November 2014

Yesterday was the first of November, and the green house was on my mind.

It is a conundrum. What do we want to do with it?
It’s a mess.  It has a very old roof. Been thru several remodels. Lath and plaster under sheetrock. Sometimes under more sheetrock. No insulation except on 1st floor.  A rats nest of plumbing. Lots of rotted siding.  A damp basement, and the south addition moves with the seasons.
Still, it’s got real and sentimental value and a killer view.

It would be a huge project to take this on, but it would eventually be a huge project if we do nothing until something has to be done, so I figure let’s do the things I’d have to do either way, like gut and clean it, and see where that puts us.

So.
Starting today, I’m going to gut it and clean it like a fish.
And over the winter, before it starts to stink, I’m going to figure out how to fix it into a tasty dish.
Join me.

11/3 mon

Yesterday, Mary said Manny had decided not to rent the place, but she did not say what she wanted to do with it. After a little prodding, she said to shut it down and to do what I want with it. She said it is OK to gut it, but you could tell she was unhappy about it.

So today, Mary is off to CT, and I took some ladders and tools next door and I pulled down the tarps, took out the shelving, removed the trim and baseboards and a lot of the sheetrock in the far end. I gotta get a camera, because the phone-y pictures I take aren’t good.

Here is what I we’re starting with.

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11/4 tue

I moved the mailbox from 2277 to 2251 in the morning.

In the afternoon, I made some 14′ truss/planks so I can walk between the beams and strip the ceiling 14′ up. I got all the sheetrock off the far end, and the ceiling is down to lath.
It took me about 3 hrs.

Here’s some old wallpaper from upstairs.
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11/5/wed

Today I went to an auction.

Based on the ad, I didn’t expect this one to be very good, and almost skipped it, but they’re all different, and I went anyway.
It was in Holland, Vt, just east of Derby Line, in the very last house before Canada.
Some guy up there was quite a guy. And then he got sick and died.
A medium house with a huge attached garage, plus a spanking 50×100 building with four 9′ OH doors. Not insulated. At all.

Lots of hunting and reloading equipment. Lots of big and little, plastic, wood, and ball bearing steel drawers stuffed with stuff. Electrical stuff. Hydraulic stuff. Big tools and little tools. Automotive stuff. A dozen desks and benches. A dozen racks of shelves.  Store bought stuff and home-made stuff. Recreational stuff. Crap and little treasures, all mixed up in cardboard boxes. All kinds of stuff.
This kind of guy inspires me.

There was a medium sized, fully-tooled mill/lathe on 2 pedestals of ball-bearing drawers, where this guy apparently made a fully-functional 10-cylinder gatling gun and ammunition for it. From scratch.

He had a bull dozer. A 3-point hitch snowblower he’d retrofitted with 4 hydraulic adjustments. A chipper. A trailer-mounted backhoe. A pristine 40-horse tractor. A pair of home-made hydraulic tree-scissors, that will snip off a 5″ tree like a cut flower.
A 1972 Honda 750 in great shape went for $2k. Mine only cost $225, but this guy, of course, had totally re-built his, and it purred.

I think I would have liked this guy.

There was a retractable pneumatic hose mount that I bid $55 on and won! It turned out to be part of a pressure washer collection with electric AND gas power plants. It has a sticker on it saying: “DANGER! Treat this sprayer like a loaded gun.” It ‘needs a little work,’ but still!

There was a box of drill sets. Jobbers drills. Numbered drills. Lettered drills. Fire drills. All kinds of drills except for dull drills. And a drill sharpener to boot! I bid $100 and lost fast.

There was a decent metal rack, and I snagged it for $20!

There were 9 motorcycle helmets, and I spent part of the morning trying them on, because they all interfere differently with my processor. For $50 apiece, I got 2 brand new helmets that fit.

And then, … I didn’t see this one coming, but a really nice park bench was on the block, and my hand rose of its own accord – three times – and I owned it.  WTF?

I had a tuna roll for lunch and some french fries for the road and I only peed once all day.
I loaded up, drove home, and fed the cats.

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11/6 thu

Couple hours at the green house. At one point, my plank slipped off the ledge that was holding it up and I wound up dangling from the turnbuckle chain spanning the room 10 feet up. And lived to tell about it. Don’t tell Mary.

The ceiling and some chains to dangle from.

The ceiling and some chains to dangle from.

11/7 fri

11/8 sat

Worked more on c3pr kinematics: made an inverse kins variant that interprets abc as a pov.o unit vector instead of an rpy.

A couple hours at the green house. Ripped out walls and ceiling in Celia’s room and remaining 2nd floor lath in the big room.

