thu june 2
It’s lawn care season, so I needed to get the lawn mower working. Sounds easy, right?
Step 1: Drain the stale gas from the tank. After several trips up and down the stairs for tools and a bucket, I finally got the gas line disconnected, only to find that I’d already drained the tank last fall. Duh.
Step 2: Start engine. It wouldn’t start and, even with a big dose of starting fluid, it ran for a few seconds and then died. It turns out the gas tank stop-cock was off. Duh.
Step 3: Try again. Wait for blue smoke to clear.
In the end, it seems to run OK.
The grass was This long.
I really like it when the grass gets tall and a layer of flowers floats, knee-high, over the lawn
But Mary does the mowing, and what she says, goes.
sat june 4
Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that I wind up with 3 @ 500# pumpkins this fall.
So far, I’ve spent:
$45 on 6 genuine, pedigreed giant pumpkin seeds. Three of which didn’t even sprout.
$30 on a timer and
$50 on soaker hoses and fittings.
That’s about 9c per pound of pumpkin, not including grow-lights and fertilizer.
In October, the farm-stand price of a pumpkin will be about $5 for a 20# pumpkin.
That’s 25c a pound.
This is better than expected, but there’s room for improvement.
I took a month off from working on the green house. Maybe even two. I earned it.
But today, I packed up my toolbox and worked next door. I picked up right where I left off, working with PVC pipe. PVC pipe gives me no pleasure.
I tried twice to grow these in a garden, but they don’t want to grow.
They taunt me from the side of the tractor trail between houses.
sun june 5
Mary got it right.
While I’ve been pouring time, money, and effort into watering my plants and pumpkins, Mary’s let hers bake in the sun while their little rootsies look for water. A couple more days of that, and they would have all died, but today, just in the nick of time, we got steady rain, all day long, and she won’t have to lift a finger for weeks. Meanwhile, all my watering has raised a lot of weeds, and my plants don’t look any better than hers do. Life isn’t fair.
I made shelves for a retail display case for Mary. They’re nice, but they’re a lot of work, and I don’t seem to get the thrill out of woodworking that I used to get.
More PVC pipe. It goes a lot faster when you have enough pipe and fittings on-hand.
mon june 6
I dropped off the truck in town to have the broken rear window replaced, took Mary to work, and then brought her car home with me. It sounds crazy, but being without my own car kinda skewed my view of my whole day, and I never really got into a rhythm.
I gave up thinking the rusty motorcycle guy is going to call me, so I fired up my motorcycle and went snooping around town. It was perfect weather for snooping.
I went back to the abandoned trailer to get the license number and picked up some of the litter that was under the bike. There was a receipt from 2013 with the owner’s name on it. Turns out he’s not just Rusty W-, he’s Rusty D W-. (That extra initial will help out a lot when trying to sort out the 50 or so Rusty W-‘s on Facebook) There was also a perfectly good box of nicotine patches and a losing lottery ticket from 2013.
I went to the police, thinking maybe they could help. (I thought about bringing along a box of donuts, but didnut) Think about this: This is the local sheriff’s office in a quiet town in a rural county in one of the most laid back states in the nation. Andy Griffith, right? Well when I walked in, it was a 5′ x 5’ lobby with 2 locked doors, no place to sit, a security camera, and an empty desk protected by 1″ thick bulletproof glass, floor to ceiling. I could not understand a single word that was coming out of the intercom, so I finally told them “I’m deaf. Can I talk to a human?” and they sent someone out to shout at me through the glass.
“What do you want?”
“There’s an abandoned motorcycle in front of an abandoned trailer on rte 100 and I’m trying to track down the owner. ”
“Why do you want to know?”
She didn’t ask for my name, the address, or the license number. She disappeared for a moment and then came back.
“We know about the motorcycle and we know who the owner is, but we can’t tell you.”
Thanks a lot. And they wonder why people don’t trust the police.
I went to the Town Office and I asked the same question, and the lady said: “Oh that would be Rusty W-. He’ll never sell it.” She gave me a brain dump about it and concluded that Rusty’s “not all there.” But she didn’t know how to get hold of him.
So after all that shoe leather, the only thing I learned today is Rusty’s middle initial.
