It don’t rain in Indianapolis in the summer time.
mon oct 3
Today, I was driving home from errands when a black cat walked in front of me and sat down in the middle of the road, stopping traffic in both directions. He looked me straight in the eye, licked his dick, and then got up and finished walking across the road.
I needed a pressure gauge to do the pressure test, and I bought the cheapest one I could find. The people who make it don’t seem to ‘do’ math: The scale has a tick every 6 psi.
USA! USA!
I finished practicing MIG welding, and then I went ahead and welded the fan intake manifold. It didn’t take me long to ruin it, but it didn’t take me long to fix the damage, either. For a fairly hard, first project, I like to think that:
Pretty sturdy + Pretty ugly = Pretty good.
Not bad, but not good, either.
While Celia was here, we put the fan hood up, to make sure it fits and to … look at it. (After all, up until now, we’ve only had my word for it that it’s going to look great.) Members of my focus group agreed that they love the color, size, and textures, but the sharpened points on the re-bar make you want to be wearing a helmet while you cook, and they’ve got to go.
It looks dangerous. It feels dangerous.
tue oct 4
We use the brush hog just about once per year, and every year, we hit the same old rocks in the same old spots, and the brush hog gets another dent. This year, Mary brush hogged the meadow and, when she hit a hidden stump, she quit and told me: “I’m not doing the rocky part.” So I did some of it, hit some of the rocks, and flagged them so I could take them out. On the 5th rock, a pin jiggled loose and the PTO clutch swung away and wedged itself under the gearbox, and the engine stopped. It won’t be hard to fix, but … not today.
I put the backhoe on and took out the rocks I’d flagged, and one of them was the proverbial tip of the iceberg. I worked on it for 20 minutes before I could get it to budge and, in the end, I left it 6″ from where I found it. No doubt I’ll find it with the brush hog next year. Same time, same station.
The brush hog has seen better days, but it’s never not worked.
The iceberg. I’m thinking it will make a good coffee table.
The propane guy says I need a 12′ x 5′ x 5′ deep hole for the new tank, and we all agreed on just about where about it needs to be. So I staked it out, scooped out the sod, and then dug the biggest hole you ever saw in the lawn. Then the guy called me back to tell me they’re not going to be able to get here with the new tank until next week after all.
An accident waiting to happen.
The Marigolds waited until the calendula died before blooming
thu oct 6
My left hand has a stab wound from a chisel, two deep nail scratches, an open blister, and a black fingernail. My right hand has a bloody cuticle and assorted dings and nicks. I went to bed last night wearing 5 band-aids. Plumbing and electrical are hazardous duty!
I re-did the basement electrical, which was an amazing spiderweb of vintage cabling, most of which didn’t go anywhere. It was a little bit of an insult to my sense of order every time I went down cellar, and it finally drove me over the edge. I spent 2 days ripping it out and then putting it in, and now it’s all new, neat and tidy, and everything works. What a concept!
fri oct 7
Every couple of weeks, I accumulate enough crap that I need to make a trip to the dump and on today’s trip, I decided to get rid of the boxes of paint cans in the shed. Mary had kept them because … “you never know when you’ll need a few dabs of paint to match a wall.” But after a few years of damp storage and winter freezing, most of the cans had rusted through and the lids had popped, and the contents had turned to mush, or dried solid. I’m pretty anal about recycling, though, and I spent an hour separating the cans from the contents, so I could put the cans in the metal bin. I ended up with 28 dirty cans and 10 gallons of lumpy paint.
Another load of crap
A week ago, I asked Dave (a fabricator with lots of tools) to roll me a 10″ diameter collar out of 16 gage steel for the kitchen hood. And today, I rode by to pick it up. I strapped it into the milk crate on the back of the motorcycle and rode home on back roads, because it was a beautiful day at the peak of foliage season. The collar apparently had a sharp edge on it, and the bumpy dirt roads jostled it enough that it managed to cut the rope that was holding it in place, and when I got home, it wasn’t in the crate. I only hope nobody behind me got hurt.
Since there was only one branch on 1 tree on the whole property that was loaded with apples, I hated to waste them.
