November 2015

sun nov 1
I made full use of the extra hour we got from the time change, and I woke up stiff and sore.
Anything I did this morning, I did sitting down, because pulling down the ceiling yesterday was really hard, and today is going to be worse.
Mid day, I headed next door and started moving the sheetrock and cellulose out of the bedroom and into the trailer, but 5 contractors bags into the program, I could tell that my body was out of gas, so I quit for lunch, and had a ham and cheese and a banana and not 1, not 2, but 3 pieces of chocolate. But no halloween candy, because Mary has hidden the bowl and she’s going to dole them out like dog treats until they’re gone.
Thus fortified, I headed back next door and moved debris into bags, down the stairs, thru the house, and into the trailer until it was too dark to see. 33 bags of debris plus sheetrock and wood.
I  stripped naked on the lawn again, and I hope the neighbors enjoyed the show.
I took a shower and sat down. Way down. And didn’t move.
Nachos, 60 Minutes, and the World series. They tied it up in the bottom of the 9th, and I turned it off. If they can’t figure it out in 9 innings, then fuck it.

mon-tue nov 3
I was pretty sore after sunday’s cleanup session, so I looked for something low-key to do, and sat at the drill press, drilling holes in about a gallon of butternuts. It took about an hour, and I’m guessing I’ve got about 6 gallons to go. Mindless work, and easy on the muscles.
I’ve had an awful time getting consistent results from the frame grabber, and the vendor has given me not 1, not 2, but 3 OneShot camera files that don’t work. In a way, this makes me feel better, because it means that, for once, it’s not my code that’s the problem, and I should just enjoy it while it lasts.
I brushed the crud off all the rafters and took out all the sheetrock nails. There were a finite number of nails, of course, but just barely.
It would appear that I’ve discarded my hammer. I think it was buried in the debris and got scooped up with the rest of it. And, for all the tools I have, I only own one framing hammer. So when I needed to nail down some boards today, I couldn’t do it, because I didn’t have a hammer! So I farted around, and didn’t really get much done. Hate that.
By now, I’m up to about 3 1/2 gallons of drilled butternuts. Half way there.

wed nov 4
I went to town and bought a hammer. I’ve always used a 20 oz hammer but, in a nod to my advanced age and aching arms, I downsized to a 16 oz model. Don’t throw it away this time, jerk!
Since Brian did not show up today, I went next door and set up a bench in the bedroom and got a good start on re-framing the closet and the bathroom. When I took out the ceiling the other day, what was left of the structure was really awful. They’d sheetrocked the whole wing and then framed up the interior walls, nailing the ceiling plates into the drywall, but without blocking. So the sheetrock was holding the walls in place instead of the other way around. I took it all out and re-did it the best I could. It was a beautiful day and it was kind of relaxing, having the whole place to myself.
I quit before dark and drilled another gallon of butternuts.
I suggested to Bitflow that the LinePause setting might be the problem, but they say no.
Mary made a really good shrimp and white-bean dish and we watched the morning show.

thu nov 5
Right off the bat, I got on the phone with Bitflow, and we got a teamviewer session going. This is the first time I’ve had an extended phone call about anything in a long time, and I gotta tell you I was nervous. What with my recent processor troubles, my broken patch cord, and the missing adapter, nothing’s been going right with my hearing lately. Plus, I’m just plain out of practice. Anyway, it went well in terms of being able to communicate. But he couldn’t fix my problem, and would get back to me.
So I drilled another gallon of nuts. I’m over 5 gallons now.
It was a beautiful day and the crew was next door, so I gassed up the motorcycle and took a ride. I took a dirt road to Johnson and then another dirt road to Waterville. Then 2 more dirt roads got me to Belvedere and another dirt road got me to the highway. It was mostly pavement on the way back, and I have to say I prefer the back roads.
When I got home, I drilled another gallon of nuts and then finished the job: All the nuts are drilled! Good job!
Today is National Men Make Dinner Day, so I was in charge of dinner. I made tomatillo green chile, straight out of this week’s Recipe of the Week. Let’s just say: I am the braise-meister!

