May 2023

The Butterfly Effect has always seemed a little far-fetched to me, but …

You’ll recall from last month that a wisp of a yellow fringe on the kitchen cooktop flame led me to adjust the burners with a wrench a few sizes too big, and I broke the burner.
Fine. So I’m down to five burners, and all I cook is coffee and salad anyway.
We ordered parts and we got in line at the service department, and we made plans to be without a stove for a day or so.
Or, should I say, I made plans, because Mary had just left for Atlanta to help Celia move 1000 miles. Long story.
I got to thinking: Mary’s gone. The stove’s gone. I’d just finished the Murphy bed and was ready for my next big project. It was the perfect confluence of events, and I decided to remodel the kitchen.
The butterfly has spoken.

I’d been sketching changes for months. I wanted to move the stovetop toward the windows and replace that god damned butt ugly fan hood, which can’t be cleaned, sounds like a jet engine, and doesn’t work for shit. (What was I thinking?)
I hadn’t planned to get started until the fall, at least, but the window of opportunity was too perfect, and I jumped right through it.

At one point, I needed an 11 x 16″ piece of sheetrock to fill the hole in the ceiling from the old fan.  Normally, I’d have a pile of pieces to choose from, but I looked everywhere, and I found zero stray pieces of sheetrock.  None.
This was a first for me, and it felt like a perp walk when I had to ask at the front desk whether they sold drywall by the quarter-sheet.
Then, of course, I cut it wrong the first time and barely had enough left over for another try.

I taped and painted the ceiling, and some of the light bulbs were too greasy to just put back in, so I decided to just wash them all.
I got them good and clean, but I also managed to get soapy water inside the bulbs and I had to pry them all apart, dry them off, put them back together, and hope they’d still work.

I was snitching a midnight bowl of ice cream and I fumbled the lid of the container. It fell to the floor, bounced a few times, and came to rest on its edge.
I took it as a good omen, and I licked it clean.

I had a bad day.
The tractor tire’s sidewall is shot, so I jacked it up, removed the wheel, drove it to the tire place, and … They are closed on fridays.
I wanted to get a coat of paint on the kitchen walls before I wound down for the evening. I figured I could do all the prep work, and then do the actual painting while the barbeque is pre-heating for dinner.  So I did the prep work, lit the barbeque, opened the can of paint, and … It had gone bad in the can, so there will be no painting tonight.
Moving on, the barbecue ought to be good and hot by now, so I took my bowl of chicken tenders out to the BBQ and … the tank had gone dry, and the flame had gone out, and the grill was not hot.
Just be glad, I suppose, that it didn’t happen in the morning: the stove is still busted, and I’m still boiling my morning coffee on the barbeque, and a first-thing-in-the-morning flame fail might have put me right over the edge.

We got back from DC, and the cat was kind of upset. He’d been mostly alone inside for 3 days, poor guy. I gave him some food and some garden time, and he gave me the evil eye, and kind of disappeared for awhile. But as soon as I sat down, he settled into my lap, and got himself a good long head scratch and a rubdown. Makeup sex.
I unpacked, and he watched me put away my socks.
I put away my devices, and he watched me magically wind up with more USB cables than I started with.
He was not impressed. He lost interest and curled up in my chair.
And he knows there’s going to be an ice cream bowl to lick when he wakes up.
I think I missed my cat as much as my cat missed me. Who’s a good boy?

“Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You went to DC?”
Yeah. Celia moved there from Georgia, and Mary helped, and I was there to pick up Mary and put up shelves. You never saw so much drama in your life.

I’ve been wiring up B3PR’s backplane for like forever, and I finally got it ready to go.
With 1 more servo, and way less safety switches than C3PR had, it is shiny and new and mounts right on the robot. What can go wrong?
I plugged it in. So far so good.
I turned it on, and I watched it boot. Green light.
I charged the coils and .. Great balls of fire! The surge suppressor on the relay coil went supernova and the blast made a big black mess of the wiring, and it scared the shit out of me.