This was not an exciting day. Therefore I should at least try to make it informative. Face it, these are not exciting times. Unless you know somebody else on a diet who was able to keep the room in stitches. Not me, I get the house, yard, and vehicle work done. The action today consisted of coffee at the bakery and a haircut, whoop-dee-doo. The seventh day on this diet is disheartening in that I’ve not lost any more weight that I would have on the diet alone.
So let’s start here. What is this? It’s a sponge in a baggie, anybody can see that, so what makes it blog-worthy? It’s what you can’t see, see? This sponge is saturated with water and it is frozen stiff. I’ve heard of people who actually spend money on ice packs. Those things are expensive and probably poisonous if they leak. They get lost, left behind, and you can’t form fit them to your container when thawed and then freeze the whole lunch box.My diet injectors must be refrigerated. The transport pack was $49.95 and it was similar to those lined lunch bag thingees. The ones that work for a whole hour and a half. Instead, I got out my half-gallon cold thermos from the Colorado trip, outfitted it with this sponge and tallied up the cost. Around $2.73 or $2.74.
Next, the short on the eBike. Of all the dumb ideas, the manufacturer makes the battery contact harness out of plastic. Years ago I told you how the battery bounces a little over each pothole or bump. This eventually wears out the flimsy bracket that keeps the contact pins in place. This causes the battery to float off the pins every time you hit any negative g’s. You mistake it for a short, the other condition where the power will suddenly cut off.
I don’t get off easy. They don’t sell that bracket, only the entire two-battery metal frame that fits over the rear wheel. My unit has been modified over the years and I have a carrier basket on the right side after that bracket was the first to wear out. For now, I simply removed the bracket and let the pins stick out too far. The battery smashes back down against them and viola, power again. Yes folks, 2013 and they still make a critical part out of plastic.
To really pick up the pace, I changed the oil on both motorcycles. The scooter is still using oil without burning or leaking it. This, while waiting for JZ to call. Where is JZ? Every month he forgets to pay his cell phone bill and we were supposed to touch bases about our plans for the weekend. Ft. Meyers Beach is just a memory now, time to move on. Speaking of that, I had a chat with my barber over chasing women. Aha, he’s found out that being great-looking is not enough after 40-ish. The guy was an LA real estate agent and looks it, but like JZ, he is painfully shy.
My advice to guys like that is to quit competing and start cooperating. This involves completely revamping your approach. If you work alone, every third-rate dude in the place will out-talk and out-spend you because he’s got what real winners don’t: thirty years experience chasing women the hard way. And they are scrounges. Expect to find one of them sitting at your table when you get back from the can. These guys are usually tough, ugly, and have nothing to lose.
What is this now? White powder. Note my fancy mortar and pestle. One thing I can now dispute is the claim that aluminum can be soldered to copper by using acetylsalicylic acid as flux. I suspect that under the right circumstances, the solder will penetrate between flat layers of metal, which is brazing, not soldering. Show here is 650 mg of crushed pills, since using the whole aspirin as shown in some diagrams is an impossible balancing act. I did not burnish the aluminum, as doing so would be so cumbersome that I’d rather pay for copper.
What’s worse is fumes from the process, while I don’t know if they are toxic, they are a bitter whiff best avoided. Afterward, I tested to see if the aspirin, itself a coat tar derivative, would burn. Yes, and in powdered form, it burns easily. I had wanted to see about making my own ROM grids with aluminum. The fact this won’t solder makes aluminum not worth it.
ADDENDUM
Will this blog survive? What if Google pulls the pin on blogspot? What if my account. with the 20 digit password which includes non-printing control characters, gets hacked. No sweat, the backup system is a work of art. If you are good, you may be immortalized by this record. If you are bad, it will never go away. Anyone who doesn't like their report card, that's tough, some fifty-five copies will be mailed out if anything should happen to me. Let's look at what I've got.
These files exist by the thousands. It is unlikely most will ever be published. I’ve been writing since I was eight. I’ve lost more pages over the years than most people write in a lifetime. Oddly, nobody in my family writes and it was frowned upon as a waste of time—unless you were writing to these wonderful, caring, relations I kept hearing about but never met.
The longest uninterrupted stretch of writing is late 1979 to late 1987. If I ever publish that, around 100 people that otherwise would die in obscurity will go down in history as the nasty, evil bastards they are. The files of those days (all handwritten) are eerily accurate because the 5% rule was not faithfully followed. The 5% rule introduces a certain amount of error into this material, but error that does not affect accuracy where it counts.
There. How was your day?
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