fri nov 6
It was another frustrating morning working on c3pr. I went back to Linux to try out the new camera files and nothing worked. I mean Nothing. I beat my head against the wall for hours and gave up thinking dark thoughts. I picked it up again in the evening and it turned out that, because I’m running as root  with sudo, the driver gets twerked and the environment gets reset. I’m hoping I’ve got that straightened out now.
While I was working on this, I started hearing strange sounds, and I figured the compressor was running or the wind was blowing, but it kept happening and I went to investigate. It turns out that Nate, one of the carpenters working next door, had brought his motorcycle over to show me and was revving it in the driveway instead of ringing the doorbell. It’s a big-ass Harley he’d modified into a chopper, and we talked about the many ways his machine differs from mine. Did you know that Harleys are 2-stroke? That the transmission is an entirely separate unit from the engine, connected with a belt? And on and on. It was a good visit.
I worked next door for awhile, but it was one of those sessions where you’re overwhelmed by the task and don’t get that much done.
Mary is in burlington having her shoulder MRIed, so I wolfed down a pizza and watched a Breaking Bad episode.

sat nov 7
I worked next door on framing. The hall and the bathroom are in 2 entirely independent structures, right down to the foundations. Neither is very stable, and I’m trying to use the interior framing to anchor them to one another. It’s the ugliest carpentry you can do, and I’m apparently not very good at it, because I seem to have to redo everything I do.
Mary made a pretty good stuffed squash, but she wasn’t happy with it. Mary was unhappy in general, and I don’t blame her, but that’s another story.

sun nov 8
This morning, I put the pumpkins in the compost. After several freeze/thaw cycles, they had turned to mush, so it was now or never.
Speaking of freeze/thaw cycles, it’s been a few weeks since the water line to the garden burst, and it was time to purge the water from the buried line. I used compressed air to blow out as much as I could and then we collected all the cheap liquor we had on hand into a 1 liter bottle and poured it into the pipe as antifreeze. We’ll be eating drunken spinach in the spring.
I made an adapter to connect the shop-vac to the sander and sanded the entire small bucket of butternuts. Between rejects and removed wood, the ‘done’ pile seems to be about 60% as big as the pile I started with.
We went to burlington and visited the LaZboy emporium. Mary wants a recliner to sleep on while her arm is in a sling, so we sat in all the motorized chairs and she picked one she liked best. I think more shopping is in order.
We went to dinner at Dan’s house. Dan, Mary, Bob, Faye, Dave, Marie, Me, and Mary.  It was good to see these people, but I really wish I could hear through noise. We really ought to stay in touch, and Dan did good work by putting some effort into it.  Attaboy!

mon nov 9
Fifty years ago, when I was working for 20 cents/hr for Dad, my job was to put in blocking. I was good at it then, and I’m good at it now, and that’s what I did today.
I sanded down about 1/4 of the remaining butternuts, and I’ve got about half to go.
Mary made a delicata-chicken-cider braise that was to die for.

tue nov 10
This morning, I visited with Adam. He tried hard to explain the method to the madness of his approach, and used a coke vs pepsi parable which actually made a lot of sense. I even read one of his handouts, and there’s a certain logic in what they say. But it’s a dismal science.
I went to Umall to pick up my diamonds. I decided to leave my calipers in the car, because I wouldn’t exactly know what to make of the measurements if I’d taken any.
I was starving, but I wanted Out of burlington, so I bought goodies at Harvest Market in Stowe and pigged out on potato chips, cookies, and crusty bread – all gourmet, mind you – on the way home.
Thus fortified, I headed next door to do more blocking, and I started feeling pretty woozy pretty fast, like my blood’s gone bad. I put in a lot of pieces, but I could have put in more. I burped hard and came home.
It’s stroganoff night and, while the meat was tough, the meal was good. More burping.
At the very end of the evening, I was working on c3pr, and I got the status line preamble to display, and I raised my fist high and pumped it in triumph. Yesss! It’s been a long time since I’ve had a good moment.

wed-fri nov 13
And it seems that that was the last good moment I had for the rest of the week, c3pr-wise. The next step would normally be to get the DMA’d cv::Mat to display in an openCV window. It did not work. I tried everything, and nothing worked. I set up a self-contained ‘by the book’ thread that worked, and then systematically tried every permutation of every difference, and it appears to be a problem with multi-threading. Fuckin’ A! That was hard!
I’ve been putting up blocking next door every day. And every morning, I feel like roadkill. My table saw keeps dying, and I keep running out of screws and I keep having to re-do stuff, but it’s getting there.
Mary left to visit Celia in NYC for the weekend, and I dropped her off at the train station. Later in the day, an old song got stuck between my ears:
.        It’s awfully nice of all you boys to see me to the train.
.        So long Mary
.        …
I finished sanding the bucket of butternuts. By the time I got good at it, it was too late, and it took me forever.

