I spent most of today skipping work to talk to the insurance adjuster. And the cleaning crew. And the furnace repair guy. It went about as I expected. My deductible is actually a lot less than I thought it was – five hundred dollars as opposed to fifteen hundred – and the insurance adjuster really liked my ceremonial Mexican axe.

Yes, I have a ceremonial Mexican axe. No, I will not be explaining that story, either.

My furnace, no surprise, is a total loss, and I’m going to convert from fuel oil to natural gas, which is cheaper, cleaner, and more efficient. The adjuster also told me that gas furnaces are generally cheaper than oil burning furnaces, so it looks like they will save some money on the deal, too. The furnace guy asked me if I was happy with the way my heating system worked. I didn’t know how to answer that question. I mean, the house gets warmer when I move the little knobby thing to the right, so… yay?

I’m amazed at how much smoke there is, and how hard it is to spot. Maybe it’s just because I’m a guy, and don’t really notice “slightly dingy,” but when he ran his special smoke attracting sponge (yes, they have special smoke attracting sponges, they’re treated with some sort of chemical) along the wall, it was like night and day. My fingers get a little gray every time I touch something.

So, the cleaning process is going to be fairly involved. I hired Service Master, at Paula’s suggestion, and they’re going to clean the carpets, walls, and ceilings, as well as the banisters, furniture, et cetera. They’re also going to sub out to a guy who will clean all of the heating ducts, which are now filled with about fourteen tons of soot and ash. And, they’ve also put me in touch with a dry cleaner, who can get all the smoke out of my clothes. The duct cleaning guy should start soon, which is good because I can’t get the furnace installed and turned on until he’s done his thing, and the rest will begin some time next week. Apparently I’m the third fire this week, and I have to wait in line.

Like I said in my last post, I was very fortunate, all things considered. This could have been a lot worse. In fact, it should have been a lot worse. I just happened to forget to turn the heat down on Saturday, so it kicked on even though it was a balmy sixty five degrees outside, and because of that, I found the fire relatively soon; if it had lit up the moment I stepped out of the house, the fire would have been burning for four hours, and I suspect that it was actually less than an hour until I discovered it. If it had turned on today, when it would have if I had turned down the heat, I would have been at work, and wouldn’t have found the fire until about ten at night, so the damage would have probably been much worse. And if it had turned on while I was sleeping… who knows.

I also had a lot of the house shut up for the winter, which means that the doors were closed and the vents were shut, so a minimal amount of smoke got into those areas. There was some, yes, but only a little.

Finally, before I left for the gym I had opened the bathroom window and turned on a fan, hoping to dry out the floor. I think, due to the amount of damage in the bathroom, that that actually drew most of the smoke that would have gone somewhere else into that one small room, limiting the damage even more.

It’s cold tonight, so I got a hotel room. I’m kind of sick of staying in hotel rooms, but c’est la vie. It has a shower and a bed, and that’s good enough.

In hindsight, I wish I had spent less time blogging about arson. I hope no one involved Googles my name.

The title pretty much says it all.

I went out to see a friend’s band last night, and had a really good time. I didn’t get home until 3am, so I slept in until 11 or so, and went to my dentist appointment at noon. I think I’ve mentioned it before, but I broke a couple of my teeth deadlifting, and I’ve been having work done to fix them; today, they put on the crown on the left side of my jaw, and they’ll start the right side next week. When I got done there, went to the store to get a set of sheets for my new bed, then went to the gym – and saw the receptionist from the dentist’s office, oddly enough – and had a really good workout.

When I left the gym, it was about 65 degrees, the sun was shining, and the bird were singing. Literally. It was the most perfect day we’ve had here since winter started last year. Driving home, I was idly planning out the rest of my day: a little internet surfing, then maybe a walk through the park, and then I was thinking about going to see yet another friend’s concert. I know a lot of musicians.

When I got home, I opened the door, and thought to myself “gee, I don’t remember leaving a rolling wall of smoke here.”

My first thought, my very first thought, wasn’t “oh God, my house is on fire,” or even some sort of guttural panic. My very first thought was “oh crap, my computer.”

