mon jul 3
I was walking next door, and there was a big, black … something … in the middle of the lawn, 50 feet from the nearest edge, and I went over to get rid of it. It was the biggest turtle you ever saw, roaming out and about, looking for love. I hot-footed it back to the house to get my camera, and when I got back, 90 seconds later, the turtle was nowhere to be found.
Not as slow as they look. Look at his belly. That’s a turtle 6-pack.
tue jul 4
When I finish a book on my Kindle, I usually pick a new book from a ‘best of’ list on the Web. The other day, I finished Children of Time (which was pretty good), and decided to read The Darkness that Comes Before. It’s really dense, and uses a lot of really weird names (like Shimeh, Inrithi, Achamian, Fanim, Maithanet, Kyranean, and a hundred others which I couldn’t keep straight in my head) and after a hundred pages or so, I gave up and started reading Harry Potter instead.
It’s Waaay easier to follow.
wed jul 5
Today, I went to the dump, the grocery store, and the metal recycling place in Hardwick. And, since it was a hot day and since it was right on the way home, I stopped for a Creemee.
I was second in line, and when the lady in front of me got hers, she tilted her head, took a hearty lick, and knocked the whole thing onto the hot pavement, where it quickly melted into a puddle of sticky white goo. Everyone in line got a good chuckle.
Fast forward 20 minutes …
I got home and helped myself to a cup of coffee (hey, sugar and caffeine are a magical combination!). The way the coffee carafe works is: you unscrew it 1 turn, you pour your coffee, and you screw it shut. Except that Mary hadn’t screwed it shut after her 2nd cup this morning, so her turn plus my turn meant the top was completely loose, and when I poured it, the cap came off and the carafe’s whole contents went all over the counter.
It was not a good day for hot or cold refreshments.
thu jul 6
Even with all the wet weather we’ve had, an 8′ tall pile of scrap wood still burns.
(with the help of a liberal sprinkling of diesel fuel)
While the pile was burning, I wanted to work outside and keep an eye on it, so I removed some shingles.
And added them to the pile.
sat jul 8
Herbie, the crazy pig farmer who lives next door, has been doing some site work on his property, and the neighborhood is all atwitter, wondering what he’s up to. Nobody seems to want to ask though, because, like I say, the man is nuts. As it turns out, he’s built a driveway and some drainage ditches, and a mobile home has been landed on the site. Rumor has it that a family member is moving in. Having a mobile home next door is not optimal, but compared to the collection of overgrown car and truck carcasses that used to be there, it’s probably an improvement. The problem is that the back of the new mobile home sticks out past the woods at the back of the property and is visible from my back porch. Ugh.
We’ve talked, in the past, about planting a row of trees along the south property line, as insurance against having to look at a house that might someday be built next door, and suddenly that sounds like a good idea. So I paid visits to all the local landscape nurseries, looking for bushes I could plant, so I wouldn’t have to look at the trailer.
(At B&B Nursery, I asked the guy who was hosing down the potted plants for advice, and when he ran out of ideas, he brought me to his boss. When pricing came up, the boss told me I could get 15% off if I bought more than a couple bushes, and the hose guy piped up with “That’s 15% off the total, not just 15% off each individual plant. Big difference!” and I looked at his boss, and his boss looked at me, and I said: “Good point!”)
Discount or no, trees sure are expensive! In the end, I bought 3 “green giant arborvitae” and planted them in a direct line between my windows and Herbie’s trailer.
I hope they grow fast.
Nothing like seeing the butt-end of a trailer suddenly sticking out of the woods next door.
wed jul 10
If brakes didn’t save your life, they’d kill you.
My brakes sprung a leak, and I think it happened while I was out driving, but they didn’t really fail until I was shuttling supplies back and forth next door, so I guess I’m lucky.
I wanted to avoid the indignity of having my car towed, so I took off the wheel and crimped the brake line closed with a pair of vise grips, thinking that, with good brakes on the left wheel, I should be able to limp into town and get them fixed. What it REALLY did, though, was trap a big air bubble in the line with no place to go, so I went from having really mushy brakes to no brakes at all, and I had the car towed after all.
I gave the mechanic a heads up that there’s still a pair of vise grips duct taped into the wheel well. lest he think to himself: “Aha! There’s the problem”
Speaking of brakes, the Honda’s rear wheel’s drum brakes are seized, and I needed to take it apart. Using a Very Large Hammer, I managed to budge it, but just barely, so I knew I was doing something wrong, and I went to Google before I did any damage. A YouTube video made it look like it was supposed to slip right out and, if it didn’t, then I should try a large hammer.
Been there, done that, so basically, I was on my own. That happens a lot.
I bought a gallon of penetrating oil and used silicone caulk and a cut-up section of a plastic bucket to rig up a ‘dam’ that would raise the level of the oil to cover the drum shoes. I let it soak for 2 days and then jimmied it back and forth with a home-made wrench.
Eventually, it popped out, and there’s really nothing wrong with it that some steel wool and $25 worth of new shoes won’t fix.
