Dispatches from the Forgotten Stars: the newsletter of author Kelly Sedinger - Issue #7
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Greetings, everyone!It's November now, and I hope you're all well. In this issue I vent a bit about this business of maintaining a home, meditate on a single movie shot, and at the end, share some links from my site!Let's get started!As I write this it's 11/6/2022, Sunday morning. I should be basking in the extra sleep afforded by the changing of the clocks back to Standard Time, but alas: a storm whipped through our region around 1:00am, knocking out our power. The storm lasted all of ten minutes: a sudden roar of wind, several flashes of lightning, a brief downpour, and then...darkness. So I had to mostly stay up all night, punctuated by brief dozing sessions, as I made repeated trips downstairs to monitor the pit for our sump pump.Now, we do have a back-up pump that runs off the municipal water supply. In the event of a power outage or failure of the main electrical pump, a float switch activates the water-powered pump when the level in the pit gets high enough. I don't entirely understand the physics of how this thing works, but it does: a whole lot of water comes out of the pit when the back-up is running. The problem is that the discharge pipe for our back-up is not connected to the storm drain; it just blasts the water right outside the house, right next to the foundation, so all that water just sinks right back down and into the pit again. So the back-up pump ends up more recirculating water than evacuating it. If the rain continues, this can actually overwhelm the back-up and cause...problems.Luckily it did not rain enough last night for that to happen, so the back-up pump just kept on cycling the same water, for hours, until power came back on at 8:30am and the main pump took over and got all that water the heck outta here. The main pump does discharge into the storm drain. Why doesn't the back-up? No idea...so at some point soon I'm going to make a fix of my own, using a ten-foot length of PVC pipe and a connector commonly called a "Fernco", because that's the company that makes them. Thus, next time this happens, I'll run out and connect my auxiliary drain pipe to the main discharge pipe, thus getting the water at least ten feet from the foundation.If you're lucky enough to have lived your life in such a way as to never have to worry about your sump pump, I somewhat envy you.But anyway, onto the main guts of this letter. I'm sure we've all had specific scenes in movies trigger various memories or feelings from our pasts, but have you ever had that happen with a single shot? And not even the super-famous shots, like, say, Barry opening the door in Close Encounters. Here's a specific shot that I've been thinking about lately. I'm not even sure why, but it's been kicking around my brain. Here's the shot:
Dispatches from the Forgotten Stars: the newsletter of author Kelly Sedinger - Issue #7
Dispatches from the Forgotten Stars: the…
Dispatches from the Forgotten Stars: the newsletter of author Kelly Sedinger - Issue #7
Greetings, everyone!It's November now, and I hope you're all well. In this issue I vent a bit about this business of maintaining a home, meditate on a single movie shot, and at the end, share some links from my site!Let's get started!As I write this it's 11/6/2022, Sunday morning. I should be basking in the extra sleep afforded by the changing of the clocks back to Standard Time, but alas: a storm whipped through our region around 1:00am, knocking out our power. The storm lasted all of ten minutes: a sudden roar of wind, several flashes of lightning, a brief downpour, and then...darkness. So I had to mostly stay up all night, punctuated by brief dozing sessions, as I made repeated trips downstairs to monitor the pit for our sump pump.Now, we do have a back-up pump that runs off the municipal water supply. In the event of a power outage or failure of the main electrical pump, a float switch activates the water-powered pump when the level in the pit gets high enough. I don't entirely understand the physics of how this thing works, but it does: a whole lot of water comes out of the pit when the back-up is running. The problem is that the discharge pipe for our back-up is not connected to the storm drain; it just blasts the water right outside the house, right next to the foundation, so all that water just sinks right back down and into the pit again. So the back-up pump ends up more recirculating water than evacuating it. If the rain continues, this can actually overwhelm the back-up and cause...problems.Luckily it did not rain enough last night for that to happen, so the back-up pump just kept on cycling the same water, for hours, until power came back on at 8:30am and the main pump took over and got all that water the heck outta here. The main pump does discharge into the storm drain. Why doesn't the back-up? No idea...so at some point soon I'm going to make a fix of my own, using a ten-foot length of PVC pipe and a connector commonly called a "Fernco", because that's the company that makes them. Thus, next time this happens, I'll run out and connect my auxiliary drain pipe to the main discharge pipe, thus getting the water at least ten feet from the foundation.If you're lucky enough to have lived your life in such a way as to never have to worry about your sump pump, I somewhat envy you.But anyway, onto the main guts of this letter. I'm sure we've all had specific scenes in movies trigger various memories or feelings from our pasts, but have you ever had that happen with a single shot? And not even the super-famous shots, like, say, Barry opening the door in Close Encounters. Here's a specific shot that I've been thinking about lately. I'm not even sure why, but it's been kicking around my brain. Here's the shot: