wed aug 1
It’s that time of year again …
I planted 2 zucchini plants this year, and they’re full of zuchinis, so I decided to make some zucchini bread. And since I’ve got a shit ton of zucchini on my hands, why not make a double recipe? So I bought everything we were out of and collected some big mixing bowls. One recipe called for a total of 8 cups of ingredients, and my biggest bowl said ’20 cups,’ so I figured it was plenty big for a double batch. But mixing 16 cups of wet and dry ingredients in a 20 cup bowl doesn’t work as well as it does on paper, and I soon had a mess on my hands.
I filled 5 pans with batter, set the timer to 50 minutes, cleaned up, and walked away.
I was making a lot of noise in the shop, so I turned off my processor and, 60 minutes later, when I wondered why I hadn’t heard the timer for the zucchini bread, it was because I was turned off.
The zucchini bread came out ‘well done.’
It was a lot of work, but I made a lot of bread.
fri aug 3
Free:
Boxes and boxes of primo cut, dried, and boxed kindling. Clean and dry off-cuts from years of woodworking. Extremely flammable!
Comes with thousands and thousands of angry mutant ninja hornets and a nest.
Half of it. Too good to throw away.
Yes, I know. “I have a problem.”
sat aug 4
I’ve been working on c3pr in my office, making the motors move all the moving parts (and some non-moving parts too, sometimes!) It’s been slow going, and nobody is going to be impressed but me. Mechanically, I can’t quite believe this is the best I could come up with, but I haven’t learned this much this fast since high school.
Fully assembled.
The shoulder joint is a clunky beast straight out of the 19th century.
I need to get the inertia down by about 5x.
I had the shoulder homing acceleration set too high and it became a motorized baseball bat. It smashed into a table, upended its mount, and lay quivering on its side before I could hit the EO button.
The carbon fiber forearm survived unscathed. My finger did not.
mon aug 6
The plan was to have 2×8’s for joists delivered to the back yard with the lumber yard’s hoist truck and then use the hoist to lift the steel beams into place. Kill 2 birds with one stone. But the lumber yard says that’s illegal. Some kind of bullshit about insurance and licensing – whatever. Bottom line: how am I going to get my beams atop my posts? Yeah, I can call around to equipment operators and pay the going rate, but that’s just not my style.
So I bought some 2×8’s that I’m going to need for joists anyway, built a 12′ tall cross-braced derrick tower, rigged a manual chain hoist at the top, and raised the beams all by myself.
Raising the 30 footer (at 45#/ft). Total cost: $zero.
After working next door for a couple years, it is a pleasure to do a project where everything is perfectly straight and level.
fri aug 10
Sometimes, I think I eat too much ice cream.
I was beset by such guilty thoughts the other night when it was time for dessert, and I remembered that Mary had stocked up on yogurt, so I checked out the refrigerator and found 5 containers to choose from! Three vanillas and two plain. What was she thinking??
I dished myself a bowl of ice cream and enjoyed it on the porch.
mon aug 13
All that work building the 3-axis c3pr prototype, and it’s a bust.
– The Hand axis works fine, but I couldn’t find an encoder with an index pulse when I bought the motor, so I can’t home it.
– The Wrist motor works fine as long as the forearm shell is not installed. You’ll recall that the plaster mold for the carbon fiber got cracked and patched and, although it looks good to the naked eye, it’s a little crooked, so the limit switch assembly rubs on the shaft, and the motor stalls.
– And the Shoulder oscillates uncontrollably when I move it. I tried (not very hard) to tune the motor, but it’s still pretty bad. The big problem seems to be a coupling with a tiny amount of backlash, and ‘tiny’ turns out to be way too much.
There are two schools of thought here: Either “Nothing works” or “Only three things don’t work.” The glass is half full.
The garlic harvest is pretty scrawny this year. We think that ‘no water’ is why.
It looks harmless now, but when this metal was 20′ long and tied to the top of my truck, it was a menace to society.
wed aug 22
If you’ve ever drilled even one hole through a piece of #9 re-bar, you know that 297 holes is a lot of holes.
The deck railing posts. Cut, drilled, pointed, welded, and cleaned up.
A little medieval, and slightly dangerous. Just like I like ’em.
Straight and level, but not square.
mon aug 26
I don’t take very good notes, so I only have a vague idea about when to expect the apple trees to be ready to pick. Last year, the way it worked was:
First I noticed the apples were ready.
Then I noticed that they’d mostly fallen to the ground.
Then I made an apple crusher.
Then I cut off my finger making an apple press. (that was on 9/11, 2 weeks from now)
Then I finished making the press.
Then I picked apples.
And I still managed to fill 90 bottles with sweet cider (plus, I fermented 2 big buckets of it, and ruined them both)
Just think what I could do if I were ready when the apples were ready!
Well the apples are ready and, once again, I’m not. I am very disappointed with myself.
A week ago, this tree was solid apples.
thu aug 30
I upgraded my hearing processor yesterday. Went from an N5 to an N7. In 29 years, I’ve upgraded maybe 10 times, and I’ve used every speech processor Cochlear has offered since the MSP, except for the N6. Along the way, the ACE processing strategy and the first BTE processor were big deals, but most of the rest of the upgrades were expensive nothing-burgers. My new N7, though, is a big improvement. It’s got really good wireless connectivity, and Bluetooth, so it works straight from my phone. Now I’ve got to get used to it.
Today I made a ham sandwich for lunch. I set aside a piece of ham for the cat and then forgot all about him while I ate my sandwich. He started yowling, so I gave him a pinch of his ham. And then another. I kept throwing him pieces as fast as he could eat it and, while it lasted, I think the cat thought it was raining ham!
fri aug 31
We are awash in tomatoes. Big red juicy ripe delicious heirloom tomatoes. Green on the top and reddish brown on the bottom. Perfect for BLT sandwiches and wet spots on your tee shirt.