11/9 sun

Planted some garlic with Mary.
Half-hearted progress at getting the stuck bolts out of the motorcycle.

Spent 3 hrs at the green house, taking out the hall closet across from Celia’s room. I have a lot of sympathy for anyone who is going to re-remodel anything I’ve worked on, because I like to use screws instead of nails. Nails come out  LOT easier.

Same view of the living room as shown on 12/3/14

Same view of the living room as shown on 12/3/14

11/10 mon

Connected and tested my new pressure washer. Stand back!
Did a lot of machining to make apparatus for drilling out the stuck bolts in the Suzuki. Got them out and tapped 2 of 3 with larger threads.
Went with Mary to Burlington and ran errands while she had her MRI done. Coffee, cat food, a new camera, and flannel for feet for the park bench.

11/11 tue

Finished tapping the enlarged holes for the exhaust pipes.
Green house: removed return-air plenum from furnace. Never seen so many dust bunnies!
Removed remaining sheetrock and lath in upstairs hall closet area.
c3pr: figured out how to approach robot-to-table frame conversions: embed it in fwd/inverse kinematics, get offset from hal, and use [if]flags to control the conversion.

This is the crumbling footing that holds up a good chunk of the house. Left half is 19th century dry-stacked rocks. Right side is part of (I'm guessing) 1950's era addition.

This is the crumbling footing that holds up a good chunk of the house. Left half is 19th century dry-stacked rocks. Right side is part of (I’m guessing) 1950’s era addition.

11/12 wed

Called Casella about a roll-off box
drilled the Suzuki’s exhaust adapters to accommodate oversized bolts
Mounted the pressure washer components on a dolly
Worked at Green House for 3 hours. Started moving wood out of living room and took photos of how the floor is structured around the stairway.
c3pr: formalized table-to-robot frame conversion in notes and partly updated kinematics code.

11/13 thu

Casella delivered a 30 cubic yard roll-off box today. I call it ‘Rob.’
I photographed the floor structure from many different angles and tapped them into CAD, and a method emerged from behind the madness. This will help with placing the new stairs and supports.
I went downtown to pay taxes and get groceries, but forgot to get tortillas!
I started hauling the debris to Rob. I had moved wood the other day, but quickly found that the pile of wood I’d created was ‘upside down’ from Rob’s end, and every single piece had to be tugged hard to dislodge it, because Rob’s end was effectively the bottom of the pile. That got old fast, so I tried moving stuff from the far side of the wood pile, but the wood was in the way. By sheer brute force, I cleared a path through the wood pile and tried moving scoopable debris in the wheelbarrow. This was fine, but the wheelbarrow doesn’t hole much, and it will take forever. I tried it in the barrel, which was ungainly. I tried it on a tarp, which was hard to maneuver and unload. In the end, I ground away at the wood pile to expose as much clean litter as possible, and I’ll find a way to move it tomorrow.
I worked on c3pr and coded the kins to get the table-to-robot frame transform from hal.

11/14 fri

Mary is off to the Dr and the DMV in Burlington.
This morning, I cleaned up the garage a little so I could put the tractor in it. I stared at the GH stuff I’ve got in CAD. Might have to change bsmt stairs to an ell if I want to have 2 flights going upstairs.
Spent about 5 hours hauling debris out of the living room on a tarp. I folded the tarp to about 16×10 and dragged it thru 2 doors, across the porch, down some stairs, and up into Rob about a dozen times. Hard work. Drove the tractor right into Rob twice to compact and push back the piles. Got it about 2/3 done in about 5 hrs.
Munchiladas and Grey’s Anatomy, and then did some debugging of the kinematic table transform.

11/15 sat

I slept late. I was tired and sore from yesterday’s marathon. Mary made munchilada omelets, and they were really good. I did some debugging of kinematics’ persistent flags and it looks ok. I gathered garbage to feed Rob and went to the hardware store for dust masks and heat tape and a 2016 battery. Mary saw me putting it in the garage door opener and decided to try her hand at connecting the Tahoe to the house and, to her credit, seemed to do everything right. Except that it didn’t work. So I tried it, and it worked. Ta da! I changed and headed next door for about 3 hours

11/16 sun

Mary had her hair done yesterday by Maggie in Stowe, so she did my hair this morning.
Just the beard and the eyebrows. Apparently there’s not much other hair to cut.
I worked next door and picked up the big piles downstairs and then chucked all the debris upstairs over the cliff  and into the tarp downstairs. Then I took out the furring and false wall, chucked the pieces over the cliff, and then sorted out the big pile and hauled it to Rob. It sounds like a lot of work, and it was, but compared to lately, it was an easy day.
I took a shower and everything itches. Comics. Football. 60Minutes. Nachos. Madam Secretary. And then I sat down and worked on c3pr and figured out why axis3 kept crapping out: Hal was only set up for 3 axes! So I fixed that and tried it out, and it seemed to work.
Then I went to bed.