sat nov 14
I guess you could say that I almost finished sanding the butternuts yesterday. Today, I finished the job. Really.
It took me a long time to get psyched to go next door, because it’s cold and spitting snow outside. But I went, and I swept the whole upstairs, and it looks a lot better. Then, since the old wall next to the stairs was not holding anything up, I took it out and extended the subfloor like celia had suggested. I added a 2nd post, and it’s going to look great.

sun-mon nov 16
I don’t know what came over me, but Sunday I pigged out. I went to get bread and groceries and picked up a bag of chips as well. Within an hour, the chips were gone. All 8 servings of them. And to make matters worse, Laura left me a box of cookies and I ate most of them. Then I put a dent in the halloween candy and I had ice cream for dessert. I guess that’s what happens when you work hard every day: you get hungry.
I went next door and put in blocking and drilled holes for pulling wires.  I used up as many of the old wires as I could, but it only saved me about $10.
I set up a station in the shop to blow the crud out of the butternut beads with a blast of compressed air, and then I processed about a gallon of them. The prickly spines and my leathery fingers were the perfect combination for holding power, and I didn’t drop a single bead in the blast of air.
I worked on c3pr, making changes to support concurrent cameras and recording to disk. I got a lot of this working last winter, so it’s mostly easy grunt work. For a change.
This morning I did paperwork. I hate paperwork.
I went next door and pulled more wires and framed out the sink and the alcove over the stairs. The hopeless mess is morphing into something funky.
Mary is on her way back from NYC, and I picked her up at the train station and got a data dump / trip report over sandwiches at the Reservoir. Lots of Drama. If I ever have kids, make them boys.

tue Nov 17
More paperwork. This time, I filled out the application for group net metering.
I went into town for 2×4’s and I can’t exactly say why I don’t just buy 100 of them once in a while instead of a dozen or 2 every couple days.
And groceries, but no potato chips this time!
I headed next door and finished framing the sink back-wall and the small bedroom’s closet. Slow work.

wed nov 18
Mary’s phone rang first thing in the morning. It seems the Town’s roadside brush-clearing project is killing perfectly good trees, and the neighbors are alarmed. They’ve got a big excavator fitted out with a 6′ pulverizer attachment, like something out of a Transformer movie. It’s been pulverizing everything it can reach from the road, and it’s headed our way. So I put up a sign: “Dear Road Crew: Don’t cut our trees.”
And while I was at it, I made stakes and staked out the driveway for the Plow Guy. So we’re all set for winter.
I blew off another gallon of butternut beads, and it took about an hour.
My arms really hurt from all the exercise lately, so I made as many excuses as I could think of before I headed next door. The stair landing was rickety and unfinished, and now it’s solid and done. And now I’m even sorer than before.
C3pr is coming along fine, but it’s grunt work for now. It’s hard to get motivated when you already know you can make it work, if you’d just work on it. I much prefer the hard parts.

thu-fri nov 20
blocking, downstairs wiring.
It’s a bad time to be a drill motor. My old 3/8″ bosch has no chuck key and the cord is frayed down to the last strands, so I’d been in the market for a new drill. I didn’t like the 1/2″ drills in the stores (too heavy) and I didn’t like the 3/8″ ones either (flimsy chucks) and the one I finally bought runs too fast to drive screws. (Note to self: 2500rpm = too fast) Thursday, the new drill’s switch fell off and the spring sprang out and fell into the debris on the floor. So I went back to the old one, and yesterday it, too, died again. So I found myself in the position of trying to work on wiring when I can neither drill holes nor drive screws. I gave up and came home.
What did I just say? “It’s hard to get motivated when you already know you can make it work”
As if! After a re-write, cv::imshow() still doesn’t work. Fuck! So I re-wrote it again, and there’s a little more bookkeeping than I’d like, but it seems to work better. No doubt tomorrow I’ll be saying “it seemed to work at the time.” Grumble.

