December 2014

Holy crap, it is December already!

If November was any clue, it is going to be hard to predict what kind of a month December is going to be. For starters, Mary is going to California for the week of her birthday, and when she gets back, there’s the holidays. Non-stop. Usually, I’m glad when December is over.

Here is what I kind of have in mind for getting done this month:
At the green house, I want to take a quick break and think hard about what’s the right way to proceed. Right now, I’m thinking I need to pour some concrete and stabilize a few places in the basement, but I could be wrong.
At the new house, I’m going to put up those damned shelves.
In c3pr, I’m going to either do my Tiger Woods imitation or try out openCV.
On the motorcycle, I’ll probably do nothing.

Dec 1 mon

I diddled around on the computer all morning:
It looks like someone wants to buy the Westford land.
I figured out how to get my phone’s photos to skyDrive and then onto my laptop, and it’s not easy.
I held my nose and took down the sheetrock in the shop stairwell so I can put in blocking to secure the new built-ins from the back.  The iron pipe railing came off, a layer of plank staging went up over the stairs, the first piece of sheetrock came down. A second level of plank staging (and a ladder on top of it) went up, and the second piece of drywall came down. Then I took it all down. It took about 2.5 hours and I worked up quite a sweat.
Mary made some super good pork chops and sweet potatoes.
I finished The Magicians and strategized about what belongs in a .tgts file.

Dec 2 tue

This morning, I got a serious start on the built-in shelves to go in the living room. They’d been stored in a pile in the shop for about 9 months, and I managed to match up about 90% of the pieces to where they go, but there are a handful that just don’t look right. That’s a little disturbing, but par for the course, the way I tend to do things. I got set up to rout the shelf-support grooves and did about half of them.
Leftover quiche and turkey for lunch, and then I went next door and started digging in the basement for a footing to stabilize the old rock foundation where it holds the green house up. I dug up the last of the beets and carrots in the garden and they were frozen into the first inch of dirt, so I brought a whole wheelbarrow full of frozen dirt into the house to thaw. Kale too! Eating fresh out of our garden in December!
Butch sent a sales agreement for Lot #3 in Westford, so I feel pretty good about that.
Munchiladas, the Voice, and a crummy Hallmark show to kick off the holiday season, and then I did a little coding to implement .tgts file functionality for c3pr.

Dec 3 wed

I dropped Mary off at the airport for her visit with Ella in Palm Springs. Picked up some stationary and envelopes in Williston and then drove home. I figured out how to configure the ends of the built-ins and routed some more grooves for shelf supports.
I made a quick trip into town for 23 bags of sack-crete to shore up the green house foundation and unloaded them into the basement. That’s a lot of fucking bags, and probably not half of what I’ll need. I went downstairs and routed grooves until I ran out of grooves to rout.  For c3pr, I coded the .tgts file parser in good old fashioned C code.

Dec 4 thu

Today I went to an auction. I wanted to buy candlesticks, and I did. It was a combined 3 estates, and the wares were like a big antique and curio store. There were lots and lots of decoys, wind-up clocks, wooden chairs, tables,  and dressers, art, glassware, rugs, and general Americana. There was a picture of a girl with a lizard on her arm that sold for $16k. I got my candlesticks and left.  I bought some crab salad that turned out to be fake manufactured seafood, and I liked the taste of it, but hated the idea of it.
I came home and pulled the beets and carrots out of the mud in the wheelbarrow and got the idea that the short ribs at Mary’s party should come with a whole braised carrot.
I worked on the final install of the cabinet bases and fitted the kicks.
I worked on compiling c3pr, and ran into a problem, so I moved code from emcmodule to taskintf and ran into another problem, so I’m sitting it out for awhile.

Dec 5 fri

Today I sanded the shelf support grooves I routed yesterday and put on a coat of hard sealer. Mary has a box of gloves on her shelf, so I wore a pair, but they dissolved in the solvent and fell apart. She’s allergic to latex, too, so why even bother? I got most of the pieces coated, and am running low on sealer.
I responded to TJ, the VEIC guy, and he will be here wednesday to do an inspection and pressure test.
I got c3pr re-compiled, and started patching the bugs. It’s tedious, but fairly simple.
Mary is enjoying her first day in Palm Springs, eating Mexican and sitting outside. I can’t say I envy her.