I tend to be kind of… unflappable. Not a whole lot really gets to me. Sometimes I play it up like it does, generally to make people laugh, but when everything hits the fan, the one thing I hear more often than anything else is “God, how can you be so calm?” I have homeowner’s insurance, things can be replaced, and in general, I have this deeply-felt belief that things will work out, more or less in my favor. There might be setbacks and losses, but in the end, I pretty much expect to win.

But my computer is my life. Everything is on it. My financial records for the last seven years. My address book. Everything I’ve written, all of the source code I’ve created, all of the photos I’ve taken. That little white box is pretty much the sum of what I am, and if I lost that, I really don’t know what I would do.

I have a Mac, and I use Time Machine to back everything up, and that has saved me a couple of times in the past, but the hard drive that I back everything up to is about eighteen inches from the Mac itself, so if one burned, chances are, the other would have gone up, too.

So, while it might seem strange to you, the biggest relief in all of this is that my little MacBook is still alive, well, and trendy. He’s covered in soot, but he’s running like a champ, and I’m seriously considering buying him some off-site backup.

Anyway, back to the smoke and the flames and the oh God oh God my house is burning hey maybe I should call 911. I live about a block away from the fire department, and they were at my place maybe five minutes after I called. I’m still kind of amazed at how many people showed up; I figured the first truck that came was enough, but they sent two more, and probably a dozen fire fighters, all for me.

They got the fire under control relatively quickly. From what I’m told, my furnace malfunctioned; the pilot light wasn’t functioning correctly, or something like that, so a lot of fuel built up, and when the thing finally sparked… boom. Or maybe fwoosh. I wasn’t around to know what it sounded like.

Since the furnace is a big metal box designed to hold fire, the fire itself didn’t spread. The only real problem was the smoke, which filled the house from basement to attic. My drapes are pretty much done, and my carpet doesn’t look all that great anymore. My bathroom is a bleeding disaster; out of everything, it’s the only room that looks like it was actually on fire. There’s smoke and soot and ash all over everything, and it stinks to high heaven.

The Deputy Fire Chief was trying to get me ready for the extent of the damage, but I’m honestly thankful and amazed that there was so littledamage. I just bought a new bed – a big, expensive, memory foam bed – but the part of the house I put it in had been closed up for the winter, so none of the heating vents were open, so very little smoke got in there. I don’t think I’m going to have to replace that, which is a huge relief.

I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to figure out if I need to buy more clothes. I don’t think that they were damaged, but I’m so used to smelling smoke right now that I can’t tell if they stink or not. What struck me was the fact that my white wrestling sweater, which was hung over the banister, and sitting in smoke for like four hours, is still, somehow, white.

I called my insurance company, and they were able to verify that I do, indeed, have insurance. Other than that, I’ll have to wait until Monday to talk with an agent. Once that’s done, I can start calling cleaning crews and furnace… replacer… people. And I’ll probably get a natural gas furnace this time around. They seem less likely to try and kill me.

I also wonder what the firemen and police thought as they were walking through my house. When I got back inside, my bo staff was laying across the floor, next to one of my katanas. Another katana was leaning against the wall. My celtic war sword was laying in the middle of the living room, next to a guitar that I still haven’t learned how to play.

At least I’m interesting.

So, another trip to Wal Mart, and another bout of barely-containable rage.

It started when I was looking through the St. Patrick’s Day t-shirts. I’m Irish, and I have a thing for Celtic culture, and I figured this might be a nice opportunity to expand my wardrobe. I was hopping to find something akin to me Lion Rampant rugby shirt. Instead, I found shirts with:

• A leprechaun, teetering over, and a caption that read Lets Get Ready To Stumble.
• The phrase Kiss Me, I’m Three Fifths Irish, and three bottles of booze.
• The words I’d Wish You Happy St. Patrick’s Day, But I’m Drunk.
• This most insightful philosophy: Happiness Is Green Beer

And so on. Look, people, racism is not cool, all right? There’s more to being Irish than drinking potentially fatal quantities of alcohol. There’s also fist fights and potatoes.

