I was LARPing before people knew it was an insult

I mean, we knew it was nerdy. And when I expalined to some mundane that I went to the park every Sunday and sword faught with my friends, I could tell that they thought this was a weird way to use my time, but there was no sense that they would use the term as an insult for people that didn’t do it.

There were some people that enjoyed making costumes, and some that loved talking in funny accents and pretending they were someone else. I participated in those things to some degree, (My costume was a beige shirt that laced up in the front, and my accent was the spaniard Carlos DeMorpheous) but I was really there because I loved fighting. The best moments of flow in my life have been while holding a foam covered PVC pipe. When someone thrusts at you, and you step forward instead of pack as you parry with your off-hand weapon, then spin and slash them in the back- it feels like you’re invincible. Like you are channeling the god of melee.

To parry a swing you block their sword with yours, but if you dodge it by going on your tiptoes and making your body in the shape of a C then your sword is free to chop off their exposed arm. No one expects the Spanish Inquisition! At some point our group was meeting with another so there was much combat among the unfamiliar. I was fighting Kelly Chandler and was using my signature C move and kept getting hit in the stomach as opposed to just the shirt. I don’t know if she had deceptively long arms or a better lean or what, but even though my timing was perfect I was not getting clear. I think the fourth time she got me she says in a kindly way “I think maybe you should try parrying like everybody else.” And I took a deep breath and said “It might not look like it from where you are, but I swear I’m very good at this, and there’s something about you in particular that’s making this not work.”

We were lined 8 on 8 for a ditch battle, and someone said “How do you kill that girl with the pink swords?!” That girl was my then girlfriend and now wife. She had a 2 sworded technique we called “The Quizinart of Doom.” She would stand in the field with her hip cocked all casual and one sword laying across her shoulder like she had forgot it was there, and then someone would approach her and suddenly it’s flying blades of death. “How do you kill that girl? You focus all of your mind on her center of mass, and fire off a quick shot, and you will kill her. There’s a good chance she will kill you too and you’ll almost definitely lose a limb, but you can kill her. She’s all offense and no D. Easy to kill, hard to survive.”

Training through Stories

After describing how a system in the power plant works, I try to tell a story about it. After talking about the slaker I tell them about sending someone to the slaker because the screw feeder tripped. They reset the overload on the screw and call for a restart and it trips again, but what they find is that there’s nothing wrong with the screw feeder- the rotary feeder downstream never tripped and looks fine on the screen, but at the slaker you see that the chain drive hopped off the gear. That made the lime back up until the screw was trying to crush it at which point it tripped the overload.

On a system that works in series the problem at one point often has it’s root downstream

What’s the difference between a breaker trip and an Overload trip? Both trip on high current, but the time delay on a breaker trip is basically instant, because it’s trying to protect against electrocution from a wire grounding out. An Overload will trip at a much lower current, but have a time delay of maybe 15 seconds. That tells you that it’s not an electrical fault, but a physical problem causing the motor to work harder than it’s designed to. Maybe a bearing is going out on the motor or the pump it’s driving. Maybe there’s a stick clogging up the impeller.

The slaking system is messy. Lime slurry splashes out of doors when you open them for inspections. it cakes up on the inside walls and has to be washed out. Grit gets caught on the grit screen and then has to be washed out. I was diligent about touring my area and keeping up with it. The earlier that you catch problems the easier they are to fix. I turned over to night shift and left. When I came back in the night shift Operator was irate. Ranting at me about how bad a mess I left him. I was utterly dismissive. I knew I was a conscientious operator. He could say whatever he wanted and it couldn’t phase me because I was confident. Why should I worry what this lying asshole thinks? Tuesday we turnover with a different shift. Wednesday morning I come in and Taylor says

“Man! You FUUUUUUUUUcked ME” And then throws his head back and laughs.

I say “No way!”

and he says “The whole room was 3 inches deep in grit!”

“I swear I washed down 30 minutes before turnover!”

Taylor stopped clowning on me and thought for a second. “Did you turn the hose all the way off?” The hose was being stored in the inspection port on top of the grit screw. Apparently it was supposed to be left at a trickle to lubricate the trough of the grit screw. Without that trickle of water the grit clogs up the screw and pours up and out the sides of the trough. My ignorance had bought him over an hour of shoveling.

“Dude. I’m so sorry.”

“Cool cool. Just learn the lesson.”