Dec 6 sat

I woke up late, despite Luci’s efforts.
There’s no getting around it: the boards need a 2nd coat of sealer – they just look kind of pale. At least it should be easier this time. So that’s what I did all day. I went to the Mill to steal a few more quarts and sanded everything with 400 grit. I brushed the dust. Spread the sealer. Soaked ’em. Wiped ’em. Racked ’em. No corners were cut on this coat. I even put a first coat on the pieces I didn’t do yesterday, and now it’s evening, and I’m sick of finishing. I’m sort of not sure what Mary sees in it.
So I worked on c3pr and after a gruesome square-root-of-negative problem that took 5 boots to fix, it dispatches targets. Sort of.

Dec 7 sun

I sorted through a 2-month, 4-inch pile of mail. It boiled down to about half ads, half statements, and only 2 things I actually had to do in response. That’s about a thing a month. I can do that.
The sealed wood was dry, so I started installing the cabinets. The window wall went together pretty well, considering what could have gone wrong. The long wall went together pretty well too, and it fits a little too perfectly in spots. The overall effect is pretty stark, and it really needs drawers and cabinets.
It’s Mary’s birthday, and I composed a nice note about Sixty three.
I’m kind of stumped on how to get the swat integrated into fsim, but I’ll figure it out.

Dec 8 mon

Today, I fitted and coated all the miscellaneous pieces. Baseboards, endpieces, anything with a notch in it. It’s a good thing I’ve been diligent about working on this, because it took 2 days to mill the grooves, 2 days to sand and seal. 1 day to install. 1 day for bits and pieces, and tomorrow will be another day. That’s 7 days of work and, thinking back, I would probably have predicted 4-5. How wrong I would have been.
I’ve been really good about staying away from the green house. I wanted to take a break over there. Kind of step back and let the task sink in. I noticed that the string of christmas lights on the door over there had gone out and many dire scenarios crossed my mind, but it took me 3 days to go over there and check, so I’ve done a good job of taking a break. Good job!
And c3pr is looping on a .swats file now. Two nights ago, it didn’t like swats at all, and there were a lot of reasons for it. Nice work!

Dec 9 tue

It took a bit of a pep talk this morning to get me going, but what else was I going to do? So I installed the divider over the aquarium, mounted the deskette near the front door and secured the backside of the wine rack. I assembled the far corner unit, milled some new trim pieces, and fitted the handful of pieces that still need a coat of finish. And I coated them.
I made a trip downtown to order short ribs for saturday and splurged on not one but two packaged dessert pastries. My bad.
I cleaned up a little and then trimmed the wallpaper fragments I’d saved from the green house into card-sized chunks.

Dec 10 wed

I got up this morning and got right at it. No screwing around. I finished installing all the bits and pieces I’d coated yesterday and I totally cleaned up. It looks stark. It looks like it needs drawers and doors bad. So that is probably going to be a priority soon.
TJ Holloway showed up on time. He’s the efficiencyVT rep. He put the big blower on the door, a little blower on each fan, and measured all the windows.  “1360” is the answer. I think it’s cfh at so many pascals, but he wasn’t clear. It’s about 2x better than you need to be to be respectable, but could probably be another 2x better if I improve the doors.  I showed him the gaps from the foam and we walked over to the other house.  He is big on infiltration, and says I’d get a lot of bang out of sealing up the basement. It takes about 4″ of foam to insulate a respectable roof, he says, and he agreed about thermal bridging around the posts. I need to stop and figure out how to proceed.
I went downtown and bought a $15 gift. And then I bought myself $10 worth of toys. I must have 1000 tools, and I only have 1 yo-yo, and it was a problem for me all last week. So I splurged and bought myself another yo-yo. One week late.
I worked on c3pr, and coded up most of calc_dpvsa_apex(). I should have more sessions like that.

Dec 11 thu

I did not do squat today, it seems, other than a run to the dump and then a trip to Burlington to pick up Mary at the airport. We stopped at Pie-casso on the way back.
I began debugging the code I wrote yesterday.

Dec 12 fri

Mary and I ran errands today, preparing for tomorrow’s Sutherland Welles holiday party. Hardware store, gas, groceries, liquor, tree farm … We got the tree home and hung it up on the trolley and it drip-dried onto the floor as it thawed out. We decorated the tree, which is just a little too perfect, and ate the chicken I never got around to cooking for dinner.
More debugging. Good progress, but slow.