Since I want the cider to last till christmas, I hot-packed it, and the crud in the bottles swirled in the thermal currents like little lava lamps, and the big chunks floated to the top.
sun oct 9
The other day, I replaced the battery on my toothbrush and – hey, live a little! – put on a fresh bristle head. Today, there was a buzzing sound in the house when I turned myself on in the morning, and when I tracked it down, there was my toothbrush, in my toothbrush holder, brushing away.
mon oct 10
Mary went to burlington and brought home 2 pair of jeans for me, and the label says “Relaxed Fit. U-shape. Provides more room where you need it.” And the sad part is: they fit me really good.
tue oct 11
I just heard that the largest pumpkin grown in North America this year weighed 2200 pounds. I just weighed mine, and it was 178 pounds. A personal record!
If I grow a bigger pumpkin, I’ll need a better way to weigh it
wed oct 12
I was up at the crack of dawn to meet the plumbers, and sat for 15 minutes on the porch next door waiting for them, watching the dew dry and the birds fly. It’s not a warm bed, but it’s close. They seemed totally un-fazed by the job, and they’ll get started next week.
I went back to the fabricator shop where I got the collar that cut its way out of the motorcycle’s milk crate, and I confessed to my dilemma. They gave me nine yards of good natured grief, and then the same guy rolled me another collar on the same tool, for the same price as last time. This time, though, I got it all the way home, where I hope to god I don’t screw it up so badly I’ll need a 3rd one.
I finally figured out why my camera-to-table transform was only approximately right, and I printed up some calibration targets to make it better.
thu oct 13
For the first time in a long time, somebody died, and today, I went to the Estate auction. You gotta wonder about who this dead guy was – what did he do? – that he left behind so much great stuff. In a small town miles from nowhere, at the end of a steep dead end dirt road, he mowed a field, and built a little house and a big shop. 50′ x 80′. Cedar boards inside and out. Shoulder to shoulder with equipment. Two tractors. Two bridgeport mills. Two surface grinders. Two rotary phase converters. Two lathes. Two tapping heads. And waaay more than two of everything else you can think of. EDM. Sandblasting. Guns. Unbelievable piles of tooling. Not a cobweb in sight, and nobody seemed to know what had made this guy tick. Sad.
I did not come away empty-handed, and I brought home a very nice pedestal grinder, a tapping head, a metal cart, and a seized-up vintage die filing machine. Can you say sickle bar mower?
fri oct 14
You know how you call up the phone company, or the cable company, and they tell you a guy is going to show up “between 10am and noon” on Friday, and then they show up way late? Well I showed up next door 3 minutes before 10am, prepared to wait for the propane guy, only to find that he’d already been there and left, and he left a 500 gallon propane tank in the middle of the lawn, next to the big hole.
Hmmm! I had expected he was going to use his hoist to put the tank in the hole, but apparently that’s not going to happen, so I got the tractor and some chains and – carefully! – lowered the tank into the hole. I took a break, and opened up the cardboard box the propane guy had left on the lawn with the tank, and I didn’t know what to make of the contents, so I went home and I was watching you-tube videos about burying propane tanks when the propane guy came back. We had a good talk, and he told me, very good-naturedly: “don’t touch anything until we’re ready to go.” And for once, I’m going to follow the directions.
Two and a half miles down the road, the corner store went out of business, the building was auctioned off, and they spent all summer renovating the place to be a barbecue joint. Details were sketchy. There are 2 windows on the front of the building, and they put up a sign in one of them that said ‘bar,’ but there was no sign in the other window of a ‘becue.’
Turns out today was the grand opening, and it turns out it’s a bar that serves barbecue, because the owner’s been in catering for 15 years, specializing in barbecue, and wants to branch out. We went. We ate. We drank. We even watched the Speaker of the House settle in at the bar for a beer. (He’s a natural.) It was good. We’ll be back.
I was grinding steel and my shirt caught fire!!
mon oct 17
I welded the 10″ collar for the kitchen hood into a cylinder and then created the hole into which it’s supposed to fit. This was a tedious task with a lot of trial and error and some heavy-duty grinding to remove stock. All that grinding created plenty of metal dust and, despite wearing safety glasses, a piece of grit landed in my eye and wouldn’t come out. Mary gave me a couple kinds of eye drops, and I had 2 uncomfortable days and a miserable night. I finally googled it and spent 15 extra minutes in the shower, flooding my eye, and it did the trick. Gotta be more careful with eye protection.
