In article ,
Dave Hinz wrote:

It's one of those special values they call a "dimensionless number" (or,
if you're a Fred Pohl fan, a "Gosh number" - See his "Annals of the
Heechee" series for a full discussion) - You can say the number, and it
doesn't matter what scale you use: It's all the same. 40 below
Farenheit, 40 below Celsius - Same thing.

So that's like "hella-big" then?

Yeah, but just a smidgen longer


fit right, and so on. But once that's done and you're slowly warming in
the gear, then the ride gets long.

Never "been there", but I can easily imagine...

For a smart animal, they can sure be dumb some times.

If I had a nickel for every time I've either heard or said that...

Being the misanthropic @$$hole I am, I'd be more inclined to have
nightmares/flashbacks/PTSD/whatever you want to call it over the horses
that didn't make it out than a human that didn't. But that's just my
(admittedly somewhat "bent") personality.

Well, I'm pretty...what's the word...gruff? But, that one still
bothered me for quite a while. For a couple years, if I'd singe some
hair or something the flashback to the scene was intense and detailed.
Only good thing about that whole deal is that the coronor's report
showed he died pretty much immediately, soon as he stood up and got a
lungs-ful of fire.

Yeah, that's what we keep telling ourselves here over the dog that
didn't make it out. She was last seen sleeping under the dining room
table, and that area of the house was fully involved (as in flames
roaring out the broken dining room windows, the ceiling collapsing in
flaming chunks, and the roof above it starting to droop) by the time I
discovered the place was burning. Chances are high that her end was
pretty quick, if she even woke up at all. She was a little 10-15
pound-ish "Benji" style mutt. No trace of her was found during the
cleanup operation, but that doesn't surprise me a lot - a roughly 50 by
40 foot house and everything in it (and believe me, there was a
*****LOAD* of "everything" in it, including a complete woodshop setup,
brand new, still in the boxes 'cause they didn't have room to get it
unpacked and set up until after Dad and his stuff got moved into the new
house that was about 10 days from completion) was reduced to about six
of those 10 yard dumpsters worth of charred rubble.

On the "plus" side of the ledger, they didn't find out until the next
day when I recovered the fire-safe (which, by some miracle, landed "door
down" when it fell through the floor into the basement - slamming it
fuly shut from its usual "sitting there with the door cracked for easy
access" state) and the insurance policy was located, but they were
grandfathered in with a "full replacement cost" rider on the policy.
Which we found out a couple days later is no longer sold at all since
the Oakland firestorm, but since the policy was written prior to that,
and was paid up to date on the IC's books, it was by law still in effect
for them. They knew they had insurance, but they had completely
forgotten about the rider, so it came as at least a hint at a silver
lining in a rather large cloud.

As I sit here and type this, I've got another window open in the
background - That window is output from a homebrewed video system that's
creating "time-lapse" movies of the rebuilding that started back toward
the first of the month - By the calendar, three days short of being two
years to the day from when it burned.

As for progress, it's been fast, once things got started. From the
camera's viewpoint, it's currently a house that's had the siding and
shingles peeled off, and all the doors and windows torn out - All of the
exterior framing, along with much of the interior, plus the roof are in
place, with the outside walls sheathed and awaiting
inspection/insulation/siding/finishing, and the roof about 90% decked.
The plumber started building the drains and such yesterday, with an
electrician expected to show up sometime next week to start wiring,
closely followed by the HVAC guys. I imagine the roofers will be on
scene and hammering at about the same time the "inside" guys are doing
their thing next week.

--
Don Bruder - - New Email policy in effect as of Feb. 21, 2004.
Short form: I'm trashing EVERY E-mail that doesn't contain a password in the
subject unless it comes from a "whitelisted" (pre-approved by me) address.
See http://www.sonic.net/~dakidd/main/contact.html for full details.