Lorindól

Parkside’s value-for-money quality has been astonishing these past few years. I took the risk with them maybe 4-5 years ago and not one power tool from their lineup has had any problems yet. Today I just set up their quiet compressor at my garage, and the damn thing really is so silent that you can even have a discussion using your normal voice when it’s running.

I remain baffled by this. But since I can barely differentiate red and green in optimal lighting conditions, it does not come as a surprise.

We X’s were born into the analog world and grew up as the digital age started to emerge. We have the luxury of knowing both.

Leaf blowers in small yards are pointless, agreed. I would never use one in the suburbs.

But I do own one and I use it at my family’s farm, for one day every autumn. It would take 3-4 days just to rake the leaves, with the blower I can easily create large piles here and there. Then I gather all the piles and take them to my leaf compost heap.

Before the blower this used to take a full week. Now I can clear all the lawns in just two days.

I’ve used a Nexus 7 mini-tablet for ten years. It runs on Android 6.0 and has been able to do everything I need from a tablet. It only started to slow down drastically this summer, I guess I’ll have to flash LineageOS to give it a few more years of life.

Jesus. That theory is the one my professors talked about in university, as an example of “how to never teach anyone anything”.

Yes. For years now. And I am horrified.

I am a teacher and I’ve had students who could not find the article about lions from the animal encyclopedia I handed to them. And when I helped them to find it, one started crying, one tried to read it (stopped after a minute or so) and one asked “Isn’t there some lion video we could watch instead?”. It was two pages with a lot of pictures. But it was too much for these 5th graders.

Reading proper books has become almost impossible to kids because their attention span is almost non-existent with written material.

We’ve tried to add more emphasis on basic reading skills in the early grades for some time now, but it seems to have very little effect.

In Finland many high school seniors go to an overnight booze cruise some time before their final exams. It can get pretty wild.

1. Do not let Mom ever have brain surgery.
2. Make grandma see a different doctor. The current one is clueless.
3. Bust Dad for smoking in secret and force him to stop. You know how it can be done.
4. Idea of Mom and Dad getting a divorce is a scary one, but it probably would make their and your life a lot better.
5. Start jogging daily. You’ll never like it, but you need to do it to.
6. Ask her out when you’re 15. She likes you too.
7. Start taking guitar and piano lessons. Turns out you have musical talent, you just haven’t realized it yet.
8. No, I won’t tell you how to get rich. You’d fuck your life up royally with unlimited money.

When we met, we were both pretty broken from past experiences. She had had a line of bad relationships and I had my own issues. She was creative, smart and very beautiful, way out of my league.

With her I was happy for the first time in my adult life and I loved her just as she was. We enjoyed the same things and our friends talked of us as a “perfect couple”. And for a time everything truly was pretty perfect.

Then one day she called me and said: “I’m sorry. I can’t do this anymore.”

After the initial shock I managed to say: “I love you and want you to be happy. If this makes you happy, so be it.”

And that was it. I was emotionally devastated.

I never saw her again. Nine months later a common friend told me she had a baby coming in the next month. Apparently she had switched me for a better candidate and gotten herself pregnant almost instantly.

Realizing this broke me even more. I guess our time together had fixed her to a point where she was ready to start a family, just not with me. According to my friend she got three kids with the same guy and is very happy with her life.

It took me years to recover from this and I don’t think that I’ll ever really get “over it”.

I had a larger surgical procedure done when I was 7. They gave me the calming pre meds maybe half an hour before the operation to make sure that I wouldn’t freak out with the IV. I remember clearly how strange it felt when the pre meds started to kick in, the whole world slowed down and everything felt “good”.

Then they wheeled me into the OR and took my robe off. The operating table was cold and I commented on it, the anesthesia doctor just laughed and said “don’t worry, in a minute it won’t be”. Then she put the IV in and asked me to count down from twenty. “Nine” was the last word I managed to stutter before I went under.

Then I woke up in the recovery room, about 9 hours later. It felt like I had slept a really long, dreamless sleep. The operation had gone as planned, but the recovery period in the hospital was still pretty painful.

Wasn’t that Chewie’s dad?

You forgot greed.

Very fast reflexes and I can see in the dark far better than most people.

I had never realized that my eyes were different until my compulsory miltary service. I could reasily read maps when others couldn’t see shit and I never stumbled during night training in the forest.

Fast reflexes are generally pretty cool to havel, but it’s not fun when a knife falls off the kitchen table and it is impossible to stop your own hand trying to catch it.

My “learned talent” is fixing mechanical devices. When I was 6 or 7 I took apart and fixed the family VCR so I could finish watching the Smurfs. My mom found me studying the jammed mechanism, with all the parts lying on the living room carpet. She had a fit and wanted to collect the parts away, I started crying and told her that I’ll never get it back together if she messes up their places. She watched as I released the stuck tape wheel and reassembled the device. And it worked.

I’ve fixed countless devices with just visual analysis and pure intuition after that.

I have many projects going on.

1. Complete window / frame restauration underway at the country house built in the fifties, I scraped all the original paint off by hand and now I’m waiting for drier days to finish the painting.

2. Fixing the terrace at the country house, I laid the first new layer of concrete to fix the corroded parts just last Thursday. When it dries I’ll see if an entire additional layer is required. Next summer I’ll also rebuild the terrace fence and install growth lines for vines over the terrace.

3. Acoustic Research AR-7x speaker restauration. I installed the new woofer surrounds few weeks ago, now I’m waiting for the ferrofluid for the tweeters to arrive by mail. Just yesterday I found suitable and cheap linen cloth for the new covers in a nearby cloth shop.

4. Fixing the rain gutters at home, the weight of last winter’s snow and ice pulled some if the screws off. This is a priority.

5. Yard fence repainting, I rebuilt a large part of the fence in June but the weather has been too hot / humid to paint the old parts.

6. New ceiling curtain rail installation at home. Would be easy per se, but it’s a two man job and the ceiling is high…

7. Motorcycle needs a new heat resistant paint job for the exhaust.

8. Two sets of new custom speaker stand parts are cut and ready for welding, just haven’t had the time to start it yet.

…and many more.