensuing, etc..

Enter the utility locators. These are the folks that come in little white station wagons to spray colored markings all over your street, sidewalk, and lawn to mark where underground utilities are hidden. They have marked the street on 5 occasions over the last 3 years or so, so I have gained a little insight into this operation (3 of these occasions were for a separate project, a County job to repair the storm drain system. This project never actually took place, despite taxpayer money marking the jobsite 3 times). If there was ever a business plan put together to take advantage of local municipalities, utility companies, and construction contractors, this is it. It seems that for every “locate” job, they send two different guys, on two different days. One guy marks the water, sewer, telephone, and cable. Another guy comes the next day, and marks electricity and natural gas. Why two guys, you may ask? I would assume that they are then able to charge for two site-visits, rather than just one.

	Green would appear to be the color for sewer. The pointy arrow shows which way this stuff flows, which is a hard-right turn to run down my northern property line.
Yellow marks natural gas. “EOM” I assume stands for “End of Main”, as this is as far as they put the gas line when we converted a few years back.
	Blue has to represent water, because it would be hard to fight a fire if it stood for natural gas.
The red lines are the underground electrical lines that run from these transformer boxes to the houses on the street. Orange are telephone lines, some of which would not have been marked had I not pointed them out to the dude with the spraypaint. The phone lines to my house get missed every time, and they were dug up back when the natural gas line was being installed.
	Apparently 100% accuracy is not a requirement, as this water meter that lies directly in the work area has no blue markings within 30 feet
Street marked, Monday the 7th rolls around and stuff starts happening… just before it stops. This load of 50 foot pipe arrives, is offloaded by this backhoe, and promptly declared to be the wrong diameter.

Fast forward again, to this week. Wednesday the 23rd the little white station wagons show up again, tracing over the same markings they made 3 weeks ago. Both guys. And yes, they did not re-mark my buried phone lines (because I didn’t stand there and point them out), and yes they missed the water running to that one meter. I assume they are just looking at a map of the last time they did the marking on this street incorrectly, and repeating the same incorrect markings. I think that as long as that’s all they are doing, the subcontractor could incorrectly interpret the location of all underground utilities themselves, and cut out the middleman.

Work actually began on Thursday, as they started to “fuse” these 50 foot sections of pipe together, and began to drag them down my property line. Next week they will begin the process of pulling the new line completely across the ravine. That should be entertaining, and hopefully they won’t have to call in the utility locators again, even if the job is stopped for a 3 day weekend.