I needed to buy a new notebook, and on my way through the stationary aisle, I saw a particularly glittery birthday card. The front read On your birthday, I want you to know you sparkle. The inside read Hope your day is dazzling. Those of you who get that reference know why that made me want to punch someone in the throat.

And then it was time to check out. The woman ahead of me was apparently feeling the effects of the bad economy, and was buying only the essentials. Like a twenty-four pack of Bud Light, three six packs of Corona, margarita mix, and a bunch of wine coolers.

I put my basket down behind this stack of liquor, and laid my items out on the cart. The girl running the checkout gestured towards the remaining beverages, and asked me if they were mine.

Yes. Yes they are. Even though you just saw me walk up, put my basket down, and unload it. Even though you’ve been ringing up alcohol for the woman ahead of me for, like, twenty minutes. Even though she brought them up to the register,, those are mine. I have weak arms, you see, and asked her to help me carry my liquor up. And I put the basket where I did to separate the alcoholic and non-alcoholic portions of my order.

I am continually amazed that there are people unqualified to work at Wal Mart.

To everyone with children: if they’re misbehaving, go away. I know you paid eleven dollars for your movie ticket. So did I. So did the other fifty people in the theater. We outnumber you. You’re the one who chose to spawn. Do not inflict your suffering on the rest of us.

I really wish Opera would get around to adding spell check to their browser; I look like I’m mildly retarded when I write a post in Opera, because of all the misspellings. I know that this is accurate, but you don’t have to rub my nose in it.

New New Facebook. STOP IT!!!!!!111111ELEVEN! Also, your new “this might be interesting” algorithm is broken. I do not need to know every single thing someone does on line. Seriously, I have like 20 stories about the same person. I feel like a stalker. An unintentional, slightly confused, and angry stalker.

I was at the gym Thursday, doing a MetCon circuit, and one of the staff trainers led her client over to where I was going through my routine. That’s fine; it’s a public gym, and I don’t take up that much space. But then she started having her client do the same movements that I was going doing. That was just freaking weird. I mean, I’d start doing lunges, and ten seconds later, the woman to my right would start doing the same thing. Crunches, pushups… They never talked to me, or even about me, as far as I could tell, they just kind of followed silently along. I think I should have charged them a fee or something.

In Africa, a lone butterfly takes wing, sending a small bit of pollen into the air. This pollen tickles the nose of a Wildebeest, causing the animal to sneeze. That sneeze startles the animal next to it, causing the herd to stampede. The stampede kicks up a cloud of dust, blocking out the sun and very, very slightly lowering the temperature of the air. This small change in temperature alters the air pressure, which causes clouds to form, which leads to further and further effects, until a thunderstorm begins in Texas.

This story is fanciful, but maybe not as far fetched as we might believe. The idea that a trivial event can have enormous long range implications is called The Butterfly Effect, after a 1952 story by Ray Bradbury. The term itself was coined by Edward Lorenz, a mathematician who was using computers to model systems of weather. He discovered the principle by accident, when he saw a trivial change, entering .056 instead of .506127, produce a completely different system. A single flap of a butterfly’s wing, he said, could forever alter global weather patterns.

This concept is the central idea of Chaos Theory. Like a great line of dominos or an immense Rube Goldberg machine, a small change, a tiny nudge, can set a tremendous series of events in motion. A system caught up in these effects is said to be manifesting Emergent Behavior. the unforeseen, unpredictable result of simple interactions. And because of this, because of the monumental ramifications small things can have, complex systems are almost unfathomably hard to model.

But what if we could?

What if we could predict the behavior of complex systems? What if we could follow the flap of a butterfly’s wings all the way to a thunderstorm on the other side of the globe? To the ancients, this was the hallmark of divine wisdom: the ability to see the end from the beginning.

This would make a marvelous premise for speculative fiction; for a while now, I’ve had an idea for a story about a mathematician who discovers a way to model the stock market, and gets drawn into the world of a secret cabal that literally rules humanity by understanding the “pattern of the world” and exerting tiny influences. And while this kind of knowledge and power is obviously beyond us, how much change could we bring if we paid attention to the patterns around us, and thought carefully about our small choices?