Brute force is all well and good, but a lot of lube works wonders.
fri july 14
Mary’s been saying that there’s a rattle coming from the back of my truck and, while the truck was getting its brakes fixed, they found that one of the leaf springs is broken. Apparently, one of those enormous loads of wet manure or mulch or gravel was too much for it, and it snapped in half, came loose, and wound up leaning on the rear drum brake. So now I’ve got not one, but two wheels worth of broken brakes. The odds are low and the bill is high, but I’ve got to have brakes. Damn!
My first auction of the season was today, and I was psyched! A guy in Newport, whose family’s been farming so long that the road is named after them, passed away, and they were selling all kinds of equipment. This kind of auction is usually a lot of fun.
I picked up my truck from the Garage and headed North and quickly learned an important lesson about using GPS in the sticks. I wound up on a dead end road that didn’t really end. Two muddy tracks with potholes in between and some barbed wire on one side. I could see civilization in the distance, though, so I gave my new leaf springs a workout and kept going. Eventually, I got back onto a ‘real’ dirt road, and made it to the auction.
I blame it on Microsoft Maps.
It turned out to be one of the few auctions that have disappointed me.
I have a rule, though: If you attend an auction, you have to bid on at least one item, so I bid on some butt-ugly brass bookends — and accidentally won.
What was I thinking?
tue july 18
I was walking next door with a tool box in each hand and suddenly my butt started itching. Whoa! Ooh! Yikes! I dropped my tools on the grass, scanned the road for observers, and gave myself the once-ever. More than once!
My best guess is I musta had a bug up my ass!
fri july 21
Maggie’s gone to NYC to visit Celia, so the kids are sleeping over with us for the weekend.
We had dinner and were out on the porch, getting eaten by the bugs, and Mary said it was (close to) the anniversary of the Moon Walk, and I wondered out loud what kind of Event, in this age of iPhones, would rivet the country to their TV sets like the Lunar Landing did. “I can remember,” I said, what I was doing when the the twin towers collapsed, when the Columbia blew up, when the Pope got shot, when they landed on the moon, when Kennedy got shot, …
And then Suri piped up with: “Who was Kennedy?”
Can you say “Generation Gap?”
sat jul 22
We took the kids golfing, and I got a hole in one !!
Too bad it was miniature golf.
sun jul 23
It was a nice day, and I needed a break from the kids and the green house, and there is a gin distillery in Hardwick that was sponsoring a Pollinators Workshop for beekeepers. So I got on the motorcycle and went. I had two questions:
Why would a gin distillery care about beekeeping? (because they make their gin from fermented honey) and
What’s for lunch? (Pulled pork and a gin cocktail.)
Column stills are waaay more complicated than pot stills.
mon jul 24
I needed to get some stuff from the hardware store and I took Suri with me. We passed a stretch of road that had apparently been skunked overnight. Suri scrunched up her nose and said “Smells like chicken McNuggets.”
thu jul 27
Another auction! This one in the hills of Northfield, selling off the estate of a guy who accumulated stuff all his life. And when he collected too much stuff, he built another barn instead of throwing some out. There were well over 200 bidders on-hand, and pickups parked everywhere. Item #1: house and land. Sold for $450k. I bid on a bunch of stuff, but it seemed to me that the prices were too high, and I lost out on a tool chest, an anvil, some saws, a school bell, a cider press, and not one, but 2 rusty old motorcycles. As cool as all the goodies were, it was a little depressing to leave empty-handed.
The dead guy had a nice collection of large hit-or-miss engines.
I was prepared to go as high as $150 for an antique cider press. It went for $650.
And the sad part is, it’s probably going to sit on someone’s porch and never press another apple.
When you think of the alternative, reviving rusty motorcycles is probably not a bad hobby.
These sold for about $3k apiece.
Wrapup
Let’s see…
What’s going on next door?
They say the home stretch of a marathon is the longest part. I decided I don’t want to screw around putting in soffits, replacing rotten siding, and painting the outside, so we hired a carpenter and a painter. The outside should be done by labor day.
Inside, I’m winding down on cabinets and starting trim work. The list goes on…
It turns out the molded shower wall we bought won’t work with the valve control centered on the shower pan, so I had to open up the wall and move the plumbing 4″ to the right. It was a big mess and a big delay, and the hole in the wall kind of looks like the house is giving me the middle finger, doesn’t it?
How about c3pr?
When the hell are we going to see it put some English on a ball?
Sometimes I wonder about that myself. What I DO know, though, is that the obscure software problems I keep solving are way harder than — and just as important as — machining motor mounts. This month, I took 2 steps forward and 1 step back: I got my new GPU working, and the initial results show ‘about’ a 10x improvement in processing time. That’s really good.
The bad news is that, in order to get AMD’s Catalyst driver working, I had to downgrade my install to 14.04.4, with a 4.2 kernel, and there is no RT-Preempt patch available for that kernel. (Sigh)
Cheer up. I (think I) know how to fix this.
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