11/17 mon

The living room is cleaned up and Rob is full.

The living room is cleaned up and Rob is full.

11/18 tue

In the morning, I found 2 reasons the paddle wasn’t rotating right, and neither one of them was my fault! By noon, I had all the joints moving right.
I went next door and had a rough time deciding what, if anything, to take down. I took down some dining room ceiling sheetrock and I’m glad I did, because it shows that there’s an entire, intact vintage beam in the ceiling, and it is smack in the middle of where I’d wanted to put the stairs.  So the stairs will have to go somewhere else. Back to the drawing board. I swept the place, hauled it to Rob, and started taking out nails.
We had spaghetti and meatballs for dinner and didn’t say much.
Afterwards, I wrestled with vismach and redrew the paddle with axes for the right frame, but it was stuck on the old vismach without my changes. I was using prod version, and I can fix that, so I am poised on the verge of launching my machine.

Say Hello to Rob, the roll-off box.

Say Hello to Rob, the roll-off box.

11/19 wed

This morning, I messed with Axes() in and out of vismach, but finally gave up and decided to just draw my frames inline. Some day, I’ll try harder and figure out how to do it Right. My hip started hurting when I got up, so I went easy on it all afternoon.
I worked next door and de-nailed 3 piles of wood. Stacked it in the living room, hauled it to the barn. Swept and tidied up. I got around to my daily grilled cheese at around 3:00, so we decided to dumb dinner down to pizza. I spent most of my evening re-coding 3 more axes and, for all the trouble it’s taking me,  I sorta know what I’m doing and I’m confident I’ll get vismach and kinematics working. Some day soon.

Kindling

Kindling

11/20 thu

This morning, I messed around on the computer, though I couldn’t tell you exactly what I accomplished. I fired up the tractor and moved 2 workbenches out of the barn and into the green house, and then moved the old table saw from chuck to the green house too. The roll-off box got picked up, and I vacuumed off the woodstove so I could use it to heat the place. I moved a couple boxes of firewood and cut up a fallen birch tree so I’d have wood to burn if I need it. It wasn’t an awfully lot of work, and I can see where a day of collecting fallen logs would get me enough firewood to last me quite a few work days.  I quit when I got cold and came back home. Seems like with the woodstove and a fan, I could keep the place pretty comfortable. I got going on vismach and finally figured out how the rotations work. I formalized it in notes and coded it into c3prgui.py, and now I’ve got got a gui that works. Two of them, even.

11/21 fri

I don’t remember.

11/22 sat

I went over the green house CAD drawings with Mary and took her next door to look over the gutted shell. She seems to be on-board for everything I showed her and talked about. There’s not a lot of choice in the matter, I suppose, but at least there was no disagreement. In the afternoon, we went to Burlington for filters, coffee, fabric, camera, Bauer, LLBean, Leunigs. Came home and I had eaten too much and felt bad.

11/23 sun

Oatmeal, assembled the shelves, messed with another stuck bolt on the motorcycle, c3pr, and TV. Pretty low key day. C3pr is coming along really well, and both GUIs run at full speed returning the ball until vball craps out. Very impressive!

11/24 mon

Today, I planted 96 daffodils, 5 red hyacinths, and a bag of mixed allium along the driveway, where it’s visible from both the house and the road. Don’t tell Mary.
I went to town and bought shoelaces, metric allen wrenches, transmission fluid, and a hypodermic needle. Is America a great country or what? I went to the green house and started taking apart the stairway. I have to say I grudgingly admire the guy who put that thing in, because it’s been really hard taking it apart. Mary made an apron, and we had swordfish and chard. Mary doesn’t like the bathroom or the stairs, but she had some good suggestions. I fixed c3pr so the cartesian paddle works. It’s an ugly kluge, but it gets the job done. Finally, I did some green house CAD, moving the stairs around

11/25 tue

In the morning, I played with c3pr, trying to decide what works and what needs to happen next. Then I did a little more CAD for the green house. Yesterday, I’d soaked the stuck bolt on the Suzuki in automatic transmission fluid, so today, I gave it one last tug to see if it would come loose before I tried adding acetone to the mix. The little fucker snapped off on me, and now I’ve got to grind it out like I did the others. The good news is that I have everything I need to do so, and all I’ve got to do is sit down and make it happen.
I went next door and ripped out the stairway. Lots of little pieces, and then the whole unit came out fairly smoothly. Another day of taking out sheetrock, and I will have a really good idea of where I stand. I came home, dug out my diamond burrs, and ground out the stuck bolt by brute force. We had pizza and watched NCIS and part of a Johnny Carson tribute and then I figured out why c3pr’s swatOff button had stopped working.