Pretty depressing, huh? So I went on a dirt road joy ride in the hills of North Wolcott and then planted more sunflowers in the spots where the first seeds didn’t come up.
Then I power-washed the sickle bar mower and got myself soaking wet.
By then, I felt better.
The cast iron shoe rests on the ground and skis across the corn field.
tue june 7
You’ll recall that I decided not to spend $500 on motorcycle bluetooth, and I got to thinking: maybe I can do it for free… Over the years, I’ve wasted a lot of money on hearing equipment, and I know of 4 sets of FM units I’ve got lying around in cardboard boxes. Most of them, I tried and rejected because their range sucks, but on a motorcycle, you’re sitting 2 feet apart, and even my worst one works at that range. I’m thinking Mary can talk into my lapel mike, and I can talk into an FM unit and – bingo – instant full duplex voice.
So I spent all morning – 2 full hours! – looking for my Williams Sound FM unit and never did find it. I’m going to try the Siemens instead.
I need to work next door and can’t decide what to work on next. The PVC plumbing is close enough to done that I’ve lost interest in it. (I do a lot of that) I need a change of pace.
The first thing you notice when you walk into the green house is the wet, earthy smell that comes from having a dirt basement. The tighter I make the house, the wetter and earthier the house is going to smell. (That was the first thing out the energy audit guy’s mouth when I showed him around) So I figured I’d tackle the whole dirt floor/indoor air quality problem.
In the big picture, the plan is to add some drainage pipe and a vapor barrier.
So I picked a place to penetrate the foundation, and I started digging.
No summer is complete without a daylight drainage ditch.
The light at the end of the tunnel connects the basement to the ditch I dug.
I tiled the rubble from the old chimney into the bottom of the ditch. Future archaeologists will think they’ve discovered a roman road.
fri june 10
When you’re in the army, and you dig a hole, and then you fill it up, it’s good news when you’re almost back where you started, because it means you’re almost done.
And that’s a good thing, because three days later, I’m still digging, and I’m almost back to where I started.
Fill her up!
sat june 11
A totally wasted day.
I weeded the ellipse and got a close-up look at all my plants, and they’re on death’s door. Maybe there’s too much manure. Maybe there’s too much water. Maybe it’s too cold. Maybe I’m trying too hard.
Mary’s garden, on the other hand, is looking really good.
I started them too early,
planted them into bad soil,
let them dry out,
and then shocked them with fertilizer and water.
It’s a wonder it’s not dead.
The sickle bar mower is looking like a disaster. I thought I’d just make an adapter for the 3-point hitch, but it turns out the arrangement of the “3-points” on the mower is waaaay different from the 3-points on the back of the tractor. Face it: it’s never going to work.
So now the goal is to just get it back together again, so I can sell it.
My Mesa card set came in the mail and it’s supposed to be plug’n’play to make it work.
So I plugged it in and tried to play it, but the computer wasn’t having it, and it got ugly. This is a PCIe FPGA-based 5-axis stepper controller with a DIN-rail daughter board, and there’s a lot that can go wrong. And then there’s me, running 64-bit non-RT 12.04 ubuntu and a private branch of 2.6.7. It didn’t work, and it did it in the worst possible way.
For the last 2 years, I’ve solved every c3pr problem that’s come up, with nothing but google and persistence, but today, I was defeated, and I had to ask for help.
A round of applause, if you please, for PCW, on the ‘driver boards’ forum, who helped me out. Thanks.
The business end of my Mesa card set. The LED goes on, but that’s about it.
mon june 13
The green house, as you know, has been remodelled many times over the years and I sometimes wonder: who did what, and when? …
It was raining, so I worked in the basement, clearing out the areas where I want to bury drain pipe. I dragged the leaky, empty 275 gallon oil tank out and left it in the middle of the lawn.
Then I started taking out a stub of concrete that apparently used to hold a wood stove and was smack dab in the path of the ditch I planned to dig.
On the little slab, I saw a big heart shape, with
John+Deb
1982
and their last name ‘M——-‘ inscribed in it.
Awwwww. So sweet! Maybe I can track them down and give it back?
So I carefully cracked the concrete to save the inscription and then demolished the rest of the slab. I googled them and the first entry on google was a news item that said:
Several people– including a public official– claim they have been threatened and intimidated by a heavily-armed religious survivalist group that resides in the town of Craftsbury……
The most ominous came this year by a man packing a gun. “He said well you are now on private property and I would tread lightly if I were you, because your life might be in jeopardy.”
