One year ago today: July 25, 2021, the old hot spoke trick.
Five years ago today: July 25, 2017, just don’t carry RFIDs.
Nine years ago today: July 25, 2013, pathetic.
Random years ago today: July 25, 2014, near Jetty Park.
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Another 24 hours taking it easy on my back has not helped, so I’m going to do something backwards this morning. I’m going to buy what I think are the right supplies for the job without actually getting under the floor. The reasoning is if I did things right the last time I was there, I may only have to get under the house once instead of twice. For $30 in parts, it’s worth a try. The pipes, like before, can be fed along the route of the old iron from the outside of the foundation. All the new piping was arranged to be under the bathroom floor, which is formed of two access panels, easy to remove for this reason.
All the field guides I have don’t help much for this situation, most have pics of the males only. Worse, they rely on the reader knowing the vocabulary of bird anatomy, or knowledge of bird classifications like “thrush” or “phoebe”. Hence, don’t rely on my species ID, just enjoy the view.
Hours later, I’m back from the store with the supplies, but no action. I’m drained of all energy just carrying the materials back to the van. Here’s my theory. Life is in cycles and they get more pronounced as you age. Up and down days, weeks, months. These exist on many tiers, but center on health, energy, gumption, finances, outlook, every last person who gets off their ass and works knows what I’m talking about.
Well, sometimes just too many of those cycles fall into a low-end alignment at the same time. It’s like when the planets align, but the opposite, causing a severe drop in overall performance. Sounds like an excellent theory to me. Around mid-morning I developed a pain in both shoulders, unusual since they have no common injuries. Nor did I strain them identically. The common factor is playing bass and I don’t even want to speculate that could be a problem.
I might add that lumber and material prices seem to have dropped. In some cases, they are about what they should have been. The ten-foot CPVC tubes were just over $11 each. They were $10 two years ago. That leaves no room to complain, for you see, including new fixtures like the toilet and medicine cabinets, the total I’ve spend on plumbing in my six years here is $1,855. The equivalent of one major repair elsewhere. The piping is likely 50 years old and has rarely let me down on the same scale as other places I’ve lived.
Russian Kalashnikov factory.
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By 5:00PM my shoulders were behaving so I cleared away mats and such to expose the plywood under-floor. This is a dusty environment to start with and we need to get at the corrideor from kitchen to bathroom, by far the most used pathway of the structure. You know from history the bathroom is not air-conditioned and it was 86ºF in there. I forget, do I have to remove the bathroom door? It now swings the other way and I don’t remember. Later, yes, off it comes, worse, I reused the old hinges which are in worse shape now.
I had to get the bathroom working before all was finished, so the floor has to come up again. To bad, it was finished so nicely that I liked the plywood finish. I’ll just cut into what I need and block new pieces when I’m done.. I’ll leave it until tomorrow. One reason is that the toilet tank line is still connected to iron and I may want to make that plastic while I’m under the building.
You may notice some electric cable also in the pit. This is two lines, one for the new fridge location once the hot water tank is gone, and a second dedicated feed for a sink disposal. That’s changed, since I want the whole sink moved to the other side of the room, I haven’t decided for sure yet. I examined the old cloth wiring and it is definitely past its prime. But replacing it could be intensive. There is an option, by bending the code but not breaking it. Junction boxes must not be covered over, they must be accessible. Well, it would be accessible but you need to crawl 12 feet under the house to get at it. Hey, I didn’t write the rules.
One entire hour was taken moving stuff out of the way, which is a constant every place I’ve ever lived. I contacted Wilford to possibly lend a hand with moving the concrete steps into position later in the week. Waiting for Agt. R. is futile. The big hot water tank cable is also rolled up under there, so I may be walking on planks longer than planned. And it’s a judgment call whether I’m in any better condition now than four years ago. The good news is when I’m done, all the plumbing and electric is new—except for the planned new kitchen counter. And I can live as long as I need on what is already there.
How about I fix a coffee and watch as much of the white camel video as I can stand. It’s one of those cultural type productions everyone needs to at least watch even if you find the culture primitive beyond suffering. I mean, how many thousands of years must go by before some people develop the wheel, much less a few hand tools.
In other news, Tesla will begin charging for connectivity, starting at $99 per year after 8 years. Like cable TV, we know what those numbers mean. China announces a small nuclear powered torpedo with a range of 6,260 miles, the run time is some 390 hours. Enough to hit Seattle from the Chinese shoreline. From the same source (JimmyR), Seagate has begun selling a 30TB solid state hard drive. It is difficult to imagine to what use this amount of memory would be to the average use. But it will be semi-legal at best.
ADDENDUM
Just so you know, the post office has photocopied the front and back of every piece of mail since 1996. No need to worry unless you are up to something funny. That’s why the government asked for your permission to do this. I would still like to apply a hot poker to the SOB who designed the WiFi and router connection systems. Like millions, I’ve given up trying to learn the ropes, you kind of find what works and go with that. The system I have with my new G4 device means turn it on twice. The first time the lights all come on except “signal” and the computer does not see it no matter how you tweak the settings. So you wait a minute and it times out.
Then, you turn it on again and sometimes the computer connects automatically, although the auto-connect switch is disabled. Most of the time, you have to keep hitting the tiny “renew: icon in the corner of a pop-up that appears. Eventually you see the device, and after another wait, the “connect” icon appears. On the device, the signal light turns red, then green, at which time a series of warning pop-ups appear on the monitor warning of device conflicts. Close them.
I suspect the “signal” is supposed to measure the strength but most people know to put the pieces close together, That damn lite should come on red only if there is no adequate signal and should have the option to sound an alarm.
The point is, all these decades later and these engineering geniuses still can’t build a simple system. You got your wifi lite, your signal lite, but that means nothing until the data lite begins to flicker. Only an engineer with a bastard-rate mentality thinks the average user wants WiFi or signal, but no Internet. Yep, a hot poker is the only thing such shitheads understand, and even then they are awful slow on the take-up. In this case, 30 years slow.
