May 2017

sun may 7
It’s mating season for wild turkeys, and they’re out of the woods, strutting their stuff, and feeding in the fields. Below the green house, there’s a field on either side of the road and – why did the turkey cross the road? – who knows?, but a flock of them were crossing to the other side when a car came down the road and the Tom turkey went into Protector Mode, puffed up his feathers until he was the size of a small deer, and paced back and forth in front of the stopped car until all the lady turkeys were safely across.
Nice job, Tom. Just don’t try it in November.

mon may 8
It was a marathon, and I dozed off more than once, but I made it through 49 you-tube videos covering a VariCAD tutorial. They make it look easy and intuitive, so when I followed up by trying to do simple things with what I’d learned, and very little of it worked, I was very frustrated. Swear words helped. Eventually, I got to the point where I can get the program to do what I want it to, and I’m slowly morphing from learning to designing. (Six wise words regarding CAD: “you get what you pay for.”)
It’s a big change: For the last couple of years, my c3pr project has been mostly programming, and I brought a lot of experience to the table: I’m a good programmer.
On the other hand, despite my many wood and metal projects over the years, I’m pretty sure I’m a bad mechanical designer. I usually ‘get it done,’ but most of my stuff is … clunky. And clunky isn’t going to cut it for c3pr.
The whole experience with the motorcycle comes to mind. I’ve taken that whole thing apart, figured out how it works, figured out what’s broken, figured out how to put it back together, and marveled at the sheer brain power that went into building it, but I didn’t have to design anything to get it running. I’ve got a feeling mechanically designing c3pr is going to be harder than fixing a motorcycle.

tue may 9
I think I make gardening more difficult than it needs to be.
With the weather warming up, I decided to prep the ground for a new row of sunflowers. First step: pull out last year’s stalks. As if! They don’t call them ‘Mammoth’ for nothing, and they were stuck solidly in the ground and Not Going Anywhere.
I got a shovel and loosened the roots and managed to pull them all out, but the ground is very wet, and all the root balls were big, gloppy, glutinous, wet blobs of mud, and no amount of shaking or scraping would make the dirt come loose, so I set them on the lawn and gave them a few days to dry out.
It rained, and they didn’t dry out very much, but they looked like Hell just lying there, so I tried it again and managed to shake and scrape most of the dirt off this time, and put them in the compost pile. I’ve got this ‘thing,’ though, about starting off with a weed-free flower bed at planting time, and I found myself trying to pull every green weed in the row and shake the dirt off of all the roots. Can you say OCD? The futility of it all finally dawned on me when I realized that last year, I simply roto-tilled a swath through the lawn, and the sunflowers grew just fine.

In the living room, we’ve got 3 chairs and a couch. Plenty of room for 2 humans and 2 cats, you’d think, but BZ likes to park himself on my chair and Carbon has staked out Mary’s chair as her own. BZ is a gray cat, and I usually pick him up and put him in my lap when I sit down. Carbon is a black cat, though, and you can’t hardly see her in the shadows. This evening, Mary got herself a drink and plopped herself down in her chair right on top of Carbon, and a black ball of squealing fur squirted out from between Mary’s legs like a watermelon seed. Even UPS couldn’t kill a cat packed between 6″ of foam and 6″ of flubber, though, and our fat cat did not become a flat cat.

fri may 12
It’s not officially Spring around here until until BZ barfs up something he killed and ate outside. Today was the day.

sat may 13
For the last year or 2, the backhoe controls have been getting really stiff, and I was resigned to having to take it apart and fix it. For once, though, it looked like a simple fix: a couple of $3 linkages were rusted solid. Except that John Deere wouldn’t sell me just a linkage. They want to sell me a lever+linkage ‘set’, and charge me $100 apiece. Fuck that. I fabricated a replacement from scrap for nothing, greased the heck out of it, and put it back together.

An advertisement for a bunch of food trucks caught my eye.
Three BBQ businesses were going to anchor a shindig in Barre at the VT Granite Museum, with live music, free admission, and sculptors, artists, and maker-space reps to talk to. The forecast said 50% chance of rain, so I got on the motorcycle and took my chances. These things are only as good as the people you talk to, so I bent some ears and learned about granite carving, drone flying, plastic casting, and the local maker space (which I didn’t even know we had one). There was a tater-tot gatling gun, and no motorcycle ride would be complete without ice cream. Two scoops for 5 bucks, and the scoops were so big that it melted faster than (even) I could eat it. (And they were out of napkins! Try that with a beard!) On the way home, the sugar and fat must have gone to my brain, because I missed my turnoff and ended up on the freeway for the first time ever, going 70 mph. Scared the shit out of me, but the bike ran great.
I got home before the rain did and gave a couple bbq rib bones to the cats.