The man with the gun was John M—–, the reported leader of the church group. He has websites that detail how Mission New England is a born-again Christian group, explaining why its members are survivalists driven by the notion that the world is coming to an end.
So I’m thinking I’ll just set that slab aside somewhere and forget about it.
I’m starting to get a little worried about my plan to ride the motorcycle up Mt Washington. What if it breaks down? What do I do?
So I made a ramp that fits in the back of the truck and the plan is that if I break down, I call Mary, she jumps in the truck, comes and gets me, and we bring the bike back. What can go wrong?
Last time I made meatballs, they were really good. (they simmered in Mary’s Red Sauce for a couple of hours, but I doubt that had anything to do with it!)
So I made meatballs again. I was thinking two meatballs on a bed of spinach, with fingerling potatoes. It sounded delicious at the time, but it was, as Mary put it, a weird combination.
I hope you like meatballs. (They weren’t all that good.)
I dug ditches for drainage pipe in the basement next door. It took me 11 wheel barrow loads and 2 hours to dig about 20′ of ditch. That’s pretty good.
I ran into a roadblock in c3pr. It turns out that:
My motor won’t work without the FPGA card and …
FPGA cards don’t work without hardware drivers and …
The hardware drivers don’t get compiled in a simulation mode install and …
simulator mode is the only way I can run ubuntu in 64-bit mode and …
I need 64-bit mode to run openCV and RT-mode to run motors, so …
It seems I need to change my linux OS from ubuntu to 64-bit RT debian so that my motors will work.
This is a big deal, and it’s going to set me back, but in the end, I’m going to be glad I did it.
tue june 14
Yesterday, it snowed 7″ on top of Mt Washington and today, the wind was blowing at 73 mph, with gusts up to 93.
Today, I put oil in the motorcycle and greased the chain.
Ready to roll.
My luggage is packed together like a chinese puzzle
thu june 16
Lunch on the road. One of the best pulled pork sandwiches I’ve ever had. Ate it at a picnic table by the beach and I washed the bbq off my face and hands in the lake.
Today, I was on top of Mt Washington, and it was a beautiful day. Crisp, clear, calm. I took my first selfie, and I bought a T-shirt.
I made it.
And so did everyone else.
It makes sense, looking back, that the once-per-year they let motorcycles go up Mt Washington is during Bike Week NH, but it never even occurred to me that THIS week was bike week in NH. And I’m betting I’m the only biker in NH who didn’t know it. This was going to be my personal victory lap. Proof that this motorcycle I’d saved from certain death was roadworthy. My first Destination overnighter.
And then yesterday, it seemed that there were dozens of motorcycles in every town. And then this morning, the were hundreds. And then this afternoon, thousands. And then it dawned on me that it must be bike week.
On the way up, I thought people were waving at me, but it turns out my gas can was trying to get out.
On the way down, it actually fell out, and I only found out about it because it swung on a bungee and hit me on the back.
They were like cluster flies, travelling in pairs or packs of dozens. And Every Single One of them is riding a Harley. It’s not good enough to be riding a motorcycle: you’ve got to be riding a Harley. And I think I’ve got a little bit of a problem with that.
Nine out of 10 bikers ride Harleys.
One in a million rides an old bike.
There is a subculture of people who like old bikes. Four times, guys walked up to tell me what a nice bike I’ve got, and itching to tell me about theirs, but not quite knowing how to do it. I can tell you that nobody’s ever tapped on my window to tell me how much they like my old car.
The whole thing reminds me of the time we went to the Calaveras County Fair when I was a kid, and we got stuck in a biker traffic jam 3 miles from the entrance, and the dog got loose. This is back when the leather-clad bikers in black who are now 70 were 20, and they weren’t quite so mellow.
At one point, I took a left about 3 miles too soon and ended up exploring a deserted dead end back road, and enjoying it very much. Quiet. Slow. It might have been the best part of the trip.
I learned a lot:
I learned that the milk crate is not good enough. My gloves fell out, and I only found out because I missed a turn and backtracked and ran over one of them. My gas can came loose twice, and my quart of oil fell out on the way down the mountain and probably put someone’s life in danger. Sorry about that.