Ripped out the stairway. Watch your step.

Ripped out the stairway. Watch your step.

11/26 wed

I’d just barely started looking at c3pr’s operating margins when I went downstairs to get started in the shop. There was a puddle on the floor. And a wet spot on the ceiling, going drip drip drip. And the drips were getting faster. So here I am, the morning of the day before thanksgiving, when nothing will be open, with a leaky pipe and a nor’easter due this afternoon.  There is nothing spilled upstairs, so it must be the radiant heat that’s leaking. I dug up photos of the tubing, sleepers and studs before the concrete was poured, and there’s nothing exceptional about the wet spot, so I’m betting the water traveled quite a ways atop the sub-floor before it found a hole through it. This is not fun. So I shut down the pipes and drilled four 3″ holes thru the sub-floor near the leak, exposing the sleeper and the tube. All the holes were dry. I powered the pipes back on and, sooner or later, something is going to get wet, and I’ll drill more holes.
So I went next door and tore out a bunch of sheetrock in the master bedroom closet extension and then de-nailed and cut up a bunch of the wood.
Mary made a delicious quiche with brussells sprouts I’d picked and then I built a python callback to let the realtime code execute gui operations.
As it turns out, a jug of water on the shelf was leaking and I hadn’t seen the puddle earlier, so all that work was wasted.

11/27 thu

Thanksgiving. We woke up to 6″ of new snow and a power failure, which had already come and gone. I spent a couple hours next door, tearing out more sheetrock near the stairs, and then we headed for Charon’s for dinner. Just Them and Us and Maggie and the girls. Maggie made some really good pies. We came home with leftovers and the 2 little girls, who promptly scared the cats. While Luci hid under the bed, BZ ate and I put Luci’s bowl on the counter, and when she finally came out, I went to feed her and found that BZ had already polished off her food. It’s the American way: BZ and I both over-ate tonight.

Behind the panelling at the foot of the stairs: Nature.

Behind the panelling at the foot of the stairs: Nature.

11/28 fri

black friday. The kids are up, playing with the cat. Mary is deep in sleep. My whities were tight all night, and I’m awake. The cats are hungry. The kids are hungry. I’m vaguely aware of it, so I feed the cats and make the coffee and sit down, like I always do. Yet the kids are still hungry. I made eggs and toast and splurged on yogurt, and suri wanted more eggs. Mary got up and filled in some of the gaps, and I disappeared. We took the kids to watch Big Hero 6 in Williston – too grown-up for them – and I ate most of the pop corn and milk duds. Poor kids had never had a milk dud before! We ate Mexican in Stowe and came home. I diddled, but could not focus on c3pr, so I watched TV. First day in weeks that I didn’t work next door.

11/29 sat

I messed with c3pr, trying to get it to render the cameras, but hit a wall trying to pass configuration data all the way from ini to hal to gui, and took a break. I went next door and worked on the new stairwell until I started shivering and then removed nails for awhile. I picked up where I left off with the cameras and moved the code from glcanon to emcmodule and finished off the data transfer too. It needs tweaking, but it basically works. Leftover turkey, Grey’s Anatomy, debugging, and bedtime.

11/30 sun

Today I messed with green house stairway CAD and then went over there and tore out  the floor of the MBR closet extension and some of the olde tyme shingles in the hidden wall to expose the old cross-beam. The house was colder than it was outside and I was feeling it, so I quit and watched football. Mary decorated the Christmas wreath for the front door. Watched 60 minutes & madam secretary, ate nachos, and I tested out the camera rendering code.

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OK!
So……
That was November.
November’s big project was the green house, and I got a lot done. Like zero to sixty. We went from a huge hopeless mess with who-knows-what’s wrong with it to a big clean exposed workplace where you can see exactly what needs to be done. And that’s a big deal, even if it’s a small part of the whole. So congratulations are in order: Nice Start!

And c3pr is showing signs of life too.
It wasn’t long ago that it was a thrill to get a simple trick to work, and now I’m pretty sure there’s nothing I can’t do. I used to contemplate the finish line and it looked sooo far away. And now that I’ve settled into doing 8 minute miles, I can sort of see it in the middle distance. It took me awhile, but kinematics and vismach Work. And everything that used to work, works better than it did. Nice job! Keep up the good work!

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