Jed,
I hope you can get the county to respond to your latest measurement. In regarding to city matters, I think you are likely to get a better ending than what our household is currently dealing with. We have a new neighbor who is threatening to call the city police or animal control to get one of our two cats, an outdoor cat, Charm, incarcerated and us fined if he ever finds our cat on his 2nd floor balcony again in the future. Charm is a rescue we picked up at an Idaho rest stop about 3 years ago. She is very adventurous. We learned long ago we couldn't keep Charm incarcerated in our home all day. She needed outdoor time or else there was hell to pay. This neighbor moved into our neighborhood a year ago. Ironically, the previous home owner, he purchased the house from, who is now deceased, liked Charm's visitations to his 2nd floor balcony. IOW, our cat, Charm, felt accepted at that house. But now, a new cat-unfriendly neighbor has moved in and apparently he really hates cats. He believes all cats are "destructive predators" - bird murderers. We want to respect our new neighbor's desire that our cat no longer visit his house. But that is difficult to accomplish when the new neighbor does not want to accept from us articles like cat repellants (free of charge) that would give our cat incentive not to visit his property and 2nd floor balcony anymore. Apparently, our new neighbor would prefer to wait for our cat to once again visit his balcony so that he can call animal control and get Charm incarcerated and us fined. Complicating matters, there are city ordinances that tell us that all outdoor dogs and cats must be on leashes no longer than 6 feet. BTW, this leash law is routinely ignored as most dog owners have leashes that extend out to 10 - 15 feet. I noticed the city ordinances cited the word "dog" 25 times and the word "cat" 6 times. It's more than at 4 to 1 ratio of dog issues versus cat issues. While well-meaning I think cats got incorporated into the city ordinance leash law as a form of collateral damage. In any case this neighbor has the law on his side. Technically he can get us fined if Charm shows up again. At present there are several neighbors with outdoor cats that have now become concerned about whether this person might go after their outdoor cat as well. I've asked my neighborhood alder as well as the president of our neighborhood association for insight on the matter. I asked if either one knew of an organization that specializes in conflict resolution to help diffuse neighborhood issues like this. While both were polite in their responses to me, but it's pretty clear that neither one wanted to have anything to do with our outdoor cat situation. Since our cat being outdoors unleashed is technically breaking city ordinances, we are breaking the law. In the eyes of the city ordinance we are the bad guys. >From my point of view, our household may end up being abused by the >enforcement of a city ordinance that nobody had really given a damn about >until a passive-aggressive neighbor with ideological bent decided to press the >issue by getting the city to do his bullying for him. What a deal for him. At present, we are not sure how this is all going to go down. There are many options we are considering. Some options are exceedingly expensive like putting up a cat proof perimeter around our property. I detest the idea, and not just because it would be expensive. It would make our house and surrounding property look like a mini-state penitentiary. If we are forced to do this it would be as if this neighbor had successfully enacted a city ordinance primarily to get his own ideological needs met, an ordinance that nobody in the past had had given a damn about. All this just to imprison out cat and get us fined. It would be as if he had symbolically imprisoned us as well. After he deals with us what other cat household might be on the chopping block next? That's another reason I don't want to do this. There comes a point where you have to take a stand. The city ordinance against cats is ill advised. There are far better ways of dealing with such matters other than ignoring sincere assistance from willing neighbors in preference to calling animal control and extracting expensive fines. Regards, Steven Vincent Johnson OrionWorks.com zazzle.com/orionworks From: Jed Rothwell [mailto:jedrothw...@gmail.com] Sent: Friday, August 28, 2015 4:09 PM To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Subject: [Vo]:Even the most reliable industrial meters can fail I have often commented that industrial grade equipment is extremely reliable. You bet your life on it every time you fly in an airplane, for example. But even though meters and sensors are reliable, airplanes have redundant backup systems, for good reason. No matter how good equipment may be, it can always fail. Particularly if that equipment is . . . a computer printer or a flowmeter! These things have an inordinate share of the innate perversity of inanimate objects. Beware, beware of believing flowmeters, especially when they are used by nitwits at places such as Defkalion. I recently got an object lesson in flowmeters. I, of all people, should have known you can't trust 'em! DeKalb County recently installed fancy electronic remote read ones. Our water bill increased from: 2800 gallons per billing period 2700 1600 To: 18,700 14,400 etc. The water department said it was probably a leak in the water line to the house. Instead of checking carefully I believed them and had it changed out on in April. The latest water bill shows the same high usage. So, I read the meter on August 26 at 10:56 PM: 006203841 At 7:10 AM the next morning the meter read: 006204633 That's 792 gallons over 8 hours, 14 minutes. That would be a leak of 1.6 gallons/minute. I watched the meter for several minutes in the morning when there was no activity in the house. Nada. Nothing. I then flushed one toilet of 2.5 gallons capacity. The meter increased by 284 gallons, and stopped increasing as soon as the toilet refilled. Now I have to convince the County to send out someone to test it. They did that before, but the test did not actually involve running some water. They have to send out a Supervisor for that, and the Supervisor has not called me back. - Jed