I’ll bet there’s an easy way to do this, but I don’t know what it is.
It’s been a really colorful fall, and the foliage is still going strong, 3 weeks into the season. It was a beautiful day, so I took a motorcycle ride on back roads. The motorcycle is giving me clanking sounds when I accelerate in low gears, and I think the clutch is giving out. Sigh. It’ll be a simple fix, but I already lost half the riding season from the last time it broke down, so I’m going to just live with it until winter sets in.
Mary finally took down the porch Christmas lights (and tree!) from last year and re-decorated. She’s a sucker for Fall.
tue oct 18
The plumbers came and spent a whole day putting in the boiler. Boy, they sure got a lot done!
The plumbers did, in 1 day, what would have taken me … quite a while.
I’ve been dragging my feet on cutting off the pointed ends of the re-bar on the kitchen hood because …. they are perfect just like they are. But Mary’s right: they’re scary. So I cut them off, and now I’ve got to figure out how I’m going to shape them
When I tried grinding them by hand, most of them come out ugly and uneven, so I’m going to think about it until inspiration strikes.
wed oct 19
It turns out the piece of grit in my eye didn’t come out after all, and the irritation kept coming and going, so I went to the eye doctor and she took it out. I described it as “behind the upper eyelid,” but she took out a chunk embedded in the cornea, and it left behind a nice little dent. It’s located such that my pupils would have to be fully dilated to affect my vision, so I guess I’m really lucky. Part of me thinks that I’m getting really lucky a little too often, and maybe I ought to start being a little more careful. Just sayin’.
They don’t call it a cutoff wheel for nothing…
fri oct 21
Here is my problem with medical care these days:
You’ve got a piece of grit in your eye. You go to the doctor. She takes it out, puts a corneal bandage on, and tells you she wants to see you tomorrow.
So you go back tomorrow and she takes off the corneal band-aid, tells you it’s getting better, puts another bandage on, and she wants to see you again tomorrow.
So you go back tomorrow, and she takes off the bandage and tells me it’s better, and she wants to see me in a week.
Mary’s given me 2 kinds of eye-drops, 2 kinds of pain killers, 9 pieces of advice, and several stern words. The doctor’s given me 4 kinds of eye-drops. Nobody’s said a word about how much all this is costing me. I’m a little worried, and it’s not about my eye.
sat oct 22
I needed rough-sawn pine boards, so I headed to the saw mill to get some. It started raining as soon as I got into the car, and by the time I was talking to the guy, it was coming down pretty good. We ended up loading wood onto the truck in a downpour, and I got pretty wet. My hearing processor, which is supposed to be waterproof, suddenly died, and fresh batteries didn’t fix it. I ended up having to close the deal with them while I was completely stone deaf. It was very demoralizing, and a vivid reminder of what life used to be like. I came home and rummaged thru a cardboard box full of hearing gadgets and came up with my old pack-of-cards-sized Sprint processor, which is old enough to vote. I put in some AA’s and, according to Mary, my hearing that evening was better than it is with my usual processor. Plenty of dry warmth didn’t seem to help, so I loaded it into a vacuum chamber for a couple hours and, finally, it worked again.
Sweet Jesus!!
What used to be the end of the hall is now the bathroom, so that door had to go.
wed oct 26
It’s been cold, but not rainy, and it’s going to snow soon. I’m going to be needing heat next door. The plumbers are getting it done, pretty much like they said they would. The propane company says they’re coming with a heavy lift and they won’t have to drain the tank to move it. The plumber is skeptical that the propane guy is even going to show up. Last year, the roof went down to the wire. This year, the heat is coming online in the nick of time. I need to work on my scheduling skills.
All summer long, I walked around piles of siding, all cut, painted, and ready to put up, and I didn’t put it up.
All those nice days, when it would have been fun to be outside, I seemed to have better things to do than putting up siding. Like digging out the basement, or plumbing.
