May 2019

fri may 3
The month got off to a good start.

Yesterday, I spent the day pruning eight long-neglected apple trees on the land surrounding ours. If I didn’t kill them, then they’ll be better trees for it in a year or two.

mon may 6
Mary went with Charon on an overnight visit to Montreal. High on her agenda: visit Ikea.
The night before, we’d gone thru an imaginary checklist.
Charge cords? Check.
Passport? Check.
Meds? Check.
Everything seemed to be in order, and she went to bed.
She ate, loaded, and left in the morning, only to return 45 minutes later. “Forgot my passport,” she said, and went to get it. “And it’s probably a good thing, because I forgot to poop too!”
Goodbye, dear. Have a good time.

My car is falling apart. A ‘lightly used’ 2009 Tacoma w/ 70k, and the power steering recently failed and the leaf spring fell off. It turns out I’ve ignored 5 recall notices, and one of them was for leaf springs, so my truck is in the dealer’s shop, absorbing free parts and labor.

sat may 11
Some old friends wanted to get together, so I invited them over for dinner.
Mary loves a dinner party, but she is the proverbial duck that glides over the pond while paddling furiously underneath. Everything has to be cleaned! Top to bottom! Doors, floors and drawers. Silver ware, glassware, and windows. Even the houseplants got dusted. She grouses about the dirty windows all year round, but only cleans them when we have company, so today she went outside and cleaned them all with ammonia. (I have to admit: they look great.) A little later, she was watering her plants and, thinking the pail of ammonia was water, poured it on a houseplant. “Oh Shit!” rang out, and she rushed her plant to the sink for a long rinse.
My bet is: That plant’s toast.

Mike and Nikki have made a lot of wine and cider in their day, and a lot of it is pretty good. So when they came over, I dragged out one bottle of each cider I made this year, and we each tasted all of them. Seven bottles total, we tasted,  and we all agreed that – yup – it’s bad. All of it.  Every single soft cider bubbled onto the floor when I opened it, and it surprised me just as much the third time as it did the first. I started off embarrassed, but ended up amused. Then we talked about how I made it, things I might have missed, and what I might have done differently. It was a good talk.

Then I showed them C3pr.
Which makes them the first people to see C3pr since my Frankenstein Moment when it first twitched its shoulder. They were not expecting any such thing, and were duly impressed.

mon may 13
Oops.
You’ll recall that the rear tractor tire was leaking.  I went to investigate.
I found a hole, so I took a tire patch kit and patched it, and it seemed to be OK.  I parked the tractor on the lawn for a couple days, and the tire went flat again. I examined it closely, and it had bubbles coming out by the rim and thru the sides, so it must be shot, and I got online to look for a new one. No luck. Nobody makes that tire any more, but there’s a replacement that ought to work. I ordered one, and they shipped two. I told them and they took one back. I swapped out the turf tires for the Ag tires, but forgot to write down which one was the bad one and had to test for leaks all over again. I also mounted the Ag tires backward, so the valve stems were only accessible from under the tractor. I dropped off the rim and tires at a garage, and they were fine with the rims, but weren’t set up to drain the CaCl ballast.  I took them across the street to Pete’s Equipment, where they were fine with the CaCl, but they weren’t set up to swap the rim. I finally took them to Pleasant Street Auto, where they said “No problem,” and got it done.  When I picked it up, I wondered aloud what the $89 worth of parts could be, since it was my tires and rim. He said it was a new tube, which you need to keep the CaCl from corroding through the metal rims.
And suddenly it all made sense. The tire patch kit I’d used was one of those needle-and-glue affairs made for tubeless tires, and I’d punctured the tube when I ‘patched’ the tire.
Nice move, Jerk!

sat may 18
Castillo San Marcos
Kennedy Space Center
Vermont Cheese Festival
Torrey Pines
Barnstable Harbor
What do all these places have in common?
I’ve been there. I bought a tee shirt there. I wore the tee shirt while grinding steel, and the shower fo sparks burned a hole thru it, right where the belly ought to be. And yet I kept putting them back in my tee shirt drawer. Well today, Mary went through my tee shirt drawer and took out six tee shirts with belly holes, threw them down the stairs, and told me to make rags of them.
I wish she wasn’t right.

C3pr hit the wall, hardware wise, when the gearboxes got back-ordered.
C3pr hit the wall, software wise, when I couldn’t get camera acquisition to work.
And it pissed me off, because it used to work, and I spent a good week – or a bad one, depending on how you look at it – narrowing down the problem to a random OVSTEP error from the vfg, but for No Good Reason! GRrrrrrrr!
So I put together a real simple test case to prove it’s a real problem and sent it to the manufacturer and I’m waiting to hear back.

C3pr hit the floor, too. I was installing the wrist motor and needed some pliers, and when I turned away, the shoulder turned over under the weight of the motor, and the wrist dumped onto the floor.
Bam! Bent the shaft. Shifted the encoder.  Ruined the motor.
That giant sucking sound you hear is $200 going down the drain.

sun may 19
Speaking of down the drain …
Today I poured 20 bottles of cider down the drain. My entire 2018 crop was crap. It was so bad it made me sad. There was no doubt, so I threw it out.
The good news is that I know what I did wrong, and next time is going to be different.

fri may 31
Getting back to c3pr, my long-awaited gearboxes finally came, and I made some mods to accommodate them and got them installed and …
And I couldn’t try them out, because …
Because I traded emails with my frame buffer manufacturer, and we sort of agreed that whatever the problem is, it’s probably not their fault, so I took a hard look at my system and decided now is a good time to upgrade my distro & kernel & RTpatch & gpu & driver.
And write it all down this time. This is a big deal and a serious detour, but it’s a good idea.
And in the mean time, I can’t try out my gearboxes.  🙁

Phooey. Gearboxes can wait.
Spring has sprung,  the weather is gorgeous, and thousands of apple blossoms glow in the sunshine wherever you look. It’s going to be a bumper crop.
In the past, the act of actually picking the apples has been the pinch point of the whole operation. Pressing is #2, but if I were to build a better press, picking would still be painful.  My trees are taller than the tallest ladder, and the best apples always live on the highest branches. So how do you pick them? With a cherry picker, of course!
Every once in awhile, I wander thru Gates Salvage yard in Hardwick, and they’ve got a row of old lineman’s trucks tucked away in the back. Despite some misgivings about whether this is a good idea, I picked the nicest one, managed to get it home, and spent 3 beautiful days working it over. What’s the worst that can happen?

After 4 days. I’ve got it stripped back, electrified, and hydraulically juiced. Three of the 4 joints work just fine, and the there’s one leak I need to fix. It could have been worse!