I learned that my carburetor doesn’t like altitude. It died twice when I idled on the way up.
I learned that, on a long ride, my underwear bunches up in back.
Also: Side roads are the way to go. And I need a windshield.
Just for the record: I went E on 15 and then 2 to Lancaster, then N on 3, then 110, then 110A, then 110B, then 16 to Gorham, where I ate soggy pizza, walked around, and twisted my knee. S on 16, up the Mtn, more S on 16, lost in the back roads, 302 into Conway, ice cream, and then the Kancamagus Hwy back to 302 in Woodville and Barre, and then 2 to Waterbury and home on 100.
It was 273 miles on 6 gallons of gas at 45 mpg. And a lot of fun.
Weather vanes point to where the wind is coming from.
I always thought they ought to point where the wind is blowing TO.
sun june 19
Somebody died and Maggie had to ‘be there,’ so we wound up with the kids overnight. So when I say, about their visit, that “nobody died,” you don’t know whether I’m being sarcastic or lying. It’s one of the above. Actually, they can be fun kids, but it’s a different kind of fun than I had a couple days ago and I can only take so much fun. I survived it and smiled doing it.
So the fun is over, and I buckled down and tried my luck with Linux. The problem is that, despite what you might read, I don’t totally understand it, and I’m really concerned that I’m going to fry my computer and lose my files if I screw this up. Backups are fine, but if the OS won’t boot, I’m screwed. So I read close to 20 different web pages about how dual boot systems are supposed to work and how partitions fit in. Then I re-partitioned my drive and installed debian 7.11 amd64 and then booted it. The good news is that ubuntu still works and I didn’t lose any data. The bad news is that debian does not boot.
Who ya gonna call?
The sickle bar mower project is not going well. I know it’s hard to believe, but it seems that I did not take enough ‘before’ photos before I took it apart. Never done that before, huh?
So now I’ve got a box of parts and I’m not sure what they do.
I’m not really sure where most of these go.
My back is killing me, but it’s off to the side, where there are no bones, so I’m not too worried. I really shouldn’t be digging ditches in a low-ceiling basement.
A couple days after I got back, I noticed that the bolt on the left had fallen out.
Just to be clear, if a couple more bolts like it had fallen out, I’d have lost my luggage, not my passenger.
thu june 23
A couple days ago was the summer solstice and the full moon on the same day. This is statistically unusual and, according to many ancient religions, a bad omen.
It was a gorgeous day and the skies were gearing up for a little rain before a stretch of nice days. Thunder rumbled in the distance. It got late, and I was working on my computer, still trying to get my system to upgrade, but not having a lot of luck. The distant thunder moved in until it was right overhead and then BAM! I swear to god it was at the stroke of midnight when a bolt of lightning lit the sky and the house went dark, and the computer went with it.
I’m not going to say that was the last I saw of my computer, but nothing’s been right since, and I’m blaming it on the Gods. Debian, the god of Linux, and Nvidia, the queen of Graphics are locked in a struggle to control my computer and I’m having a hard time keeping the peace.
You’ll recall that debian-amd64 wouldn’t boot, and the error code was about nouveau. Google tracked it down, but all the fixes boiled down to installing the right device drivers. But if I can’t boot the system, even in safe mode, the how do I install the drivers?
I tried … a lot of stuff before I finally took out all my cards and dusted off an 8 year old graphics card from the gantry computer, and finally (!!) Debian booted. Now, at long last, I can resume following the instructions. Sheesh.
120′ of ditch and pipe.
Yes, it all flows downhill.
I looked out my office window yesterday, and it was a scene straight out of Bambi. Robins on the lawn, pulling up worms. Hummingbirds in the honeysuckle. A deer and a fawn behind the apple tree, and the cat on the porch, watching it all.
Honeysuckle. Looks great. Smells great. Takes care of itself.
sat june 25
We went to Burlington with a list of errands. Coffee, John Deere, cat food, Tree House, vinegar, Queen City Steel, Gardener’s Supply, Sneakers, Riverberry Farm, Steeple Market, and home. Whew.
We wound up with 20# of pick-your-own strawberries, and the pickin’ was good. We hulled them and made 4 batches of jam by noon, with plenty left over for eating.
