One year ago today: April 6, 2021, another prison town.
Five years ago today: April 6, 2017, 50 years late.
Nine years ago today: April 6, 2013, veggie breakfast.
Random years ago today: April 6, 2005, working with Win 98.
My big toe found that piece of glass that fell behind the water heater a few years ago. I’m on the news feeds waiting for the Thrift to open and I see the Democrat panic rising to new levels on a daily basis. Told ya. Do we have time for some good news. My peach tree, which is supposed to bud all at once? For a week now three spots, but very careful inspection this morning led to this discovery. When I got up close I saw these teensy weensy green spots. I ran inside for the camera and soon found six leaf tips, shown here. With 10x magnification, I found another fourteen spots, including nibs on branches from last year I thought would never come back. Please, another summer of peaches and cream, this makes me super-happy.
Still no washer, so I took two loads downtown and who should be there but the lady I first met in this town, wife of the former owner. He would have passed away two years by now, I recall. She always was independent and spirited, I’ll bet I’d say that if I went back and found it so in this blog. Like myself, she quickly learned to never call the service man except as a last resort, so you should see her now.
One of the washers would not lock the lid, so she was like me after six months with my own laundromat, what, 40 or so years ago now. Service man, my eye, she drops a sack of tools on the floor and pulls the door off by the hinges. In there with a hammer and pliers, bashes the offending latch back into shape, and the thing is back in service by the time I’m just on my rinse cycle.
The Canon printer is on my desk. It’s a $130 retail and I think it is brand new. The starter ink cartridges still had the seal intact. Please let it be a bargain, when you see a donation like this it is usually millennials who could not figure out how to connect it wirelessly. Ah, some say, don’t I mean older people? Nope, those will get somebody to help them, but millennials know everything.
Let’s not get ahead of things, I’m back to suspecting a subtle change in my prescriptions last week may be behind my lack of pep. It’s happened before, usually when ordinary tasks take forever. Like laundry tis morning, should have been 45 minutes, but I never got back here until 11:00AM and the dryer is still running. If you’re new here, these are mild heart medications meant to keep my pressure and such in spec, but so mild that feeling whooped isn’t on the label as a side-effect.
What’s this talk of Biden seizing Russian yachts on the high seas? That old fart is determined to get us into a war before those mid-term elections. Legalized piracy, goes the rumors, with Miami as the home port. Like the Russians would not retaliate and American yachts are far more plentiful. Since I doubt even Biden is stupid enough to use military vessels, we may soon find out what a Dushka can do to fibreglass hulls. Make Swiss cheese, I’d say.
Later, the new printer is a gem, and I found out what was wrong with it. The previous owner did not read the manual and had pried up the paper feed tray without sliding it propertly, snapping off the clips. I never close the tray so I’ll probably just glue the thing in place. The printer is equipped for both wireless and WiFi which are security risks, so I’ll hardwire it. It has some typical millennial features, such as nowhere on the outside of the printer, box, manual, or on-line instructions does it show or tell what ink cartridge this device uses. A message appears only when the cartridge is nearly empty, but is not a menu item you can check with a keypress.
Atacama dessert.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
The carpet was also like new. Here’s a peek at it, I had to move fast in case of rain. It’s been overcast for an hour, but you can see enough to judge the quality. It turned out a muggy afternoon, so I bypassed working on the shed, which entails a lot of back and forth into the shed and worked on the Roman A/C. This ancient system is well described on the Internet, yet it is rare to see any such thing in reality. I hope it isn’t another of those all-talk “science” things that arm-chair bozos love to death. Because you love it, I’ll document the theory and progress just enough to keep it casually moving along.
The planned arrangement is six PVC pipes each two inches in diameter and five feet long. They could be any length, but I chose these as a convenient size for the silo south wall. The material is PVC schedule 40 pipe for the reason the cheaper black colored pipe is reputed to deteriorate in sunlight. My budget for this project is $100. The pipes are to run vertically up the exterior wall one foot apart, positioned in the direct sunlight.
The wall is eight feet high, but I chose not to use the full dimension as each pipe runs through the wall into the interior around a foot off the floor. There is also an overhanging eave which casts a summertime shadow that varies, but that is necessary for rain. This lops a foot off the top, leaving a six-foot working space. As the pipe is sold in ten-foot lengths, we have a compromise size of five feet for this pilot project. Initially, anyway, the pipe and fittings are to be friction fit and unpainted.