Today, I fitted the last piece of the new floor at the green house. What a fucking project. The upstairs wasn’t too bad (if you don’t count the part with the mortar bed), and the downstairs shouldn’t have been much worse worse. Famous last words.
Mary decided she absolutely couldn’t live with the woodstove being off-center from the 2 posts holding up the 2nd floor, so she hired Ashton to take out the bricks, leaving an 8′ void in the sheetrock, a pile of bricks on the lawn, and a big problem where the new floor had to marry up to the old floor. The new flooring we had on-hand was 1×10 T&G, while the old floor dates from an era when a 1×10 measured 9 1/2″ wide, had been un-evenly milled (on a tablesaw!) to shiplap , and then sanded a couple times over the years so it was only about 5/8″ thick. In the end, I had to take up the old boards, rip them down by 1/4″, custom-re-mill the shiplap, and then plane the new boards down to match the old thickness. Plus, the last row of the new east section had to be taper-planed to match the old surfaces. I won’t even tell you about the mismatch between the living room and the south addition.
Sure, it only took 2 hours to take out the bricks, but when it takes 2 weeks to fix the damage …. Jeez

tue may 16
There was a break in the rainy weather, and I took the motorcycle into town to buy some screws. I put them in my luggage, closed the lid, and took the scenic route home. When I got there, the screws were fine, but the lid was gone. Damn! I felt like NASA musta felt when the space shuttle started losing tiles. You can’t just buy another lid without buying another (expensive!) luggage box, so I traced my route backwards into town, with my eyes glued to the ground. I got lucky and found it in the middle of the bypass, where every passing car swerved to avoid it. It was dinged up, but otherwise intact.  I can’t quite see how the mechanism could have failed, so I’m going to assume I was careless when I closed it. Get it right, Jerko!

wed may 17
I took BZ to the vet for routine shots, and was checking in at the front desk.
“Your name?”
“Reid Wistort. W-i-s-t-o-r-t”
“And your cat’s name?”
“BZ”
“How do you spell that?”
“B-Z”

tue may 23
A couple weeks ago, I was talking to Ashton about … stuff … and the subject of salvage yards came up. He mentioned that there’s a good one in Hardwick.
Since I needed a box of screws today, and since it was a nice day, I thought … “screw it” and headed for Hardwick on the motorcycle, just to see what’s there. What an amazing place! It doesn’t look like much from the road, but past the gate, there are acres and acres of rusty cars. Rows and rows of yellow school buses used for storage: A school bus full of transmissions. A school bus full of radiators. A school bus full of gas tanks. Buildings full of engines. Piles of tires. A car compactor: Car in, cube out. Cherry pickers retired from line work. Dump trucks. You name it.
And a pile of old motorcycles! Most of them have mangled front-ends from head-on collisions, and you gotta wonder how many people died on those bikes. Anyway, I picked through the pile, jotting down notes on a post-it, and went home to google a few of them. One of them was a 1981 Honda CM400A, which is a very interesting bike, and different enough from my Suzuki to keep it interesting: 400cc, twin cylinders, SOHC, 3 valves/cylinder, electronic ignition, rear drum, and – get this – it’s an automatic! Technically, it’s a Hondamatic®, which is Japanese for “moped on steroids”: fluidic vane drive, 2 gears, no clutch, and it’s got a parking brake.
Now I need a rusty motorcycle like I need a hole in the head, but I drove back to Hardwick anyway, bought it for $200, and watched 5 guys, with about 50 teeth and zero high school diplomas between them, load it into my truck.
To be clear, the bike is in rough shape, and my first order of business is to check whether the frame got bent along with the forks when it ‘hit the road.’ And if it did, to throw it out and don’t look back.
Like I don’t already have enough on my plate….

tue may 30
I’ve spent a little time taking the new motorcycle apart and … “rough shape” is being generous. The frame is bent. The engine is seized. The brake drum is locked. The plastic is UV-brittled. Plus all the stuff I already knew was wrong with it. If I have any brains at all, I will take it to the dump and call it a valuable lesson.

wed may 31
Today was Sophia’s birthday. She’s 12.
We went out to dinner, and when it came time to open the gift bags, I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. Maggie gave her 2 gallons of Elmer’s glue and a box of mason jars, and Sophia was thrilled, and didn’t seem to be faking it.
I said: “WTF?”
It turns out that Elmer’s School Glue + baking soda = ‘slime.’
And ‘slime’ is a snot-like goop that doesn’t stick to your hands. Kids love it, and Sophia is going to make a big batch of it, add glitter, put it in the jars, and give it to her friends.
Go ahead. Google it.

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Looking back over this post, it looks like was a pretty boring month. Maybe it was.

On C3PR, I’ve plugged away at 3D CAD, and made limited progress. The biggest problem is knowing which servos to specify, and getting used to the sticker shock of what they cost. (All the more reason to think it through and get it right.)
One of the problems I’ve shoved under the rug is the horrible, terrible, very bad latency and jitter numbers I get from the RT Linux install on my workstation, and it’s something I’ve got to address sooner or later. It’s so bad that the watchdog timer shuts down the FPGA card. The documentation says that “some systems” have lousy latency no matter what you do and, after trying everything on the forums, I’m starting to think that mine is one of them. There is probably (yet) another new computer in my future.

Next door, the flooring install is about done, the base cabinets are mostly installed, and yesterday, I re-routed the black iron pipe to get propane to the kitchen.
(And I decided to put in an extra zone valve instead of messing with scoop tees.)
Everything is a bitch.

The whole month has been cool and wet. The row of sunflowers are starting to poke through. The ellipse is full of self-sown calendulas. And in the basement, under lights, I’ve got marigolds, zinnias, dahlias, cosmos, and giant pumpkins, all about ready to go in the ground.