So I was running my area perfectly and then leaving a time bomb for the next shift. And one guy challenges me about it and I learned nothing. The next razzed me about it and I engaged and came out better for it.

I wonder how Taylor is doing?

What are Cockles?

The other night we had were unloading an anhydrous ammonia truck when it was 8F out. We had ordered the truck for Sunday to top off the tank before the weather turned, but they failed to and blamed the weather. This was some bullshit, as not a single flake fell until 4PM and if they thought Sunday was going to be a problem they could’ve moved it up to Saturday. Monday was definitely legit undrivable… Wednesday night the truck is finally on site and tank level low enough that we’re worried that the vaporizers will start tripping.

We have an Operator working with the truck driver, and he call’s up the Shift Sup and says that “there’s something broken off in the threads” and the driver won’t be able to unload. The supervisor responds with a lecture about how that is unacceptable and how badly we need that truck. 10 minutes later they’ve got something figured out and start unloading. The Supervisor is doing a victory dance and the CRO says “Good. But you didn’t have to talk to Mason like that. He was just relaying what the driver told him.” He’s right. The better response would have been for the Sup and the driver to talk face to face. Either tell Mason “hold the driver, I’ll be right down” or “Bring the driver up to the control room.”

Later the CRO says to me “You know how you used to stand up for Darnell? Well, sometimes I’ve got to stand up for Mason.” The fact that his mental image of me includes trying to defend my Operators and he’s trying to emulate that behavior warms the heart.

Winter is Coming

It is 36F outside and very windy. The thermostat is set at 64, but it acknowledges that it’s only getting the house up to 60. We’ve had colder days than this already this winter, but this is the night when my toes hurt the worst. Our house was built in the 70’s, and the windows are honestly not tight enough. A salesmen came to our house one time and tried to get us to replace all the windows. He brought a model window in and showed that it was double paned and in between the 2 layers was some insulating gas or something ridiculous. He sprayed canned air on it upside down to get onside to frost real good and you couldn’t feel it on the other side. It was something like $17,000 dollars and he was bragging how it would pay for itself in utility savings in less than 5 years…

Would I pay 17k to have warm toes?

In 4 nights the weather is predicting it will be 2F.

I might set up a tent and an electric heater in the living room.

The house has a crawl space, and the pipes don’t freeze in the 20s, but probably will in the single digits. So tomorrow I have to buy a 4’x8′ sheet of foam insulation and cut 15 rectangles out of it to block the vents to the crawl space. This is not a good idea in the summer humidity, but is necessary if we want to take showers. The pipes are pex though, so freezing in only inconvenient, not an expensive repair.

On and Off “The Path”

It’s January, and I have been trying to be better in a handful of ways.

• Exercising more
• Writing more
• Eating less junk

I am a devotee of Jocko Willink, and have been trying to incorporate his message into my life in a way that is far more relaxed than the way he preaches it… So my January efforts have been in the shadow of his “Discipline Equals Freedom RESET.” And the last 3 days I have been so bad that I couldn’t bring myself to play his podcast.

Is this what Shame feels like?

Fitting in getting Fit

I have a strength training routine in my home gym. For most of the last 15 years I worked 12hr rotating shift work. When you work for 12hrs, and you spend 30 min driving each way. And you cook, eat, shower, and do minimal family time, and sleep 7 hours- you get about a 45 minutes that’s actually yours. I tend to zone out and waste it.

Working 10hr days, suddenly has more possibilities to it.

I got to coach Joule’s soccer team, and that got me a bit of cardio 2 days a week. And when soccer ended I looked at picking back up the home gym. And Joule decided she was going to be my “Gym bro.” And she’s pretty good at it. She shouts out the rep counts, and says “Come on! One more!” but she does add to the scheduling problem. Do we work out right when I get home at 4:45? When dinner’s about to be ready and we ought to be helping and setting the table. After dinner we clean up, and I don’t like working out without letting my food settle… Next thing I know she’s sent to the shower and the window is closed.Then I go swing the battle ropes for a 5-10minutes by myself and call it.

Close up on barbell on the floor in the gym.

It’s ultimately my lack of discipline to blame, but the other day we went to do pull day and looked back at the log and realized it had been 12 days since the last pull day. It should have been 3. We still squeezed out another rep and continued to make GAINZ, but it should be more

Fighting the good fight

There’s a thing I do when dealing with an angry wife. I listen to her complaints, and find the specific things about them that I legitimately did wrong, and humbly and honestly apologize for them. I try and do it without siting the mitigating circumstances, or the parts of the problem which I think she is responsible for. I find my links in the chain of events, or my exacerbating defense mechanisms and I acknowledge that things would be better if I had not done these things.

