JOURNEY OF THE ROVER: WEDDING DAY

erica and i got married just a little over a week ago. like most people i find that its easier to organize my life around deadlines and like most adults with ADHD i find that creating sometimes arbitrary deadlines with strict cut offs that i have tied to heavy social expectations creates just that flavor of total panic and anxiety necessary to actually get things done. i decide that on top of all the other deadlines that a normal person might encounter when throwing their 50 person plated-dinner backyard-wedding and following open house reception in montana in late september without the help of a formal wedding planner or formal catering company, that i should add every single other possible task and undertaking that i have been putting off in the last year to the list.

so i get it in my head that even though we are having the reception in the very same backyard in which we are having our ceremony that we need to drive away into the sunset after the ceremony in the 1959 land rover series ii that hasn’t moved in two years, if only to go around the block and come right back, and if i haven’t gotten the land rover running in time that basically our wedding doesn’t count. so after trying everything i can think of to get a spark out of the thing i finally find, with just four days to spare, a mobile mechanic who says he will come out and help me get it running.

after a couple of affirming hours of him putzing around trying exactly everything that i have tried and muttering to himself that ’that doesn’t makes sense’ he comes to three conclusions.

first: the car is ‘positive ground’ so the positive terminal of the battery is suppose to be connected directly to chassis making the entire car hot and the flow of electrons reversed from what we would expect in a modern car.

second: there is a short in the ground (positive) lead to the distributor where a wire needs to be held away from the distributor body with electrical tape until i can replace the whole distributor.

third: there is a huge hole in the fuel line from the gas tank to the fuel pump so the pump is just sucking air (you might remember i replaced the fuel pump, but didn’t notice the broken line).

so we swap the battery terminals, wrap the distributor with tape, and he leaves me to make four trips back and forth to o’reilly for hoses and clamps and now i have a running land rover!

LEAKS...

i went down into the basement today and noticed some water on the floor. apparently the east side of the house had a sprinkler every two feet, some of which were leaking, and with the rain sensor on the system not working over the last couple of days of rain there was enough water on the ground surface that it started seeping through the gap between the concrete sill and the window frame. it was clear that this had happened before. the problem was there was a built in place MDF cabinet in front of this leaky wall filled with shotgun shells and camp gear so no one had seen it happen. the only choice was to demo the cabinet in place and drag the soggy chunks out one at a time. so yusef and i donned N95s and taped a box fan to a furnace air filter and got to work in the hot humid basement. an hour and a half later we had a poker room full of sleeping pads, bags and tents, a pile ruined MFD in the alley, had chased away most of the wood lice and centipedes and shopvac-ed up most of the mess. erica got to go full smash room on the MDF with an axe after work and by the end of the day the wall, though looking bad, was starting to dry. the steps from here? besides fixing the sprinklers holes and turning off every other sprinkler head i don’t really know. i talked to a friend who is better at this stuff than i am and he though sealing the inside of the basement wall might trap water and cause it to rot so in the meantime we have replaced the MDF cabinet with wire storage racks so we can see what’s going on behind them and we will wait and see what happens…

FISHES

david brooks, director of montana trout unlimited, invited us to participate in their yearly memorial float fundraiser and i felt that with my dad having been such a big supporter of the organization that it made sense for us to donate to a cause he loved and to get some guided fishing in too. we floated the clark fork from clinton to turah and it was a beautiful clear warm but not hot day in western montana and the fields along the river had been regreened by a week of afternoon monsoon rains. our guide matt was a great coach, helping me get over some bad casting habits that i have developed over the last 30 lazy years of piss-poor flyfishermanship and built erica into a consistent confident caster in less than an hour. the space goat pale ales and cheetos flowed steadily on our raft at the same easy pace as the august river and by the end of the float we had caught 14 fish between us. we lay a rock with my dad’s name engraved on it into the shallows at the pull-out and it was immediately surrounded by a small school of curious minnows which felt appropriate, and then we went home for an afternoon nap: what a wonderful way to spend a late summer day.

CANCER

my dad died of kidney failure a year ago friday after a five year fight with leukemia, skin cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer, and multiple bouts of sepsis. he was first diagnosed with leukemia in 2020 but in the end it was a prostate cancer tumor that finally blocked his urinary track and caused the kidney failure. i was in the room with him looking at MRI slides with the research oncologist when they first spotted the tumor that would kill. we had driven to spokane where he was getting experimental radiation therapy: they knew he had prostate cancer but they hadn’t seen this particular tumor. they said there was nothing they could do and said he had weeks to months to live. we went home to missoula and a few weeks later i moved up from denver to take care of him. as things went down hill he got weaker and weaker and had to pee more and more frequently, getting up seven difficult and uncomfortable times a night to pee less than an ounce into a urinal we kept next to the bed. he could only get that much out if he was standing, so he would wake up and try to get out of bed even after his legs became too weak to hold him. we got into a routine: a bell on the foot of his bed, me sleeping with one eye open so i could help him before tried to stand alone fell. after many failed attempts to catheter him by the hospice people that left him in a drug induced haze from which he would never fully return, a urologist who lived down the street made a house call and got a catheter in with a single flick of the wrist, but at that point it was too late and his kidneys were shot. he died four days later.