Like the cheap on-line “solar” water heaters, the efficiency of this system is really the rate at which the heated piping can transfer the temperature difference and draw air from the cooler bottom end and out the top. It would make sense in a way to paint the pipes black, but since I have six of them, I will first try them just as they are. The joints are all friction fit because that is simple and good enough. A short length of pipe runs through the wall into the interior at the bottom of each segment, each pipe is an independent unit. At the top end is a simple elbow to keep out rain and vermin.
While the interior pipes will draw the coolest air already inside the structure, any other arrangement represents complication. The north wall is in permanent shadows and we already know it is a comfortable place to work. Thus, it becomes the logical spot to put any type of damper or other flow control, near the bottom where it is coolest. I cannot bury anything in the ground because of tree roots. And the ground temperature around here isn’t that much cooler to begin with. This is the type of seat-of-the-pants project that appears when you strongly suspect everyone else is all talk.
This picture shows a mockup of one of the stems. The long piece is half-size, shown here testing the fittings. At the bottom, between my feet, there will be a piece fitted to the left that goes through the wall into the interior. The theory is that the sun will heat the air in the pipe, causing it to rise and flow out the top, shown here with a proposed end-piece. I salvaged around half the material so the cost of this endeavor is far less than if you try it at home. Most of these fittings are around $5 bucks each these days.
ADDENDUM
Did you see the video of that pathetic Biden wondering around aimlessly at his own house party? It’s beneath humiliating to the nation, but the Democrats can’t dump the old bugger because they know the Kamel woman in unacceptable to almost all Americans. I’m not referring to the camera angle which may have caught him off guard, but that blank, confused look on his face. The Democrats are old fogies who missed the whole Internet way of things until they encountered Trump’s tweets. Now they can’t win for losing because as they catch on to social media, the only thing they know how to do is use it for more corruption. What got me on this so early in the morning was way the panic keeps ratcheting up and up.
They now have another element to keep them worried. They did what they could to depict Trump rallies as super-spreaders, but look what just happened. A smaller rally in Michigan, with 10,000 inside and probably double that outside. While those would be gigantic numbers for any Democrat, the stats are out. Close to 3,000,000 watched the rally on-line. That many is off the top of the scale and the leftoids should be worried. I can’t wait for November even though they will cheat. Because they will be caught this time.
What’s with Wisconsin? Nothing to me, but for reasons I’ve never known or believed, the place is an indicator of upcoming elections. If so, America is headed for a massive upheaval as we near the midterms. Forty years ago I was a lonely voice warning about how leftists were constantly nibbling away at our freedoms from the bottom up. The cost of what they put into this takeover is probably incalculable. They became so adept at dirty politics that I believe if Trump had not come along, they may have pulled it off.
So, what is happening that’s so drastic? It appears that complete newcomers are getting elected over twenty-year incumbents. Professional politicians on the payroll for half a lifetime are being replaced by amateur but staunch Republican, most of them white and no longer alarmed at being called “racist”. Stealing one big election where locals had no concept of the scale cannot be repeated at the state and county level. People know how may people are supposed to vote and where.
For now, those school board elections are the lowest echelon, and local housewives are kicking Democrat ass. My hypothesis is that people have a general hesitancy to upset any working system, but places like Wisconsin show them that it can be done and how to do it. Those who held back can now see entire school boards being thrown out, and long-standing politicos getting the axe. I know little of Wisconsin except it is traditionally Democrat, but so far every Democrat at any level in this round has been “shellacked” which is the word being tossed. And that kind of upset is why I support Trump without agreeing with all he does.
So as not to end on too dreary a note, here is the first scan with the new Canon printer. The Marigold seed box. It isn’t that great a scanner but it’s a third the size of the old clunker. The highest setting is 600 dpi, which is too fine for regular and too coarse of photos, so why do they bother? These seeds were tested in two batches, on in a potting soil mix, the other directly to the native sand mixture. As ever, both sprouted well and continue great up to the flowering stage. It’s this adult phase where they do not flourish and die off despite the best care.