Or actually more of a scraaaaaape Crash! in the night.

You know how it is when you’re in bed, at long last starting to drift off, when you hear a really big clatter somewhere close? So you have to get up out of bed, turn on the lights, and try and figure out what happened?

Like thinking, was it a lamp falling over? Did the cats knock over the coat-tree? It sounded so close, maybe it was in the bedroom?

No, everything looks where it should. So you check the bathroom, the purple room, the kitchen.

Then you see one of the cats looking around with a WTF? expression, she heard it but doesn’t know what it was. The other cat is hiding or sleeping or something.

Finally you find the source of the noise; it was just a drinking glass. It was left on the desk, and has been pushed to the edge and then fell to the floor. Not broken fortunately, just laying on its side on the floor near the desk.

So you put the glass in the sink and go back to bed to start over with trying to fall asleep.

You know what I mean? I hate when that happens.

Oh and then to top it off, when you’re laying in bed with the laptop blogging about the first noise, then you hear a second one? Like some sort of punchline…

Whenever I think about moving glassware, I think about seances and ouiji boards and that tv show Most Haunted.

I wonder why they use glass. Perhaps because of it’s resistive properties; it is very electrically resistant. Glass is used in modern electronics, and was used back in the early days of electrical experimentation. Not to mention, glass is made out of the same stuff that computer chips are.

There may have been a point in there somewhere. I thought I had more to write on the subject but now it escapes me.

Something about being in the bathroom, lends an extra sense of defencelessness. I mean, if something were to “go down” while you’re in the bathroom, odds are you’re going to be unprepared for immediate action. As the saying goes, “caught with one’s pants down.” Or worse, being in the bath, caught naked and dripping wet.

Of course, one is only as unprepared as one lets ones’ self get. The boy scouts’ motto is be prepared. In Bushido, it is Yuden Nashi: never off-guard. In Japanese legend, the famous swordsman Miyamoto Musashi was once attacked by several of his enemies while he was in the bath. The fiends built up the fire under the bath, and then lit the bathhouse on fire, so Musashi had to choose between boiling to death, burning to death, or running naked and wet out of the bathhouse and into the trap of their swords. Of couse, Musashi was never off-guard and had taken his swords into the bath-house with him, so although he may have been naked and wet, he was not unprepared, and he was able to swiftly eliminate his foes.

But I digress.

Back to the bathroom, and indeed the bath. Enjoying a quiet calm afternoon soak, to be completely specific.

So as I lay there, relaxed, at ease, I hear footsteps. Footsteps in my hall! Not kitty footsteps. Not fourlegs footsteps, but twolegs footsteps. There’s nobody home but me.

I’ve never heard the footsteps before. My former roommate had, once. After she moved out, she was visiting and spent the night, and she heard the footsteps in the hall outside her bedroom. That was at night. Now it’s like just after noon, and I’m home alone, in the tub(!) and there’s footsteps.

So after the initial surprise has faded, I think to myself, “Well, that’s creepy.” and at that point, I realize there’s nothing to do but carry on with my bath.

Nothing’s been disturbed, nothing’s amis, the cats were both sleeping when I eventually emerged from the tub.

Nothing to do but shrug and chalk it up to the fun of living alone in a 140-year old house.

So my furnace has been acting up, and I wanted to get a technician here to have a look at it. He gets here an hour or so after dark. (Whole nuther story there but will let it go.) Down we go into the cellar, and he starts working away. All he had for light was a little penlight, like a little 2 AA battery pocket penlight. I offered a couple times to go and get another flashlight but he said it was cool, he could service a furnace in his sleep.

So away he goes, working at it, holding the penlight in his mouth while tinkering with the furnace. And, you could have predicted it, right? The penlight dies.

So he hits it, fiddles with the switch, and finaly it comes back on, but really dim. He keeps working. And yep, the penlight dies again.

So he shakes it and hits it and fiddles with the switch, and finaly it comes back on again but now it’s about as bright as a firefly. Anyhow, he got the furnace fixed up and working great really fast. He was a very dexterious and handy fellow.

Anyways (heh thought I was going to start another paragraph with ‘so’ didn’t ya?) anyways he’s gone, and since he left, there’s been like three or four loud bangs and bumps from down there. At first I thought it was one of the cats, maybe snuck down there and got stuck when I closed the door. But no, they’re both cowering up here.

It’s been 15 or 20 minutes since the last big bump, so I’m thinking maybe they’re done whatever it is they do down there.

My Thingamagoop finaly arrived!

It’s just as bleeping, chirping, zapping, bixxerfouping, and blinking as Dr. Bleep said it would be!

And, it’s cute as a button! Let the noises commence!

Bleep Labs

A week or so ago, I was all excited about the Thingamagoop from Bleep Labs. So excited, I put in an order for one, in fact.

Well, seems a lot of people saw that article on Music Thing and Dr. Bleep is overloaded with orders, so it’ll be a few weeks before my Thingama arrives. Unfortunately, patience is a virtue of which I am not always in posession.

I’m still excited though, and eager to play and make noise. So, after a bit of thought, a bit of time spent poking around on the internet, and a bit of experimentation, I have built my own noise-making box. It is neither as cute or as cool as a Thingama, but it will let me annoy everyone within earshot, until my real Thingama arrives.

It’s actually really simple inside, I’ve just used a pair of 556 dual-timer chips, with variable resistors to control some of the oscilators, and switches to set whether the oscillators are mixed at the speaker, or if they switch each other on and off. I’ve only got 3 of the 4 oscillators running, and only 3 of the four knobs are wired right now. It makes some cool (annoying) noises. I think I’ll call it Ah-Noise-Ing.

Dr. Bleep says “…there are not nearly enough beeping, zapping, bixxerfouping, anthropomorphic synthesizer monsters in the world.”

I wholeheartedly agree, so I just ordered one for myself.

Check them out at:

Bleep Labs

Photo from Bleep Labs