Dec 13 sat

Today was Mary’s party

Dec 14 sun

Today was the aftermath of Mary’s party and I farted around, laid low, and stuck to the program. Cleanup, computer, c3pr, football, 60minutes, nachos.
c3pr was built so, for once, I tried just using it instead of compiling it, and just about everything I’ve got coded, works. And it’s pretty impressive. Pat me on the back, will you please?

Dec 15 mon

Today was Mary’s first day back at work, and I got my car inspected while I walked around the Harrell st & rte 15 loop. I went to 1829 house for antiques. I got the forms set for the footing pour next door and collected all the tools I need to mix concrete.
Tough but tasty beef for dinner, with leftover mashed potatoes and braise gravy. Super good. We watched the Voice, but couldn’t figure out how to vote on Mary’s phone.

Dec 16 tue

This morning, I filled a bucket with water 8 times and walked it out to the drum on the tractor. By the 5th trip, a bucket on wheels was looking mighty attractive.  I hauled the drum of water through the snow to the green house shed and mixed and poured 13 bags of concrete for the footing. I think it will be OK.

I picked the Brussels sprouts and tossed the compost. I had hoped to make pickled brussells sprouts, but the ones I picked were kind of punky, and I’ll probably toss them IN the compost.

I went back to the green house and peered along the joists to see if the structure will take a wall for the larger bathroom. It won’t, so I need to put another footing in the basement. The stairway was in the way, so I took it out. It was in there solid, let me tell you.
We had scallops and watched the Voice finale.

Dec 17 wed

I felt like I’d wasted most of my morning because I ‘just’ played on the computer.
I did some CAD to see what drawer fronts might look like.
I did a little coding and I got vpaddle to show up in the vismach window. Wow.
So maybe I didn’t waste it as much as I thought. The solar guy came late, and I pretty much just went thru the motions with him. Sorry, Kevin.
I went next door and I set up the forms for the next pour. I think they’re going to be too thick, but too bad.  I came home and started a user space hal logger and we had pizza and a Hallmark movie. I got the logger compiled later on. Yet another chunk of progress, in just a half an evening.

Dec 18 thu

This morning, for a change of pace, I puttered in the shop a bit. I actually felt a little guilty for not being at the the computer or the green house, but I think it’s good to mix it up.
I trimmed the yellow submarine and slotted some copper pipe for a frame.
I cut plywood for forms, added water to the barrel, and hauled it next door. I put up the forms and poured 9 bags of concrete, and then went to the store and bought 18 more bags, put them in the tractor, and carried them thru the shed to the mixing area. All this in a snowstorm.
I saved a git image of c3pr to thumb and then worked on the logging function.

Dec 19 fri

corned beef. marinated brussels sprouts. Signed papers for the solar guy. poured another 11 bags of concrete. Since fopen() was dicy, I tried open(,O_NONBLOCK) and, after a lot of work, found that it was dicy too, so an easy way eludes me still…

Dec 20 sat

Having done the coding, it was time to try it out, so I sat down and actually tried to learn something useful from the logged data, and decided that the real problem behind the following errors was the step scale, which was 100 steps per degree, and a max of 1 step per 65uS. I changed it to 10 and – wow. Everything works. YEQ, GAME, INDEX, CYCLE, everything. You can watch it play, and it does everything it’s supposed to do. Very cool. I showed it to Mary and she involuntarily cocked an eyebrow at it. You could tell she was impressed. And somewhere in there, I went into town, came back with another 18 bags of concrete, and hauled them into the green house basement.
Then we went christmas shopping. Maple tree place. Christmas tree shop. Dicks. Terry Keim. starbucks. walmart. Plato. starbucks again. Macys. OGX. Umall. Pennys. kidstore. Guild. Home. Cats.

Dec 21 sun

We met charon and marshall in Jeff for breakfast and exchanged goodies. I sat out the goodie business this year. We came back and I poured 12 bags of concrete in the 4th pour next door. It was nice calm cold weather, and it was nice to be outdoors.
I came home and did enough computer work to see that there is plenty that’s still broken, but it doesn’t look hard to fix. Football, nachos, 60 minutes, hallmark, and more computer work, with more poking than progress.

