Learn From My Fail; Car Keys

I've been driving since I was 16 years old, and in that time period I've locked my keys inside my car exactly once; just two days ago. On my way home from Georgia. While I was still in another state.

It was stupid, really. I was driving on I-85, heading north from Spartanburg, and thinking about a math problem (I'm a nerd). I really wanted to stop and put gas in the car prior to leaving the state so that I could fill up on cheap gas (30 cents cheaper than in N.C.!), and so that I could scribble out the math problem on a note pad real quick and get the answer (It was a combination problem in which I needed to estimate the mileage driven in the Civic before the increased fuel efficiency zeroed out the repairs cost. I came up with the formula in my head but there were too many numbers flying around to get an accurate answer, although I did come up with a rough estimate of 10,500 miles mentally. The accurate answer was 11, 352 miles.) so that it would stop bothering me. I put my car keys in the passenger seat while I wrote down the actual numbers and solved the problem, and then jumped out of the car while locking the door to put gas in the car. It wasn't until after I had finished topping of the tank that I realized I had locked myself out (I wanted to get the mileage from my odometer to keep track of my fuel efficiency, 38.4 mpg on that particular tank, which included city driving in Athens).

The ironic thing is that I had mentioned to my better half that I really needed to stash a copy of the Civic key on my person, probably in my wallet, to better guard against doing just that. Irony is hard to laugh at, however, when you're locked out of your car a couple hundred miles from home, with no one friendly within a two hour drive radius to come and help you out.

Fortunately, I got hold of a local business called "Pop A Lock" (Stupid name, great service), that came out and for a token fee got me back in the Civic and on my way.

Since I'll never put up a picture of myself, here's Soren Bowie locked out of his car instead, since he understands the issue.

Mission Debrief: What Went Wrong, What Went Right, and Thoughts on Future Prevention
First and foremost, violation of my personal rules, #9, which is "Keep a Spare". I do this a lot, I have backup ways to start fires, to get water into my system, back up knives, back up magazines.. I even had backup motor oil in the trunk of the car. What I didn't have on me was a backup key for the car, which is inexcusable because, frankly, a single key is lightweight and easy to carry at a secondary position on your person. I have corrected this by putting the car key that was originally on my key ring (it was somewhat bent, but still serviceable) in my wallet, and putting the original Civic key on my key ring. I do sometimes leave my wallet in my car (about 1:100 car rides), but the odds of leaving both my keys and my wallet in the car are astronomical.

Second; I have an illogical conditioned reflex to lock the car while getting out of it. It's a simple procedure of lifting the handle to open the door, and while that handle is being actuated I can reach out with a few fingers and easily lock the door. However, this does not work in the favor or insuring that I have my keys on my person prior to closing the locked door. My proposal to eliminate this issue is to simply recondition my locking reflex into one where I lock the car after closing the car door using the key. If I cannot accomplish this, it would be because I have left my key inside the car. Once this reflex has been so ingrained that it is automatic, I will have added another layer of defense onto the statistical odds of being completely locked out of my car.

I am happy to report that possessing a smart phone has paid off once again, as it allowed me to search for local locksmith companies on the fly, once locked out of my car, so that I could get home in a timely manner. This prevented my better half from having to drive four hours from our home into South Carolina in order to bail me out with one of the spare keys for the Civic. It also gave me access to my kindle library to read during the relatively short duration between securing the services of a locksmith and their actual arrival time. I was also able to get a hold of my better half with the phone, and even though I ultimately did not need her to drive down to South Carolina, it was comforting to know that I at least had a solid, non-destructive plan B. ( I actually had about a dozen plans lined up on how to deal with the situation, but they get more undesirable as they increase in letter count away from Plan A).

Book Review; There Are Other Rivers

The perils of shopping for books via Amazon are relatively few and easy to enumerate. First, unless you read the proffered sample, you don't get the same experience as you would in a bookstore. Second, it's far too easy to add books to a wish list without properly vetting them first. Third, which is really just an extension of the second, it's far to easy to just snap up cheap books.

I've fallen prey to all three perils, and Alistair Humphreys "There Are Other Rivers" is an example of the second one. This book loosely tells the story of the author's foot trek, following a river from the Indian Ocean up into the Himalaya mountains. It only tangentially deals with the people and experiences he has, however.

Book wishlists are, by definition, self selected. Look through my wishlist and you'll find a lot of survival fiction, woods lore, and travel journals of the epic adventure variety. When I put this book on my list, I thought that it was an example of the latter. It wasn't.

That's not to say that it wasn't a good read. I enjoyed reading the book, even though it was quite a bit shorter than I thought it would be. Rather, it was more like the "out of season bird alighting on my shoulder". An unexpected pleasure, momentarily pleasing, but not the sort of stuff that epics are woven from. Unless the bird talks, that is.

This book is more of a collection of diary entries than a travel journal. By which I mean that it doesn't have a real narrative, lumps of time are lost due to the nature of journal writing, and it focuses more on what the author thinks and feels rather than what he did. This isn't necessarily bad, but because of that second peril I had thought that I was getting into something else.

And, let me be frank, I'm not terribly interested in delving into another man's feelings without good reason. There were some high points and morals to derive, but mostly I found myself skipping ahead, which is never a good sign.

I'd give this book a 45 on my new corrected bell curve scale. It's within that time range of entertaining and enjoyable books that makes for good reading, but ultimately it was somewhat underwhelming.

Twitter; Shucks and Other Comments

I've been fighting with the ruttin' Twitter timeline widget on this page for perhaps the last week, trying to get the thing to work. Turns out it was user error; one of the applications I use to bar internet services from tracking me was also not allowing Twitter to incorporate the code into this blog.

