One year ago today: June 8, 2016, my unfounded theory.
Five years ago today: June 8, 2012, a DNS transcript.
Nine years ago today: June 8, 2008, whoop-dee-figgin-doo!
Random years ago today: June 8, 2011, universal enough for you.
It would be a while down the line, but I finally found a design of solar water pre-heater that would work right on my home system. It’s not as simple as running the water through a pre-heater coil, those systems are not carefree. For carefree you require a pressurized system (which works off the water pressure in your house line) and a storage tank that is higher than the sun collector, since it works on convection. These apparatuses are another area where every “expert” omits telling you at least one of the factors you need to know or you will lose money.
A further example of how these Internet experts and authors can screw you up is the way they mention the storage tank is higher than the heating section. Fine. But there is not a single word on whether the other tank in your house, the regular hot water heater must ALSO be higher than the collector. It probably doesn’t, because who wants to rip out and reinstall the main tank? But that is where the observant spot the potential for a big mistake.
All of their diagrams show that it [the house hot water tank] is [higher than the solar holding tank]. Coincidence? They could be equally inept at drawing diagrams. I don’t know the answer, but it’s a question, if unanswered, that could lead to a costly mistake.
That’s not important now, so meanwhile you city slickers can take a guess what this instrument is for. It’s life size and the tongs are three times longer than fits in this photo. Give up? They are a locking hemostat for removing fish hooks. True, thanks to over-fishing, there is nothing left in Florida that requires a tool this size. However, you like this blog because it feeds out new information in real time at the right pace. Have you ever noticed that other blogs either blast you with information like cramming for finals, or they just show you a picture without a description? On the other hand, their descriptions aren’t prize material either.
While downtown to pay my utilities, I grabbed coffee at a café. They usually put on the weather but that’s been played out for three days now. As usual, I was the only patron working the crossword puzzle, so the news station was on. I have no idea about establishment politics, but I know when somebody is lying through their teeth. And they had some guy there playing dodgeball with the truth in every sentence. Something about Trump telling him to drop an investigation and he was claiming this had never happened before with any other president. What do you make of that?
I could barely hear his answers and none of the questions, so I’ll state my conclusion. If any of you out there know what’s happening there, you can compare it my impression. The talker was a master bureaucrat supremely confident he could deny his way out of any anything, and apparently got fired recently when he tried it on Trump. He was playing the media for air time, maybe thinking of doing a Clinton with the books and lecture circuit. His tone of constant lying was impeccable, the measured manner in which a trained liar defeats a polygraph. This guy is a piece of work, so I wonder what the issue was. Maybe he was like vice-president or something?
He was going on like many before him who thought it was going to business as usual. The points he was bringing up were the predictable situations that were never an issue as long as the establishment candidate was the one elected. Like that tiresome claim that the Russians interfered with the election—not a problem as long as the liberals thought Hillary was winning. Their whining and bitching has gone beyond pathetic.
Room with a view.
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Here’s something more cheery. The “pumpkin” plant in the front yard has staged a wondrous recovery. I was even impressed how well those spindly looking stems survived the windstorm. There’s Florida’s most reknowned tree-top in the upper left, “planted” in that pot. This is the tip of the 62-foot tree used to be in the back. The white object at the base is a yard weather sensor.
I was talking to my real estate lady about the local market. She says inventory is down to nothing. But the institutional buying is back in full swing. Remember last year how everything in the affordable cash range was being snapped up same day? Same thing is beginning again, though not so obvious. Nothing worthwhile stays active very long, and what’s left over are the extreme fixer-uppers.
She is the only other person I’ve met whose parents did not pay at least something for her education. Even those who put themselves through on student loans always got something, somewhere along the line. An Xmas bonus, or a letter with ten bucks. Something. Not me, I got my first new shirt when I was 21. This is a vague likeness, because her folks fronted the money. The commonality is that they did not pay for it in the final analysis. That's an important distinction, "in the final analysis".
The story with my real estate lady is that her parents paid her way through. And the day she graduated, they handed her the bill. Contextually, there is no comparison to my story. Her parents did come up with the money. She did not attend school as I did, with the constant reminder of the burden being incurred. Her parents paid, mine did not. Still, she’s the closest story I can identify with.
And that (I would have paid my parents back a hundredfold) would have been a dream come true for me. I would have committed to a degree that maximized my income, rather than the short term certificates I needed so I would not become a laborer like my parents intended. This is not conjecture; you can look it up for yourself what a university degree meant. In my day, the 70s and 80s, a university degree was an assurance of a good job. By the opposite token, lack of a degree meant basic financial destitution because the country was moving toward living on credit. If you were working class and didn’t buy everything on credit, you pretty much had nothing. Without borrowed money, you could probably not even afford to live near enough to a good job to commute. Don’t laugh, I knew one guy who drove 56 miles each way.
Nor am I that sympathetic to nowadays with the student loan “crisis”. In my day, student organizations occupied campuses and stopped a war. Why don’t these millennials form a tough society a few million strong and counter-sue these campuses that fed them over-stated hiring statistics and over-sold them on degrees with no potential. Ten million students chipping in ten bucks each per month could sue the government for allowing these operations in the first place.
“You can go anywhere you want
if you look serious and carry a clipboard.”
Here’s the restored bench with the galvanized bolts. The photo belies the difficult of fastening this thing together. It’s not like the first slat held the contraption rigid while you placed the remaining bolts. This is another pic to lighten up the day, which has otherwise been soggy and so windy I had to cancel rehearsal.
Later, I was in the shed until after dark and go the basic template glued up. This was an empirical design, so expect many modifications. In the end it was a compromise, a framework instead of a sold core. Shown here lying on it’s side, it is being glued up with two of the dark stained rails placed in cutout grooves to keep the assembly square. The hole in the center is not the chimney vent, rather a winch fits through this to cinch the plates and rails up for drilling. It turns out my drill press does not have a port that would allow a workpiece to fit up from under the table, so chances are I will hand drill the dowel holes for now.
The pieces are pre-stained and I have not decided on the hardware yet. If you wonder about the fourth piece of glass, it is in the hinged door, assembled separately and placed in near the end of the build. I don’t know yet about the wires, either. Stick around for results, these are not ornaments. They are fully functional lanterns. No decision has been made on the heat diffuser, I’m still open to ideas.
ADDENDUM
Again, don’t take my reviews of movies too seriously since I don’t really watch them. Mind you, the fact that I usually have to be reading or working a crossword tells you a lot about the quality of movie entertainment. Today’s disc was “Relative Evil”, from the turn of the century, an interesting plot. A kid gets out of rehab with an insurance policy that his relatives would like to collect. The actor, Jonathan Tucker, was excellent, but I don’t think I’ve heard of him before or since—but then I only watch this type of movie when nothing else is available. The movie was the more enjoyable because it had every hint of being based on true circumstances.
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