One year ago today: April 28, 2016, golden bathtubs & Elugelab Island.
Five years ago today: April 28, 2012, asking the right questions.
Nine years ago today: April 28, 2008, the lowest form of life.
Random years ago today: April 28, 2007, the Edison Museum.
Here’s a novelty item you may not have seen before. It is a cube with the numbers 0, 1, 3, 5, and 7 on difference faces. When you set it down with, say, the 5 on top, it counts down for 5 minutes and beeps. To stop it, just turn the 0 face up. For fifty cents, I could not turn it down. Works great, because I know how long some things take to cook and I don’t always like standing there waiting. Neat, huh? It was new in the box and the directions say it is part of a larger set. Downside? You have to turn the batteries off when not in use, or it drains them quickly. And tough about the lousy picture. My camera is still missing.
Anyway, it works out to 86 cents per plate, but there is enough left from the trim to cut up to 38 stiles, or enough for 9 lanterns. Somebody has to calculate what all this costs and it looks like I’m the only one left standing. To show you life isn’t totally cruel, while at the old lumber yard on the west end, we saw a pile of really old lumber, which the yard said the might let go at cost because it is weathered looking. That would suit us just fine, so we may pick up an entire lift for only $3.50 per plank. If so, just you watch how nice a work shed I wind up with. I would kind of like a carport on the north side, as well.
The lumber still costs more than I thought by 50%. I put the roof supports in the white shed, ready for the rafter that pops the roof back into shape. Agt. R dropped off some of that corrugated roofing material, but it was too badly deteriorated to use. Tomorrow I’m putting in shelving and a twelve-foot work counter, aiming to get the last of my tools out of my bedroom. While he was here, I got him to help me take down the drywall from the corner with that 1/2” bend. That’s a retrograde step, in that it is soon to be a year and I have not slept in my own bedroom yet.
Um, in general, lumber has gotten quite expensive. That’s one of those products that should decline in price in a pure competitive environment, but we have not that in America since 1941. I may have found a source of free scrap glass, why I even investing in a proper glass cutter. I’ve decided not to spend $22 on a shelf board and to use my huge supply of oak flooring as more shelving. It’s not an ideal surface but I’ve been using it as such since September last. You bet, solid oak shelving, like, for my drill press. Eat your heart out, Jay Leno.
I have no other place to record this, so here’s a paragraph you can skip. The white shed roof won’t hold its shape when I snap it back into place. Thus, I’ve decided on the rafter down the middle tactic. I’ve carefully cut and installed two 4x4 posts on opposite sides, 12 feet apart. I will drill pilot holes and bolt one end of a twelve-foot 2x4” on one post. Then, using a bottle jack, pop the roof panels out to level, using the lumber as a lever. I’ve designed it so if one piece won’t hold it up, I can laminate up to three pieces into a regular beam. By that point, you could stand on the roof.
Of more immediate concern is a secure door. Mind you, somebody would have to get down the entire length of my yard, through the back fence, across the back yard past both sheds, and even then, he’d be standing in full view from my neighbor’s kitchen window. I’ll reinforce the door anyway, as ultimately there will be close to $800 worth of tools in there, tools I would not want to replace at today’s prices. I’ve also placed extra pegboards so that no tools ever touch the ground. That’s the shed I stopped work on when it was subject to shallow flooding, even though I took care of that by digging a swale.
Russian superstition. (Imgur link.)
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
Around noon, I drove downtown and treated myself to a lunch at the deli. There’s something about store-bought potato salad I like better than my own. I got the local gossip and nearly nodded off. Just cats and kittens. My neighbors to the north lost two tiny newborn kittens, but I could not help. The lady was in tears but I told her I was around most of the day and saw nothing. Kittens I would definitely have noticed, but the sad news is there was nothing over here.
Here’s something you didn’t know about JZ and family. They are staunch pro-environmentalists, and I’ve got you a tale from the trailer court. Around a year ago, so not that far back, one of his brothers took all the courses and applied for a job as a Fish and Wildlife agent. He even passed the captain’s exam and was eminently qualified, but they turned him down. And you know why? In their personality assessment, they decided he wasn’t enough of a prick. He was asked such questions as his willingness to lie under oath to support the department.
