noise."Misgiving 2018 · 12:40pm Nov 22nd, 2018
Happy Thanksgiving, y’all!
In case you were wondering about the blog title--I know I’ve brought it up before, but for all the new people following me, one of the developmentally disabled guys I work with on the weekends conflates Christmas and Thanksgiving into ‘Misgiving.’
If all goes according to plan*, I’m gonna start y’all off tomorrow morning with something simple and amusing, and kind of thematic for Thanksgiving. Vaguely, sideways sort of related. Which is to say that they play football games on Thanksgiving here in the States, and this story is tangentially-related to football, being a sequel to The Trouble with Unicorns. Which was about football.
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I realize this is the wrong kind of football and sort of confusing, but I’m appealing to an international audience, so there.
If you want to get a jump on it--and who wouldn’t?--it’s gonna be published in a Prompt-a-Day collection. The group is kinda defunct these days, but I might as well get around to finishing what I started four years ago, right?
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*Thus far this week, plans have had to be changed multiple times due to circumstances beyond my control, and I have no reason to expect that things will go significantly better for the rest of the week. Just a fool’s hope, really.
That’s gonna be followed up by another story later in the day. Probably in the evening, perhaps around dinner time for those of you who live in the eastern time zone. (I can’t give an exact time, ‘cause I’ll be on the road around then.) It’s going to be a nice, SoL fic for a reader of mine who has no idea it’s coming.
It’s very much a story that ought to have a blog post attached to it, and I’m sure some of y’all are going to get to the end of it and wonder why there isn’t one. Well, the fact is that I simply did not have enough time to write one, and I won’t have enough time until Saturday.
Y’all might have noticed that I got a day off-schedule on The Haunting, and over the next week updates might wind up being slightly delayed as well. You’d think that a four-day weekend would be plenty of time to have all my ducks in a row, but the truth is that I’ve got a lot of ducks that need to be corralled. At the shop, we are $400 short of having our second-best year ever, and things aren’t likely to be slowing down there.
We’re also into tech week for the play, and the set still isn’t all the way built. That’s a Sunday project, at least that’s the current plan. It was supposed to happen last week, but was not due to unforeseen circumstances. As I’m sure y’all will understand, I’ve got to move the play to high priority next week, even if it cuts into my schedule here.
From the episode
Going forward into December, I’ve got a few projects lined up, some of which will make people quite happy, I’m sure. Others will surely have people shaking their fists and muttering “Biscuit.” How many of them I’ll ultimately wind up getting done, I don’t know. I’d like to think that I’ll have four or five of them finished by the end of the year; that’ll let me start the new year with FocusWriter not having three documents open simultaneously, for starters. That’s a worthy goal; maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll hit it.
And it turns out my words above were more prophetic than I could have imagined. My hot water heater decided that Thanksgiving Day would be a perfect time to start leaking. Just the thing I need going into a holiday weekend. Especially since the inlet valve doesn’t close fully, so the only way to stop it is to disconnect the well pump entirely. Whoever put this thing in really cheaped out on the installation; it’s got a PVC valve on the inlet side.
I guess I can’t be all that mad. It’s a Montgomery Ward brand hot water heater, and I think they went bankrupt almost 20 years ago.
But . . .
Where’s a plumber pony when you need her?
derpicdn.net/img/view/2013/5/2/314360__safe_artist-colon-scribble_silver+spanner_30+minute+art+challenge.jpeg
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Hmm... indeed, where's Silver Spanner?
Can I put in a wish for more of our favourite plumber? Just, you know, at some vaguely defined point in the future. I miss her.
Anyway, all the best to you and may the Princesses smile upon you (and maybe help out with the stage, I hear Celestia has some experience).
Can you really call it football when you play with your hands?
4971549
Well hopefully when the home improvement store opens on Friday you will not be that out of place being there. Hopefully you can install it yourself in the end.
Same to you!
4971549 Sounds like a good time to replace that valve too.
4971560 Menards here has all kinds of stuff on sale tomorrow. I get to do a suspended ceiling in our basement now. Gee, thanks.
Oh no. yes.
And oh dear. :/ Hope that resolves itself sooner rather than later, that you may get back to enjoying your regularly-scheduled vacation (you lucky dog . . .).
Dang, Biscuit! Wish I was close enough to help. But you've gotten probably 30 plus years out of that Montgomery Wards heater so that's a good thing, despite the leak.
I wish you a good day, be safe, have fun where you can and take a breath! Maybe around New Years you'll get a break!
