December 2018

sat dec 1
Today, Suri beat me at chess for the first time.
I’m not saying she’s any good, but she beat me fair and square.

sun dec 2
A couple weeks ago, Maggie baked me a couple dozen cookies, and I keep them in the shop. I usually work for a couple hours in the shop and then I grab a cookie, go upstairs, and take a break. Mary is usually upstairs, so whenever she sees me, I usually have a cookie in my hand.
Or, as I like to think of it: whenever I have a cookie in my hand, she sees me.

wed dec 5
Mary’s birthday is coming up, so I needed a card, and I headed to the local Tractor Supply store (where they have the best cards in town, but no John Deere parts). They were in the middle of moving shelves around, and the card shelf was temporarily crammed in with a bunch of other displays, so I squoze myself through between a rack of phone cards and a box of ball caps, and started looking through the birthday cards. I bent over to look at the card on the bottom shelf and, as I bent over, my butt bent back and hit the rack of phone cards. The whole thing toppled over into the aisle, sending hundreds of phone cards flying. Two old ladies barely lived to tell about it, and I’ll bet that’s exactly what they did, all day long.

thu dec 6
I got another piece of grit in my eye from grinding steel, and I had to get a doctor to get it out.  This is the second time I’ve fucked up my eye just by not wearing enough goggles. There may be a message here? Apparently, there’s a difference between being careful, and being careful enough, and I have to be a little more careful when I grind my steel.
Note to self: Take care!

Roughly speaking, a ping pong table is about 4 feet wide, and I want c3pr to be able to ‘stand’ about a foot past the edge of the table on either side. That means my robot needs to have about a 6 foot ‘travel’ going sideways.
That, my friend, is a lot of travel! That is some serious sideways!
Sure, size matters, but it’s just a detail, and I had the truss built in no time.

Now, … For the linear rail to work, it needs to attach to a perfectly planar surface, but (ahem)  nothing I build is perfectly planar, so I seem to need to either machine the truss flat or have it machined flat. And since none of my machines are big enough to do the job, then I guess what I need is a bigger machine! (just kidding) Tools big enough to planarize an 80″ bed of steel are few and far between, but it turns out that the biggest machine in the biggest machine shop in the heart of Vermont’s granite industry can do the job, and as soon as my truck is fixed, I’m going to pay them a visit.

sat dec 8
The other day, I went to Queen City Steel to buy steel. I’ve been going there for years, and they know me by name. The way their system works is: you tell the guy in the yard what you want, he gets it for you and jots it down, and you take the slip of paper to the office to pay. Well, for the first time ever, there was nobody in the yard, so I selected my steel, jotted it down, and headed to the office to pay.
The guy says, “Huh. The computer says we’re out of stock on 1/2×3 cold roll.”
I told him, “There was a big stack of them, and I took two.”
“Huh. We better go look.” And we went back to the yard.
It turns out the pieces I’d taken were stainless, worth about 3x the price of cold roll.  It all ended well, I suppose, but in the back of my mind, I can see where it might look like I tried to pull a fast one on them, and I’m a little embarrassed.

sun dec 9
If there’s one thing Mary likes to do, it’s decorate the christmas tree.
If there’s one thing I can do without, it’s a christmas tree.
Today we put up the tree.
Because I can reach the top, my job is to put up the lights and hang the beads. We made a solemn promise beforehand that if a string of lights is out, we’re going to just throw it OUT and we’re NOT going to try to debug the problem. So I tested two strings of lights, tucked them into the tree, plugged the whole thing back in and …
A half of a section of lights was out.
Right in the front. Right in the middle. Right at eye level.
It looked like a lot of work to unwrap it, throw it out and replace it, so Mary (not me!) debugged it and got it all lit up. I sweartogod, I am good with electricity, but I do not understand christmas lights.

mon dec 10
I woke up this morning and my eye was on fire.
That piece of grit that got taken out the other day had been getting better, and then it suddenly got worse. There’s probably a simple explanation, like: I should have put drops in my eye before I made coffee. But Mary doesn’t fuck around, and she called the doctor.
So I’m explaining to the doctor that the scab probably tore because my eye was dry, and he totally agreed. Then he scoped the eye, said he saw another piece of metal, said he could easily take it out, and then he got some tweezers and took it out.
Which should be great, right? Except that he didn’t bother to even look at the tweezers after he used them, and he didn’t bother to scope the eye again, either, to make sure he’d gotten the last of it out. I think that finding a piece of crud in an eyeball with a microscope is like finding a rock in your driveway: not very hard. And now I’ve got this lingering feeling that he pretended to find a problem, ‘fixed’ it, charged me for it, and nobody has to know.
Mary says I’m cynical.

mon dec 17

I bottled my cider today and by now, most of you know how it came out.
I need to cogitate upon what went wrong, because it tasted pretty good until well into the process. My best guess is that, when the air locks were breached (due to my not paying attention), oxygen and bacteria got into the carboys, and malolactic fermentation got started.
It could also be that it’s just ‘not ready for prime time,’ since it’s only 2 months in the carboy, vs the year or so they say it takes.
I hope it’s a probiotic for the septic system, because I dumped 5 gallons down the drain.
On the bright side, now I’ve got a few more mistakes under my belt, so there’s less that can go wrong next year. Because next year, I’m going big.

sat dec 22
My evil plan is working.
I sent dad 3 bottles of cider. The bottle of good stuff broke. The bottle of bad stuff bubbled up and ‘busted a cap.’ And the ugly stuff was bad even before I bottled it.
Many thanks to the USPS, for making my day.

fri dec 28
My life has spun out of control. Everything has gone wrong.
I ordered timing pulleys, and they sent the wrong one.
I ordered a network card from Dell, and UPS lost it.
I ordered bottles, and they got back-ordered.
Some friends sent me a christmas newsletter, and it got lost in the mail.
I leave message after message for a guy I need to work with, and I get no response.
I ran out of sawdust to feed my worms, and now they smell.
Nothing but woe.

I bitched and they replaced it.
I moaned and they sent another one.
I complained, but it didn’t help.
I need a better strategy than bitch, moan, complain, and wait.

sat dec 29
I only asked for one thing for christmas. Suspenders.
And when I got them (surprise!) I didn’t know quite what to do with them, so I put them on, and I’ve been wearing them ever since. I’m not saying that suspenders are a better system than a belt, but I’m giving it a thorough investigation. So far, I’ve found that:
When you’re wearing suspenders, you tuck your tee shirt in, because you don’t have a choice.
With suspenders, loose pants are the way to go.
Like a pocket watch, suspenders are a fashion statement, and when you walk into a room wearing suspenders, you’re telling the room what kind of a man you are. Not that that’s a good thing.

mon dec 31