sat nov 21
I needed a break, and today, I got one.
I puttered around in clean clothes most of the morning, and they stayed clean. Mary went to the eye doctor.
When I sold the ‘back 40’ to the Criscolos, I promised to walk them around the property, and today, we walked the walk. Beautiful crisp day, and Nikki was on her knees planting daffodils around the front stump when I got there. The place looks great. They’re taking really good care of it, and it made me feel good to see how the gardens are getting all the love they need. We headed to the new rock wall, sampling wild apples as we went, and then crossed past where Dad lost his hearing aid and found both survey stakes. We crossed over the RR tie bridge, which the beavers finally got the best of, and tramped across the low, wet meadow, long-wise. That was a tough stretch, and my legs were getting a little rubbery at the end. They were both troupers, though, and they kept up just fine. We found the pond overlook and the rock wall, and we looked for markers at the Jog. No luck. We hiked all the way back to the border wall and then down to the pond and got our feet wet looking for another marker I know is there. No luck. We tramped back up to the stake at the trail and then down the muddy gulch to the pond. The beavers have dammed the breach again, and the pond is rising nicely. We walked across the dam, back to civilization. 95% of the trip, I kept my feet dry, and then suddenly both of them were wet, so it’s a good thing I brought spare feet.
We met Mary at Lost Nation and got their last table. It was noisy, and I have to say I enjoyed the first part of the day more than this part. Not that that’s a bad thing.

sun nov 22
The worm factory showed up yesterday, so this morning, I put it together. I’ve never seen one before, and it seems to be a pretty credible unit.   Stay tuned.
I did some work on c3pr and now I can copy and paste registers from one camera to another.
Mary is re-organizing the pantry and worrying about thanksgiving. I don’t blame her.
I went next door and pulled about 2 wires and then started cleaning up debris. Mary came by and we discussed switches and bathrooms and doorways until it got cold and dark. We’re mostly on the same page, I think.
I blew off another gallon of butternuts. For some reason, my compressed air is wet.
Nachos and TV.
I worked on CAD for next door electric box placement.

mon nov 23
I was in a bad mood all day. Maybe it’s the holidays. Maybe it’s the green house. Maybe it’s the weather. Maybe it’s just me.
Paperwork didn’t help. I tried to do net metering, but couldn’t finish it because Mary’s got the folder. It’s 2015, and you still gotta have a folder to do paperwork.
Baby, it’s cold outside! So I layered up before I went next door. All the clutter and debris has been going to my brain, and I decided to clean up. I threw all the small wood out the window and got rid of a lot of the big stuff. I sorted out the wires I’d ripped out and tripped on and scraped what’s left into piles. I was working near the dishwasher, and it just kind of stank, so I opened it up and smelled it and it wasn’t bad. Must be a dead animal somewhere, I thought, and I kept working. Scraping a steel dustpan on a gritty floor, making dust and static in a cold, dry room. The smell got worse and worse and it dawned on me it was propane I was smelling. I’d hit the valve with the dustpan, and half the house was full of gas! Fuck! I shut off the gas, opened the doors, and all was soon well. Nothing like going out with a bang, huh? Anyway, I spent $16.50 at the dump, $5 at the bakery, and $22 on some “carpenters gloves” with just 2 fingers each.
Then I blew off another gallon of butternuts. This takes about an hour, and what you do is toss the clean nuts into a small bucket and you don’t stop until a toss hits the pile and rolls down and out of the bucket. Today’s bucket was piled to record height, and I only have a handful of nuts to go.
Mary went to the selectboard meeting after getting groceries, and the ice cream sat in the car for 90 minutes. The angry mob did not attend with pitchforks, but it was crowded, vocal, and civil. You gotta love Vermont.
Her potato-leek soup was fantastic. The news and NCIS sucked. The ice cream was perfect.

tue nov 24
This morning, I sharpened the kitchen knives. Nothing’s worse than sawing away at a tomato without breaking the skin, and that’s how bad our knives are. But even after watching Dad’s sharpener-friend in SD do it, I still have never gotten a good edge, so I decided to google it. It turns out that I’ve been using the steel backwards, pushing the blade into it instead of pulling it across. I tried it and this time, the tomato was no match for the blade.
I went into town to pick up the Thanksgiving turkey from MOCO and accidentally put it in the car before they had a chance to weigh it. Whoops.
I went next door and got quite a bit done. I put a post under the beam, framed a gap on the road wall, took out the last 2 beams upstairs, and re-built the entire long wall in the loft. The 2-fingered gloves work really well. Had a good talk with Brian, and he’ll be back
Munchiladas for dinner, and we had to pause netflix because one of Mary’s munchiladas went down the wrong pipe and she almost died.
Working on the c3pr’s Record feature.