Sometimes when I did this, Stanna’s relief was immediate and obvious. I imagine her thinking:

“Look! He understands his mistake! Now we can move forward together and life will be better.”

But often things weren’t as embettered as she expected. And many times I would find some new way to screw things up which (though not identical) should have been avoided if I had actually internalized the lesson.

Art by Hotpot.ai

Over time she came to listen more carefully to my apologies. She makes note of the careful boundaries drawn around the behavior I am apologizing for. She will sometimes point at the things I’m specifically not apologizing for and ask “what about that?!” and I will be forced to say: “Oh, I’m not sorry for that part.” and if my hand is forced “I actually think that’s your fault.”

She may see this as word games to avoid taking full responsibility. I see them as an honest attempt to take as much responsibility as I can. If I’m forced to say I’m sorry for the things that I’m not, then I REALLY won’t change. It would turn what is now a carefully crafted attempt to own my part of the problem to an empty attempt to placate an angry person.

Now that she’s taught herself to listen for them, she’s grown to hate my “fake” apologies. I don’t think she understands that the boundaries are what keep the apologies real.

Also, change is kind of hard. A large percentage of life (at least, MY life) is run on autopilot. Active analysis and decision making is exhausting. So even when I know I’m wrong about something and I agree that I should do it different, I often don’t ACTUALLY do it any differently out of habitual thinking. That sucks. And despite all the ways I’ve changed over the years, I haven’t learned how to change whatever I want whenever I want to. So I don’t know how to unsuck it.

401k

• 

Link to spreadsheet

So, I did my annual report on my retirement savings. I’m really proud of it, despite the fact that it’s not super amazing or anything. Simultaneously it feels crazy uncomfortable talking about it, because it feels like bragging.

I wish I had started the spreadsheet a little bit earlier, as you can only get statements going back 10 years, so there is 2 years of data lost. I worked for Nucor for 1 year in 2008. I don’t think I contributed to my 401k at all, and that all of it came in the form of a $15k profit sharing. I did not have a good experience at Nucor (my first year out of the Navy) but they did compensate well- with the caveat that they use their “production bonus” structure to limit their losses to salaries in a down market. From 2009 on I have worked at my power plant, but the labor contractor changed from Naes to nrg at the 5 year point. The deposits made in 2009 is the data that I really wish hadn’t been lost.

Some interesting bits from this year:

• The amount of money in the Nucor account is now (15 years later) approximately equal to the amount they paid me that year
• After 8 years and ~4x the contributions: the nrg account finally caught up to the Naes account. That 5 year head start really illustrates how time works for you on compound interest.
• My total gains this year across all accounts exceeded my Salary for the second time – but take that with a grain of salt, as I lost more that my Salary in 2022.

All of these savings started at age 33, so a little late, but not too bad. I am a little bit ahead of the “6x your salary by 50 years old” benchmark put out by Fidelity, but not excessively so. I am definitely NOT the guy at the plant that’s worth the most, and I only hit the federal contribution limit twice in all my years of saving.

Is this comforting to people that feel a little behind, to see that its achievable? Or is this terribly classless and I should take it down immediately? Let me know in the comments.

Lost Wor(l)ds 10

Catherine-wheel

Catherine wheel or breaking wheel, is an instrument of torturous execution originally associated with Saint Catherine of Alexandria

Catherine wheel (firework), is a type of spinning firework

---

“It was at that moment that he rushed me. It was lucky that I had opened the door, or we should have gone through it. We did a Catharine-wheel together down the passage. Somehow we gathered up a chair upon our way, and bounded on with it towards the street.”

*I’m leaning towards the breaking wheel definition, as it probably goes back further and the source text was published in 1912 and it seems that the torture device goes back further, and also the bodies tangled in the chair could be reminiscent of the torture device.

**These 10 words in ~30 pages of reading were 1 days work.

Lost Wor(l)ds 9

parthenogenesis

: reproduction by development of an unfertilized usually female gamete that occurs especially among lower plants and invertebrate animals

---

“And that the germ plasm is different from the parthenogenetic egg?”

 

In context of the story the character is deliberately speaking pseudo-sciency mumbo-jumbo