Dec 22 mon

Mary is off to work, and is driving to bring Celia from Albany to Burlington and is due back here soon. I spent the morning pasting together home-made blank cards made out of wallpaper from next door until I ran out of paste. I seem to have no particular talent for paste. Then I went on a shopping excursion of my own. Aubuchon. Bank. Hannafords. Tomlinsons. Macys. Snowflake. Umall (not). Cheese Traders.  Liquor. ACMoore. ToysRUs. Staples. Xmas tree shoppe. Yankee. Starbucks. Home. I divvied up all my packages and wrapped most of them and then finished pasting the cards together with a new tube of paste.

Dec 23 tue

I finished wrapping christmas stuff. Whew.
Here is how c3pr is going to unfold: In about 2 years, Charlie is going to burst upon the scene and a year later he’s going to be in line for a championship match. At that time, it just so happens that the reigning human world champion  is going to be a North Korean player and the match has to be played in North Korea. Kim Jong-Un grabs a paddle to play a photo-op with Charlie and I’m instructed to let him win. Instead, Charlie beats the pants off him and hits a few extra balls his way to boot. Nobody laughs. Charlie is confiscated, and I am arrested, charged with assaulting the Dear Leader, and imprisoned. A crisis ensues. But before that can happen, I have a lot of bugs to fix.
Pizza and grey’s anatomy.

Dec 24 wed

Christmas eve at Maggie’s

Dec 25 thu

Christmas here. Chris, Nina, celia, sean, maggie.

Dec 26 fri

Green house tour. Go-cart. Helicopter.

Dec 27 sat

Hill Farmstead brewery, Positive Pie, back to the brewery.
Kids drank 2l of brewery beer.

Dec 28 sun

Hung out. Kids went out to burlington in the evening. Football, tv, lasagna.
Found another bug.

Dec 29 mon

Snow on the ground. Mary to work. Kids returned from burl. Snow. Tahoe is at McMahon’s. The kids slept all day and I made sure that c3pr mostly worked, anticipating some kind of a demo soon. I went next door and took the  forms off the footings, which was harder than it sounds. I brought the jack over and set it up under the floor beam and raised it up enough to take out the round post that was holding that end of the floor up. I made some replacement block and took the original one home as a souvenir.  I cleaned up and started reading a self-help book.
Mary came home and we all went out for drinks at the RRdepot. I did not say much, but everyone else sure did. Ashton talked about ammunition and Celia was non-stop. We went to the Whip for drinks and wings and stayed for burgers. I had 2.5 beers and Mary had 5 jacks. I gotta tell you I’m a little uncomfortable about how much alcohol has been consumed in the last week.

Dec 30 tue

I took the kids to Burlington and dropped them off at Maggie’s, where their job was to clean up Maggie’s apartment, which was a mess. Then they were going to lunch with Alena and to visit with Gary for 2 days. That girl will be glad to go home. We had a good talk in the car on the way up. I drove home, got groceries, and pretty much read my book, savoring the quiet.
We had a fritata and watched Kennedy Honors.

Dec 31 wed

—————————————————————————————
So December draws to a close. And with it, 2014.
In December, I did what I said I was going to do:
I poured concrete at the green house and put up cabinets at the new one.
I got 90% done with Tiger Woods and 10% done trying openCV. Combined, that’s 100%.
And I didn’t do a thing on the motorcycle. That’s pretty good, and I’m claiming victory.

I’m not sure I can say the same about 2014, though. It was a tough year.
Actually, it was a great year, for everything except for some personal problems.
I did hinges, doors, Adam’s buffet, and the cabinets. The solar panels, the retaining wall, and the gutter additions all got made. The ellipse got built, and there’s a ‘spring-activated’ motion picture queued up in spring bulbs buried in it. The go-cart got fixed, the motorcycle got set aside, and the green house got started. And I made a ton of progress on c3pr. Mercaldo settled and I sold land. Everything I touched came out great, except for …
And then there’s Mary. We were in sad shape to begin with and her shoulder didn’t help. Therapy failed. The anger is gone, but there’s no affection. It’s interesting that, for all that went right this year, this one bad thing gave the whole year a bad name.