So we've been discussing getting new everyday glassware for some time. Margie's not been fond of the big-wide glasses we've had, and I've not liked the big-tall ones,

I've had my eye set for a long time on the Libbey Inverness glasses. You see them in restaurants a fair amount, heavy glass with a pentagonal bottom. Margie's been mixed on them, but she finally offered that she had no real objections to them, after we saw them at the local Pier One store.

So today, amidst various peregrinations, we stopped by and cleaned them out of their supply (i.e., bought ten of the Tumblers, plus ten of the Old Fashioned size). So now we can actually set a table with consistent glassware without pulling out the crystal, which will be nice. And they fit in the dishwasher well, too. Plus, as they are food service glasses, they're designed to be tough and break-resistant.

Of course, it's tough to get out of Pier One with only what you went in for. Which is why we ended up with some replacement lanterns for out front for parties and so forth, as well as some additional ideas of ways to spend our money.

Not a cheap afternoon, but a productive one.

Filed under :: Food & Drink :: Home Improvement
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Introducing Kate to the Addictive Joys of the Botanic Garden Plant Sale

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I've done a few deep waterings in the past few weeks with the manual oscillating sprinkler in front (a few deeper than I'd intended (coughovernightcough), so I figured it was probably time to energize the sprinkler system for the season.

With Katherine to help and spot for me, I turned it all on, went through each zone and ...

VICTORY!

All zones fired off, all sprinkers worked fine, God's in His lawn chair, all's right with the world!

Nice.

Also did some cleaning work in the back garden beds, pulling out deadwood and leaves and so forth. Decided, with my arm being a bit sore (no, really) to only do a part of the back -- but also sent Katherine hallooing off after the Fresh Spring Crop (if not Locust Plague) of Dandelions.

They look so pretty in bloom. Why do they have to get so ugly after ...?

Regardless, very jazzed about the sprinklers.

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They're coming today to excavate and fix it -- $4K if we're lucky, $8K if we're not. Joy. 

So I'm working from home, since, quoth the statement of work.

There will be a trench approximately 2' wide x 8' long (midyard). Everything in the way will be affected.

Ya think? We're going to do some emergency iris removal, maybe a rose bush, when they arrive and describe the site of the carnage in more detail.

This repair does not cover any unforeseens such as cavities, cave-ins, buried debris, sprinkler systems, etc., etc.

I'm pretty certain they'll hit a sprinkler line in there somewhere. Ah, well -- I knew there was a reason (besides the weather) I didn't turn on the sprinklers last week.

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Spiffy -- a newly declassified 2003 Justice Dept. memo (rescinded 9 months later) that told the Defense Dept. it could do pretty much anything it wanted when it came to interrogating prisoners.

Sent to the Pentagon's general counsel on March 14, 2003, by John C. Yoo, then a deputy in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, the memo provides an expansive argument for nearly unfettered presidential power in a time of war. It contends that numerous laws and treaties forbidding torture or cruel treatment should not apply to U.S. interrogations in foreign lands because of the president's inherent wartime powers.

"If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network," Yoo wrote. "In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch's constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions."

Interrogators who harmed a prisoner would be protected by a "national and international version of the right to self-defense," Yoo wrote. He also articulated a definition of illegal conduct in interrogations -- that it must "shock the conscience" -- that the Bush administration advocated for years.

"Whether conduct is conscience-shocking turns in part on whether it is without any justification," Yoo wrote, explaining, for example, that it would have to be inspired by malice or sadism before it could be prosecuted.

In other words, don't worry your little head about "treaties" and "law." Do whatever you think is "necessary," as long as you don't openly chortle maniacally whist doing it.

Justice and Law in the Bush Administration.   How invigorating.

(The memo itself.)

Filed under :: Geopolitical Brouhaha :: Home Improvement :: Politics & Law
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Raked up (with Kitten's help) four trash cans full of leaves from the back lawn and bed fringes -- and that without actually cleaning out the beds of deadwood from last season. That's on next weekend's schedule.

Seriously thinking I'll need to fire off the sprinklers -- or do some manual sprinkling -- this week. Even with the frosting of snow last night, things are getting kind of dry in the front yard.

Pulled the first dandelion of the season.

Meanwhile, hilarity almost ensued as Margie started the laundry -- and while loading it up, saw water beginning to pool up on the floor. Yikes!

Turns out (after she looked online to see how to open the washer up) that it looks like the actual nozzle to fill the tub got knocked out of alignment enough to partly spray outside the tub. Got things set right, and ran the rest of the laundry without a hitch.

Though I did run out and grab another water alarm to put next to the washer.

Speaking of which, we've decided on someone to replace the sewer pipe out front -- for a third off the initial (overpriced) estimate, though that still leaves it in the high four figures. But if that gets done soon, then we can get some estimates on the landscaping we want to do out front and maybe even get that taken care of this year, too.

And so it goes.

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Saturday, pre-Easter Soiree, I spent a few hours out front chopping and hacking at deadwood left over from the Fall -- in particular, chopping back the ornamental grasses and various perennials that die back with the cold. Yes, sir, yes, sir, five trash cans full. And that was just the front yard.

We've all sorts of bulbs bulbing, and the irises are cropping up nicely. Lots of stuff beginning to green up at the bases under the leaf mulch. Nothing needs watering yet -- but if we keep getting lots of sun, warm temps, and minimal snow/rain, it won't be long before I fire up the sprinklers.

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It was relatively quiet weekend at the Consortium, as we rested up from a very hectic week and tried to find some peace and quiet before our own personal March Madness commences. Most of it was relaxing, playing some LotRO, and sleeping in. 