ENOSPEC

i decided to host the company website on cloudflare workers thinking there was a certain amount of security baked into everything they do. workers is cloudflare’s serverless computing platform, which we had ironically building a webserver and it was pretty damn good at it for a while but then the builds started failing out of nowhere and giving us an ENOSPEC: Error No SPace left on device. the website is tiny and even rolling back to previous working builds produces the same error so something strange is going on under the hood but workers is black box of mystery so its been hard to figure out just what that strangeness is, probably some sort of caching that we can’t purge. cloudflare has a discord channel for support but so far my posts there have been met only by the sound of crickets so today we have taken to just trying different things to see if we can break it in new and exciting ways, and we have, but we definitely haven’t gotten it to work and so i have taken to shaking my fist at the æther and screaming, ‘damn you cloud… flare!’

HOLLAND LAKE

i took erica and yusef to holland lake over the weekend to hike to the waterfall. holland lake was beautiful, clear water in dense pine and tamarack forest framed by the still snowcapped missions. we came here a lot when i was growing up. i am pretty sure i caught my first fish on a snoopy branded spinning rod on holland lake and in my early teens i remember a summer wedding at which i paddled a beautiful thickly accented polish girl around the lake in a canoe. in my twenties, visiting from hawaii, a couple of friends and i paddled out to the far, wildside of the lake on bodyboards with snorkel masks to spearfish. there was a huge submerged pine trunk laying on the steeply receding bank, dwarfed by the depth and clarity of the water and the school of trout was right where we thought it was going to be, hanging out between that giant snag and the cold inlet where the icy waterfall fed stream came into the lake. i took a huge breath and slipped off my board and dived as deep into the exponentially increasing cold as i could stand to try and get beneath the fish and drive them upwards towards my friend who floated near the surface with a hawaiian sling spear. it worked exactly as planned and he speared a fat one right in the top of its head killing it instantly. we got to the surface, he with fish in hand, and though about it and determined that what we had done was almost certainly illegal and decided to lie to everyone when we got back to camp about our luck spearfishing holland lake.

CYBERPUNK: TRANSMETROPOLITAN

i was waiting on a shot of espresso at tandem bakery and noticed that they had transmetropolitan volume one in almost new condition selling for five bucks. its been a while but considering that we are living in this dystopian cyberpunk future that is our present i thought it was only appropriate to invite spider jerusalem back into my life.

DON'T GET SPOOFED: MX, SPF, DKIM, AND DMARC

one of my first cybersecurity gigs was helping a client lock down their email domain after they realized someone was spoofing their email address. last week i found myself dealing with email domain records again, first for another client who got a new domain and wanted to switch email clients and then for myself as i set up ART Educational with Proton Mail. there are five major things to consider with email: the MX record which defines routing from the email domain to the email server, the SPF record that ensures that sent emails come from authorized servers, the DKIM record that verifies that the emails haven’t been altered in transit, and the DMARC record that sets polices that instruct the recipient mail servers on how to handle authentication failures.it isn’t all that complicated but you would be amazed how often email isn’t set up correctly or with full security. for a small business this can be catastrophic as emails will go unsent, get rejected, end up in recipients spam folders, or worst of all, be sent by malicious actors pretending to be you and asking for money or sensitive information seemingly from your email address.

OLD HAUNTS: THE MISSOULA CLUB

the missoula food scene is missing all sorts of things, but one thing it has in spades is damn good burgers. i used to come to “the mo club” with my dad where he would have lunch with a bunch of “old guys” some of whom were in there 90s when i used to go with him in his late 70s. i think almost all of them now, including my dad of course, are dead, with only tom graff, one of the younger ones and my high school film teacher, left. the bar is cash only and has been open in some incarnation since 1890. the burgers come with or without bacon, your choice of cheese, pickles, and onions, grilled or raw, with ketchup, yellow, or insanely hot brown mustard in squeeze bottles on the counter, and mayo packets by request. they also have chips and a huge jar of pickled turkey gizzards on the counter behind the bar and while i have never seen anyone eat the latter i have been told that one of the older bartenders, shane, eats them all the time. the beef is local, of course, the buns are toasted on the flattop with the burgers and are perfectly soft and greasy. the walls are covered in university of montana grizzlies photos and memorabilia going back to the nineteen teens, there are a couple of video poker and keno machines and a pinball machine that seems to rotate (it is currently ghostbusters themed). the men’s room is three urinals on one wall and an un-stalled toilet against the other and a sink in the middle with a paper towel dispenser above it and no mirror: i guess we are expect to shit and check ourselves out elsewhere, and i am fine with that.

CALLE OCHO

miami is the land of the sandwich: cubano and medianoche from sanguchi and frita cubanas from el rey de las fritas on calle ocho, huge slabs of mahimahi barely contained by their rolls on the coast, tropical fruit, tomatoes, fresh mozzarella and smoked salmon on baguette from sandwhicheri in south beach, and fruit based batido milkshakes and tiny cups of thick super sweet cafecito available everywhere to wash them all down with…