So now I’m doing siding during the nastiest stretch of weather all fall.
Finally putting up siding.
I rearranged the furniture in my office, and it was quite the job. Three computers, a printer, the router, the TV, the room loop, the dsl, the furniture, and the whole entertainment center all played musical chairs. I even crimped my own cables.
The basic reason for doing this was to move the router, hoping the wifi would be better in the bedroom and … from what I hear, things are not much better in the bedroom.
fri oct 28
Big day, bad weather.
The plumbers are supposed to finish up, and the gas company is supposed to take out the tank, put it back in, and hook up the house. And we got it all done.
Woody’s Plumbing has got 3 jobs going right now:
There’s the guy who, for some reason, took his furnace out, put it on his lawn, and then called the plumber.
There’s the Canadian guy who’s built a 27 million dollar home with 700 thousand dollars worth of plumbing (real numbers), who wants to move in, but his ice machine is not done yet.
And there’s me.
So Richard, Josh, and Dave spent yesterday and today getting me going. Attaboys!
Meanwhile, the gas company was supposed to come after 10, and finally showed up at 1:00, with 2 big trucks. Both guys thought the tank was fine just like it was, but since I’d already made a stink about it being too deep, they picked it up, backfilled about a foot, and then put it back in the hole. We dug the trench, laid the pipe, hooked it up, leak tested it, covered it up, inspected the system, and turned on the furnace. It started heating up, and then it sprung a leak in the manifold. Just a little one (and NOT, I might add, in the part I did) but we shut it down, and Josh came back and fixed it.
So right now, the green house is heated, and it’s a toasty 55 degrees inside.
The gas company made it look easy.
You can move a lot of dirt with the tractor but, in the end, it only does a pretty rough job, and I spent a lot of time on my hands and knees, shoveling dirt and generally getting wet and dirty. My gloves kept getting full of dirt and rocks and, as I walked around, I’d shake them out onto the ground. Two hours later, by the merest stroke of luck, I picked a shiny thing up off the lawn, and it was my wedding ring.
sat oct 29
Years ago, I was making myself a steam box on steroids, to bend wood with. I was going to weld some caps and fittings onto a piece of cast iron pipe, and make a 10′ pressure cooker out of it. I told Dad about it, and he immediately wrote back: Don’t do it! Cast iron won’t weld! It will explode in your face and you will die! (So I made it out of the 8″ steel pipe that is now the middle of the spiral staircase, but that’s another story)
I mention this because I’ve been trying to clean up the welds on the re-bar in the kitchen hood I’m (still) making, and they keep breaking due to thermal stresses. It was sort of a welding whack-a-mole, where you re-weld one weld, and the weld next to it cracks. I googled it, and it turns out that re-bar is made of the cheapest steel money can buy, and not even the manufacture knows what’s in it. Still, I’m fairly confident that, when I finally hang this thing from the ceiling, it’s more likely to pull the ceiling down than to shatter due to bad welding.
Remember the big rock that I couldn’t get out of the ground?
I got it out of the ground.
mon oct 31
I replaced the clutch in the motorcycle, because it was pretty clear that the clutch was the problem. I bought a new clutch online and then, (and there’s my mistake) I took apart the old one. It turns out the old clutch plates are basically in good shape, and within spec. But the springs were way too short. Which means I had new clutch plates I didn’t need, and still needed new springs! Microprocessor geeks who study instruction sets have a term for that: out of order execution.
So I got new springs, put it together, and … it didn’t work. The stack of new plates was thicker than the old stack, and Google was no help. I finally figured out, from an exploded view of the engine, how to make the adjustment, and then closed up the engine and called it a day.
Loosen nut 9 and advance threaded pin 8
All I needed now was 3.4 liters of oil. I bought a 5 quart jug and, with a careful eye on the oil level window, poured the whole thing into the crankcase without seeing the oil level rise! It turns out the little oil level viewport was spotless on the inside, but filthy on the outside, and I basically couldn’t see through it.
I sweartogod, if I ever kill myself riding this motorcycle, I’m going to deserve it.
It’s Halloween, and we didn’t get a single trick or treater. It’s sad.