I swear to God Biscuit if you don't write more Sam and Rose! *shakes fist*
4971576
(Tonight's story isn't Sam and Rose; I just thought I'd give you a snippet of the next Sam and Rose work in progress)
4971580
Eeeeeeeeee
Do ponies eat meat?
My son does that conflating thing. Calls thanksgiving giftgiving.
Also what is the bird like abomination on the table in that first pic?!
Water heater issues suuck. Best of luck.
Why does that crap always decide to go on a holiday?! Sorry you provoked Murphy, somehow. 20 years is a pretty long time for a water heater, though. Monty Wards. I miss that place and Sears. Well, Happy Thanksgiving, anyway, Admiral and may that be the extent of your problems this holiday season.
4971588
If you look closely, it's actually a bread bowl. The top has been sliced off and is leaning on the left. It's filled with vegetables. I assume the drumsticks are rolls. The 'bones' are carrots.
According to the artist: "I didn't want a turkey, or tofurkey. Instead, I ended up with a turkey-shaped bread thing, stuffed with beans, vegetables and potatoes."
So what I'm hearing is that OTPP will be unaffected by these changes in schedule. You will not be writing just as much for it as you have not been writing for it normally.
Grr. You don't seem to know how being ponyfamous works. You should be spending all your time writing the story I want to be reading. Not other stories I enjoy reading.
Hee.
4971549 Oh that sucks.
4971556
And it's also not ball-shaped? Really, handegg would be a better name.
4971552
I should do another Silver Spanner story. Not sure yet what the context would be, but I can come up with something.
Unlikely to be this year, though; I’ve got enough projects currently in progress to get me through to the new year.
Thank you!
4971556
Sometimes you kick it.
4971560
Picked one up today after work. Haven’t gotten to the install part yet; that’s a tomorrow project. It looks reasonably straightforward, although my installation isn’t exactly going to be to code.
4971562
4971566
That’s my plan. Be stupid not to, honestly.
4971569
Well, it’s half resolved now. I fiddled with the valve enough that I can turn the water to the house back on and it only leaks a little bit (I’m going to turn the water off overnight so I don’t accidentally flood the basement), and I’ve got nearly all the parts I need to install it. Most of the tools, too.
I did get to spend half of Thanksgiving and Friday morning with my parents, and we even Skyped my brother and his wife, so that was fun.
4971574
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. I’m mad that it failed, and that it failed now; on the other hand, it’s lasted beyond what I’d figure the expected lifespan of a hot water heater is, so that’s a good thing.
Thank you! Had a decent holiday, spent some time with the family, and am now safely back home and can spend most of tomorrow catching up on everything that needs to be caught up on.
4971585
Well, we’ve seen them fishing before.
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In general, probably not, though.
4971588
He’s only off by one major holiday (unless y’all give Thanksgiving gifts, of course)
I think I’ve got all the parts I need to replace it tomorrow, and any of the little bits and bobs I don’t have, I can get from the hardware store tomorrow.
4971619
That’s just how it is, I guess. And it could be worse; it could have been a more catastrophic failure.
Yeah, I’m annoyed that it quit, but at the same time, not terribly surprised. My washing machine is that old or older . . . it was in the house we bought in 2002, and it wasn’t new then. That’s probably going to be the next appliance to go, honestly.
As far as I know, we’ve still got Sears here. At least this spring the one in Lansing was still open. Not sure if it still is.
A man can hope.
4971888
That’s pretty cool. I didn’t really look at it all that hard at first, but now that you brought it up, it does look very much like a bread bowl, and the top of it’s sitting on the left side.
4972033
I’m still hoping to get one more chapter out by the end of the year or thereabouts, but we’ll see. Some of my plans got derailed by a series of unfortunate events, and I’m behind on a bunch of things.
4972261
Yeah, not the best way to start the long holiday weekend. On the other hand, since I was leaving for Thanksgiving and not coming back until (as it turned out) late this afternoon, I just shut off the water to the whole house and let it be future Admiral’s problem.
And now I’ve got a new water heater and lots of pipes and other plumbing tools and tomorrow I’m going to see if I can get it all put together.
4972288
I’m okay with that name change.
4972539
Check YouTube for This Old House segments as they would be a great help.
4972563
I’ve got the full resources of the internet at my disposal for it (no joke; that should prove helpful if I get confused).
If nothing else, I’ll know just how far out of code it is when all’s said and done.
4972555
Though you still have the weirdness of why ponies would want a version of a roasted dead bird on their table.
4972558 Good luck, have fun.