But we also went on a flurry of errands on Sunday that included a stint at American Furniture Warehouse. While we didn't find what I was really looking for (a small sofa table for the breakfast room that I can use as a workspace rather than the breakfast table), we did pick up a new coffee table for the family room.

This week looks to be moderately hectic. Then a week from today I fly off to the Netherlands for a week of meetings, and fly out to Pasadena a week later for some other big action goodies. And elsewhere in the month we have a karate tournament (while I'm away), green belt testing (after I'm back), and ... just ... a lot of stuff. I added to that a bit by throwing some events onto the gaming schedule, but hopefully those will be more recreational than burdensome. 

Filed under :: Gaming :: Home Improvement :: Job Jollies :: Personal :: Travel
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So Thursday morning we had a bit of excitement at home.  About five, six years ago we had a sewer line backup that caused some (mercifully minor) flooding in one room of the basement, and at the time we purchased a little water alarm to sit on the floor in there to alert of us any problems.

The good news is, it works, and did, in fact, let Margie know that she should stop the washing machine right now.

The bad news is, of course, that it went off because of another backup.  So Margie called a recommended plumbing service and they got someone out there that day.

Now, when this previously happened, the previous plumber roto-rooted the drain down to the tap on the main sewer, out in the street, about 100 feet down the line.  And, at that time, he noted that there was some sort of problem at the connection to the tap, possibly some subsidence in the pipe, that could in the long term cause problems.

The good news was, his prediction that we would need root roto'ed every couple of years hasn't come true.  The bad news is, the "long term" is, well, today.

The plumber reported  that he'd cleaned one section about 20 feet out, and run into no problems until (ta-da) 100 feet along the pipe, at which point he couldn't go any further.  He arranged for a guy to come out the next day with a camera. 

I was home for the arrival of the camera guy and his assistant.  Here's where things get "interesting" (cf. Chinese curse).  He showed me the video feed down the sewer line and where the 102-foot mark was, at which point clearly the pipe is offset with what's beyond -- presumably (at that point) the main tap.  The line had dropped about an inch, meaning (a) a four inch pipe was now restricted in flow to a three inch pipe and (b) the continued flow would continue to undermine things, which would cause it to get worse, etc.

We got  videocassette of the sewer line.  We somehow restrained ourselves from sharing it at the party on Saturday.

The helpful plumber then went outside, tracking the beacon on the camera, and discovered something interesting.  The fault was not at the sewer main tap, out in (across) the street.  Instead, it was in our yard.  Evidently, our line takes a left turn in Albuquerque by the drive way, and cuts over to the sewer line in what seems an inefficient fashion, but in reality I'm sure made perfect sense to someone twenty-five years ago.

On the bright side, he opined that our pipe up to the problem point was in "really great shape."

On the down side, now we're talking some serious work that needs doing.  Because (now a lot of this is based on what I was told, but nothing about it didn't make sense) an important thing in the sewer line biz is "pitch" -- i.e., the angle of the pipe.  They can't just dig down nine feet at at the problem point and patch together the place where things join.  They need a consistent run of pipe at a steady angle (or set of angles).  So to get to where the joint is that failed, they either need to run a bunch of new pipe from above it to that point (joining up with the old line), or run something new from there down to the main sewer tap.  Which, of course, involves massive trenching in either case -- including, if we would go the main tap (the recommended course), trenching across the sidewalk and street (thus closing the street down).  Joy.

So plumbing man starts writing up an estimate for all this work, which he guesses will be about $13,000.  Um ... yikes? 

In the process of writing this stuff up, he mentions another way of doing this which avoids the trenching.  It's called "trenchless replacement," or "pipe bursting" -- basically they run the new pipe inside of the old pipe, pushing it outward.  It lets them make use of the old course, and avoids trenching, and is a more durable material, and will have no joints, and will probably cure global warming, too.  I made up that last one, but he certainly seemed enthused about it.

However enthused, however, the estimate remained $13K (which didn't make a lot of sense).  We can get 15% knocked off by signing up for a plumbing system maintenance service at $20/mo, which would also give us free plumbing service while it was there and so on and so forth. 

Joy.

Well, the problem is alleviated at the moment, but we do have something of a ticking time bomb on this.  We clearly need to get (at least) a second opinion and estimate -- hopefully my sense that this guy is a high-cost operator will be fulfilled -- but we are nevertheless looking at a very large chunk of change to solve the problem.

And so it goes ...

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Recently declassified papers indicate that in 1950, days after the Korean War started, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover pushed forward a plan to declare an emergency, suspend habeas corpus, and imprison 12,000 people from his "little list."

Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.

The names were part of an index that Hoover had been compiling for years. “The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States,” he wrote. “In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” it said.

[...] Hoover’s plan called for “the permanent detention” of the roughly 12,000 suspects at military bases as well as in federal prisons. The F.B.I., he said, had found that the arrests it proposed in New York and California would cause the prisons there to overflow. So the bureau had arranged for “detention in military facilities of the individuals apprehended” in those states, he wrote.

The prisoners eventually would have had a right to a hearing under the Hoover plan. The hearing board would have been a panel made up of one judge and two citizens. But the hearings “will not be bound by the rules of evidence,” his letter noted.

Of course, it's worth noting, as the article does, that this wasn't purely a Hoover scheme.

In September 1950, Congress passed and the president signed a law authorizing the detention of “dangerous radicals” if the president declared a national emergency. Truman did declare such an emergency in December 1950, after China entered the Korean War. But no known evidence suggests he or any other president approved any part of Hoover’s proposal.

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