Grr. I think the application (Disconnect) should be smarter than that, but I'm not a computer programmer (any more). I guess I shouldn't be too picky, since I've barely touched the code on this site other than a few tweaks and clean up operations here and there.

Anyway; Boo Hiss to the programmers for Disconnect; for not making a product that's smart enough to tell a tracking code from a useful javascript code. Then again, the application is FREE, so I guess I shouldn't complain too much. The takeaway is that those NOT using a tracking blocker, and who have updated browsers, should be able to see my twitter feed now. This is a good thing, right?

The Trudge

You know, about a month ago I was pretty much bored and looking for stuff to do to take up my time. Well, when it rains it pours, and now I've got something planned for every day for the next few weeks plus. No real time off either, just "go, go, go!".

I'm not complaining, really, but the truth is that I know I'm going to get tired eventually, and then the bout between my schedule and I will stop being a slugfest and become instead more of a test of my endurance. My ability to trudge on.

I've got work hours lined up on mid-shifts, appointments for a few wedding related things, a couple of trips out of the state on school business, a party to plan at the secret lair, papers to read, and at some point I'll need to look over the final draft of the manuscript for my own paper before it's sent to the publisher. Also! The lawn could use a pickup, put up, and a trim. Yikes, maybe I'd best stop typing and get to it.

Civic Minding; Errata

I've been driving the Civic for a few weeks now and I'm happy to report that it's functioning at full capacity again, albeit with somewhat lower fuel efficiency than I expected. Since I have not undertaken a long road trip to this point consisting of primarily highway miles, I'm left with the hypothesis that the type of mileage I am putting on the car while going back and forth to work is not conducive for achieving peak fuel efficiency for this particular make and model of vehicle. I'm sure a hybrid would shrug off stop and go traffic, but the Civic hates it.

I will be putting the Civic up to it's first real road trip soon, in order to visit the universities that have offered me good award packages to pursue a PhD. I guess I'll get a taste for what the repairs and cleaning have done for the Civic then. In the meantime, it could use another cleaning; I missed a spot on the shifter column that has been triggering my faux-CD, and apparently there was some more tree sap down in the driver's side window slide that has gotten back onto the window that I need to clean off. Other than that; vaccuming never really hurts, right?

Other thoughts on the Civic;
- No clock on the dash means I've gotten used to wearing a wristwatch again, to avoid the fumbling of pulling out my phone to check the time. I'm not really looking forward to having a lily white patch on my arm whenever I take off my watch, but watches don't really help you tell time if you don't wear them.
- All other things being equal, the Civic is a pretty easy car to break into. There's nothing to be done for this, of course, but it does give me cause for concern in an Op-Sec point of view. I'm considering putting one of my smaller safes in the Civic and using a metal cord to lock it in place underneath the passenger seat. There's a ridge underneath the passenger seat that should prevent the safe from sliding forward under braking, and it would get things out of sight. The rest of my EDC bag and it's associated contents can go either behind the driver's seat for short time periods, or in the trunk for extended time periods. Not sure what else I can do.
- I burn my running lights constantly, because it's a rather small car, painted a dark color. That makes it hard to see; the only issue is that I run the risk of burning out my running lights. I need to pick of a replacement bulb for each and store them in the trunk to be armed against that. I'd rather avoid being pulled over by the Police for a fishing trip if I can.
- My better half hates driving the car, because it's too low to the ground. Not really much I can do about that.. OR IS THERE?

Jesus, look at that. I'd almost think it was awesome if it wasn't so ludicrous. 

Speaking of my better half, I think it's time to get my rear in gear for the day. She's got a crippled coffee maker and some errands to run. Better go get her some coffee like I promised, and get started on my own chores.

Book Review: Rikki Tikki Tavi

Man, do I love me some Kipling. It's not a joke to say that I spend a pretty decent chunk of my younger life, book or verse of Kipling in hand, sword branch in the other, swinging my way through the wilds of rural North Carolina. Adventure, combat, philosophy, reason, ideals for manhood.. all to be found in Kipling's body of work.

To say that I have great respect for that work is to put it mildly.

Rikki Tikki Tavi is one of those "books" (It can be had as a separate book, but it's really a short story from one of the Jungle Book collections) that really stuck with me as a kid. It's about a young Mongoose that finds himself, after being cast from his home by a swollen river, embroiled in a small war for control over a compound in India where a family lives. The war, of course, is with snakes.

Great book. Short! But great, simply because it gets right down to the damned point without much knocking about. Does the Mongoose need a reason to fight a snake? No, because that's what Mongoose do; they fight and eat snakes. You do get the sense that the Mongoose (Rikki) knows what he is doing is gallant, but that kind of takes a back seat to his just wanting to rise to the challenge. A sentiment that I can appreciate.

It's about time to revisit my scale for reviewing books, because I think that they are getting skewed away from the low to medium side in favor of mid 70's reviews. This may be an artifact that my book selection has been edited to only books that I think I will enjoy, but that being said the average enjoyment really should be an even 50, not a 75. A 75 should be *really* enjoying a book, and a perfect 100 should mean that I enjoyed the book immensely, then turned around and read it again and found no flaws in it. Rikki Tikki Tavi really, then, falls right in the mid 60's because while I did really enjoy it, it could have been a bit longer. Oh, not much longer, perhaps a second chapter where the children of Nag and Nagina from a prior clutch of eggs come to exact revenge. Consequences and whatnot. Still, it's a great book, and one would do well to read it.