Nobody is saying he was rejected because he would have answered no, but the point here is any government employee who even asks such a question as a contextual part of the hiring process should be instantly fired and blacklisted. Along with whoever else knew it was going on. Mr. Trump, time to clean house. It’s obvious they are letting it become a bigger problem before they do anything because they like their nice soft jobs. Where’s the EPA, where’s the police? Hint: start by firing any civil servant who expresses a political view to the media while on duty. That should get rid of half those blabbermouths the first pay period.
“So I said to the one-legged hitchhiker,
‘Hop in’.”
I studied leather hinges for a half hour on-line. Harrumph, most of them don’t know any more about it than I do. So, I had to call on my experience with leather, which pretty much amounts to a few months of helping out at the shoemakers. Remember that? The motive here is that we cannot find any real brass hinges, only plated. Even parts claiming to be brass will stick to a magnet. Authenticity doesn’t have to be exact, but the incentive here is to try where possible. And we do have an awfully big pile of leather.
Here’s my first prototype and I don’t like it. The leather is okay to cut, but the nails are labor intensive. Maybe if I had a tack hammer, but shown here are tiny tacks, the ones I found that would probably rust. Don’t mind the little hook, I was experimenting. The hinges don’t flex the door back fully closed, so some type of latch is in order.
I’ve also gone over the shop layout and done my best to replace labor with equipment. Everything within reason that can be done by machine is mapped out. Accumulating the tools is taking time, for instance, the router table turns out to be in Ft. Meyers, a hundred miles from here. But it will be here next week, during semester break. I should refine what I mean, I’m saying I’ve done the work on paper, we still do not have the ideal set of tools. And the assembly line is not even begun until the roof of that shed is waterproof. However, unlike some sheds around here, ahem, my sheds are completely wired for light, fans, music, and a generous supply of outlets. Got that, or do I need to repeat it?
ADDENDUM
My ulterior motive remains to get all the tools out of my bedroom. I promise pics if you return. I see when I take a day off, a lot of you scatter. The good news is despite massive shifts in customer loyalty, my blog readership has not declined since 2012, when social media put most blogs out of business. I don’t like slow months even though this blog is not dependent on mass appeal. Vanity is also an inescapable factor in any publishing so I’m happy to keep any reader base against Twitter. I don’t compare to FaceBook type sites, since this blog requires intelligence to understand. It was Twitter that hurt, my numbers went down until Twitter leveled off.
Other than a few bad months, this blog has held its own against colossal competition. I also hold other blogs claims with some suspicion. No way somebody who talks about their laundry and publishes once a month can possibly have ten times my readership. For about a year now, I’ve noticed the effect of Twitter about once a month. I’ll suddenly get 832 hits in one hour from Germany or a three day bump in the mornings as people arrive at work. Numbers are otherwise constant, the worst month being January, with a slight dip in mid-September.
The most popular feature? Yesteryear. I attribute this to a number of factors, such as being at the top of the page. There is also the unexplained coincidence of my activities pairing with the same date in earlier years, a real mystery because even I don’t know it until it happens. I don’t usually read my old posts until they come up as a link-back date. Other items I’ve tried make slight improvements, but they come and go as it is terrifically difficult to consistently find new material by relying on other authors or sites. That spurs me to dare anyone to show me another daily blog that contains as much new or novel information as this one. Oh, I know they exist, but don’t tell me, show me.
My favorite site to skim through? JimmyR (Jimmy Ruska) because his list conglomerates a wide audience. You still have to sift through it to bypass the Millennial crap and contrived questions. Another thing, people, is if it doesn’t have pictures, I don’t read it. I consider it a waste of time when any link goes to Reddit. One idiot posts an idiotic article and fifty other idiots post idiotic replies. Reddit people are among the slowest on the planet. These are the people George Carlin warned you about.
Last Laugh
Return Home
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