We made a solemn pact, before we picked, that we wouldn’t pick more than 15# of berries.
Who’s counting?
I was cutting some 3/4″ x 3″ pieces of steel and I guess I didn’t clamp the workpiece down hard enough, because it shifted in mid-cut and bent the blade.
I hate it when I do that. Screwing up is in my blood.
tue june 28
I was welding those same 3/4″ x 3″ pieces of steel and (ahem) I guess I didn’t clamp the pieces enough, because they warped from the heat and, instead of being 11 1/4″ apart, they’re 11 1/8″, and I had to grind off 1/8″ of steel. That’s a lot of steel. If you’re thinking to yourself: “this guy never learns,” you’re probably slightly right, but hey, clamping for cutting and clamping for welding are 2 very different things, and they’re both easy to screw up.
My 3-point-hitch adapter for the sickle bar mower. On the left will be the safety-release, just in case I try to mow the un-mowable.
I am still (still!) trying to get linux configured. This is really hard. It’s not like there are not plenty of instructions online, but nobody ever seems to be solving exactly my problem, so when I do what they did, it never exactly works. Usually, it doesn’t work at all. At one point, I deleted a couple partitions, and the boot table got trashed so bad it gave me nothing but BIOS. The fix was a boot rescue disk, but using it meant downloading 600Meg of .iso and burning it to CD. But my laptop won’t stay awake for that long without overheating and shutting down, so I turned to my old CNC machine as my last resort, and it worked. Thank you Jesus.
The RTAI is installed. I’ve got /home on a separate logical volume. I git-cloned the source and got it configured for uspace-RTPREMPT. Make ran cleanly. And I’m finally starting to understand apt and packages and sources.
So for all the frustration and delay, this is good work. Nice job!!
I needed some lynch pins and I hopped on the motorcycle to get them and then headed for the nearest creemee stand on the way back, but it started raining and I just headed home and barely beat the rain. No creemee for me! 
thu june 30
I took the furnace out of the green house basement. This thing is a dinosaur not only because it’s old, but it’s big too. 5’x4’x30″. I wasn’t expecting any problems moving it because, hey, it’s just sheet metal, right? Wrong. That sucker had a cast iron burner the size of a cow and a drum fan the size of … a big drum. I manhandled it onto a plank and then ran 4 long chains around 2 corners and up 2 steps to the tractor on the lawn and then dragged that sucker, 3 feet at a time, out through the shed. I left it on the lawn next to the leaky oil tank.
If only dragging it the rest of the way was as easy as dragging it the last 20′ was
Even in it’s day, this wasn’t a very good furnace.
My laptop gave out months ago. It runs fine until it suddenly turns itself off, and it doesn’t warn you about it. It just does it. Not having a reliable windows PC was a real incentive in switching my desktop to Linux (and you know how much fun THAT’s been!) If I were writing malware, I’d find a more creative way to attack your laptop, so I doubt the problem is malware. It’s gotta be something simple, like heat and dust. So I pulled up the service manual and then pulled off the covers and the keyboard and blew the whole thing out with compressed air. And now it works fine. Good job!
I can’t seem to buy John Deere parts online: You’ve got to buy them in a store. So we ordered a new rear wheel for the mowing deck and I had to go to Burlington to pick it up. It was a beautiful day, so I got on the motorcycle and I took back roads. Man, I’m telling you, the scenery in Vermont this time of year is something else. Mountains, valleys, rivers, back yards, farms, country stores, countryside, and sunshine galore. You can’t beat it unless a big bug plows into helmet visor and doesn’t bounce off. Which happened to me, so I stopped at a picnic area next to the river, thinking I’d moisten a napkin and wash it off, but it was a cliff next to the river, and I couldn’t actually get down to the water to moisten my napkin. So I asked a couple of (pedal) bikers if they could spare me some water, and he emptied his water bottle for me. You gotta love a man who’ll give a stranger the last of his water so he can wash a squashed bug off his helmet. Thanks, man!
The motorcycle is running like a watch, but it’s full of mud, goes through a lot of oil, and the front tire leaks.
It gets me where I want to go, though, as fast as I want to go, and in style.
The pumpkin plants are perking up.
The sunflowers are coming up Roses.