wed nov 25
It’s the day before thanksgiving, and we’ve got a full house tomorrow, so that means chores today. The deal is: I’ll vacuum and clean my bathroom tomorrow morning and she’ll cook up a storm. So far, she’s fulfilled her end of the bargain.
I made a bracket to mount the fish picture in its new location, but I put the mounting hole in the wrong place, and the picture hung crooked. Plan B worked better.
I had a rough time convincing myself to go next door, but I put in 2 studs and took out the bathroom floor. It seems like every day now, I’d rather be doing just about anything besides working next door, but I just absolutely, positively have to get certain things done before winter sets in for real, and the Holidays aren’t helping.
More work on the c3pr’s Record feature. It’s more complicated than it looks, and I’m getting strange core dumps.
Mary made a smoked trout puttanesca. A little too smoked, perhaps, but really good.

thu nov 26
It’s Thanksgiving morning, and the drain pipe underneath the sink decided to fall apart. I put it back together, but the nut is visibly cracked, and we’re just going to have to live with it until the hardware store opens again.
I vacuumed the house, cleaned the toilet, peeled the potatoes, did email, coded up a pf1 key, drained the gas out of the motorcycle and changed clothes.
Everyone showed up, ate well, and had a good time. I had a rough time following most of the conversation, but that’s normal, for me. Sucks.

fri-sat nov 28
Mary bought a baffle for the ‘can’ lights in the ceiling and it doesn’t fit the fixtures unless you bend some metal tabs over. No big deal, but they’re more trouble to install than they need to be. She is on a mission to get some light fixtures.
I went next door and started to vacuum the debris off the walls so the spray foam insulation will stick. I’d bought a spare shop-vac hose, but it’s configured as a replacement instead of an extension, so I need to make a hose coupling. Somebody is going to make a million dollars by selling some decent shop-vac wands and attachments, because the ones they sell are shit.
I moved a ton of old wood from the green house into the barn, clearing up a lot of space. Too bad I left it in the way when it was underfoot.
I’ve been working on the switch and lighting placements in CAD. There’s more to it than meets the eye.
We went to burlington for jeans and light fixtures because all my jeans are ripped at the knees and Mary’s suddenly got religion about all the bare bulbs in the house. Mary didn’t like any of the fixtures at Home Depot, so we ended up at Lowe’s. So now I’m signed up to install 32 baffles, 3 ceiling lights, and a custom wall sconce. Personally, I’m indifferent to lighting unless it’s done really nicely, and there’s nothing nice about the cheapest light fixtures money can buy. Which is what we bought.
We ate at MLC and it was good, but honestly, not as good as it should have been.

sun nov 29
It’s a kid day, and Mary left early to go to the dump and pick up the kids. (Just to clarify, that’s 2 separate errands)
I started making a shop-vac hose splice, and by the time I was almost done, Suri wandered in, so I had her hold the flashlight and learn how swarf is made. The adapter works great.
I’d been meaning to soak my beads in watered down tung oil, so we did a dozen nuts each at 1:1, 3:1, and 6:1 dilution, and I’m thinking 6:1 because – well – it makes the nuts look like I want them to look. Suri wanted to know what the sander was, so I showed her how I sand nuts on it, and we fished a handful of decent nuts out of the reject bucket and made some beads from scratch. She especially liked the compressed air.
I always say you should pay special attention to the very first thing people do when they see something new. And when I showed the kids the worms, their first reaction was horror and disgust and physical retreat. Maggie leaned right into it.
I worked next door and put in a fair number of boxes and wires. It really helps to have a written plan in your hand.
c3pr is still having problems crashing, and it’s really hard to understand why, so I’m making a wild guess and assuming the problem is threading, and I’m re-writing the namedWindow part yet again. It’s not good enough that it works most of the time. It’s gotta work, period. So I’ve got work to do.
Mary did some magic with leftover turkey, and we plowed through it.

mon nov 30
I did stuff today that I didn’t really want to do.
I put in 32 lighting baffles, 2 ceiling fixtures and some track lighting. I blew a GFI in Mary’s office closet and had to move not 1, not 2, but 6 cardboard boxes of kids toys in order to get to the reset button. What’s with that??
I fixed the kitchen sink.
I talked to Brian not once, not twice, but 3 times. And gave him a check.
He brought me 5 sheets of plywood and 14 16-foot 1-by’s and I primed them all.
I’m about done with the Gunslinger and I’m a little surprised that it’s not a better book.