I have an index card sitting next to my computer, which holds the words See the pattern, change the outcome. I wrote this card to remind myself that the choices I make today are going to effect my tomorrow. The little choices, the small decisions, are adding up , day after day. As a friend is fond of preaching, “Sow an action, reap a habit. Sow a habit, reap a lifestyle. Sow a lifestyle, reap a destiny.”

I know several people who lost between five and ten pounds simply by switching to diet soda. The cost of a coffee at Starbucks is small, a few dollars, but those few dollars multiplied by days, weeks, months, and years add up to hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. There are a number of books that will explain how investing a couple of hundred dollars a month in your twenties will leave you a millionaire in retirement. These relatively small changes have profound effects, and this kind of information is readily available to us. Success, as it has been said, leave clues.

Diving home tonight, what would happen if you went to the super market instead of the drive through? What if, when you walk past someone in the hallway, you smiled and said “hello” instead of averting your eyes and hurrying past? What if, instead of buying some new gadget that you’ll be bored with in a month, you set that money aside?

These changes are trivial, but over time, they will compound. Success and failure are made one small choice at a time.

One of the things I like about Batman is that he’s (sort of) realistic. If you had a thirst for justice born of a childhood tragedy, an obsessive personality that makes the most dedicated Internet stalker look milquetoast, the genetic potential of an Olympic gymnast, and billions upon billions of dollars, you, too, could hone yourself into a lean, mean, animal-themed, crime fighting machine. The Joel Schumaker movies went off the rails when they became too campy, and the Christopher Nolan movies are so well regarded because they returned the Caped Crusader to his urban roots.

And then there’s the comics.

I don’t follow comic books, but when I heard about Batman RIP and the Battle for the Cowl, I was intrigued. Grant Morrison set out to write what he termed “the final Batman story,” and to make room for a successor to Brue Wayne. Given the title, and the promised outcome, you’d expect Bruce to die, right?

No. Based on what I’ve read on-line, what actually happens is that Batman gets dosed with LSD and turns into the Batman of Zur En Rah, an alien planet exactly like earth, but on the other side of the sun, a figure who wears a red and purple costume with frills on the shoulders. Bat Mite, an elfin demi-god from the Nth dimension, helps him battle his demons, returning him to fighting form, so that he can die in a helicopter crash.

Except he didn’t die. No, the story continues in Final Crisis, where Batman goes on to fight Darkside, an evil New God, to whom we are told “Satan prays.” Batman fights this evil New God by putting on a suit of robot armor, and shooting him with a magic gun. But before he dies, Darkside retaliates, and blasts Batman with the Omega Sanction, the nifty name for his hot pink eye beams.

What do these hot pink eye beams do? Kill the victim, thus fulfilling the promise of Batman “Resting in Peace?” No. They transport him back to prehistoric times, where now Batman fights for justice among the cavemen.

Anyway, since Bruce Wayne is missing, a battle breaks out among the people who want to be the new Dark Knight. From what I can gather, the contenders include Batwoman, who is now a lesbian, Two-Face, who I guess is a good guy now, some dude that had plastic surgery to make himself look like Bruce Wayne, the original Robin, and the third Robin. Oh, and the second Robin is back, too. He was killed by the Joker, in one of the most important Batman stories ever, but he came back to life because the Golden Age Superman (who exists along side of, and is distinct from, the modern Superman, and is also a bad guy now,) punched the wall of the universe, sending some kind of temporal cause and effect mangling shockwave thing rippling through time and space.

Hand to God, I am not making any of that up.

This, this, is the “final Batman story.” This is how DC chooses to wrap up the Batman mythos. By having Batman freak out, convince himself he’s an alien, and then get banished to 2,000,000 BC by an evil alien demi-god with hot pink eye lasers, while his former teenage sidekick is resurrected by the 1950s Superman punching the universe.

And they wonder why sales are falling.

Today, my friends, is a monumental day. I have won the internets. How, you ask? Simple. If you Google my name, the very first link returned is to my blog.

This means two very important things. First, according to Google, I am a real person. Second, any potential employer who happens to Google me will quickly find out that I’m an anti-social jerk with a mild tendency toward arson.