September 11, 2022

Yesteryear
One year ago today: September 11, 2021, he can’t play rhythm.
Five years ago today: September 11, 2017, one hurricane so far.
Nine years ago today: September 11, 2013, a nothing day.
Random years ago today: September 11, 2007, I know every shortcut.

           Pancakes. Then off to work, sort of. It’s routine maintenance and not progress. I sure get my outdoor time. I’ve said how the neighbors will work with a shirt on, but that’s maybe an hour. I’m alone out there most of the day and I mostly cleaned some of the remaining pallet lumber. I didn’t care for this work when I was younger. You get a job as a carpenter’s helper and they set you to junk like that, which I fully understand. You are there to work, not go to school. But enough is enough. Now, I’m indifferent. I’m out there with the birds and the radio.

           I had to take the sledge hammer to get some of the pallets apart. I surprised myself how I managed that without huffing and puffing. Since I’ve learned to read the markings, I now take extra care to separate the best wood and cut it so the markings show. The best sawhorses are made from these matching sets, I tend to work on those first. This means I accumulate less than optimum lumber, most of which will make sawhorses but the difference in quality is marked. Here’s a view of the new hex bits, which is a wrong terminology I use. These are properly called star bits, two of them on the far right side of the picture. Cost $2.00 each, size T25.

           On-line I located several DIY sites that together gave me a better idea how to proceed and some of the proper terms. As always there is no telling if anything will come of this but you’ll understand when you get to the stage where time is no longer money. I dread ever becoming your average over-60 couch potato, especially those crabby one who think they know it all because they watch Fox. Examining various styles of sawhorses, my choice was to stick with the basic “construction site” model. It’s stackable and I make one modification. Instead of the standard 32” size, I make them all 30”. If built from new lumber this would best suit ten-foot pieces.
           Pallets are handled differently and although 36” is a fairly standard size, all too often the nails or disassembly splits or cracks the ends. Play it safe and go for 30”and you’ll find fewer buried nails as well. There is shop layout so the task means all kinds of walking back and forth. That means the peach tree got hand groomed and the dead papaya leaves trimmed. The bird feeders are shaken and I packed the soil around the transplanted agave cactus. I set aside a matching set of smaller pieces to build a small set of sawhorses like the “lambs” in Tennessee.

           Otherwise, I did chores like sweeping the laundry deck. It concerns me how far I’m getting behind on the house. But at the same time I’m doing work that needs done anyway and at a pace quite unthinkable not that many years ago. Today the estimate is I was out there 5-1/2 hours, split into two shifts. In between I watch a how-to on working with DC power supplies. I did not know these could be connected to give different voltages. Funny how not one of the several dozen books I studied since 2012 even mentioned this.
           What I’m saying is if you need an 18VDC supply, you can gang one together. Up to now, I have a big box of tangled power supplies and I would sift through to find voltages that were close enough. Now, if I need an 18, I will wire up a 12 and a 6. These have to be matched for amperage but this is child’s play for the robot club.

Picture of the day.
Afghanis using wool blankets
to hide from infrared drones.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.

           Around half-way through I get this earworm, the tune “Mercury Blues”. It was originally called “Mercury Boogie” from 1948, but I never hear the song until the version by David Lindley. Never heard of him before or since either. That was the year I met the Reb, so back in the late 80s. The bass line is three notes but I could not shake the tune out of my brain until I grabbed the bass and played it three or four times. A half hour later and I’m okay again.

           Pricing what you sell can be tricky but it’s also hilarious the say some people approach it. I learned in accounting school various less obvious methods. I even learned to like the ones that applied to investing. For example, it could be said if I leave money in the bank, I’m losing due to inflation. But I’m also losing at a slower rate than somebody with nothing in the bank. Income is a relative thing and you can get ahead by losing money more slowly than the competition. Outwardly it seems backwards but I applied it my retirement and even if I’m wrong, I’ve been doing well at it for over twenty years. The sad news is the formula does not work for poor people, and I know because I was poor.

           This made me smile as I worked on the saw horses. When you are poor, if you work for less money than you could be making, you will be sorry. In my life I had to take jobs I hated because they paid the highest and I generally detest people who don’t realize this. They ladle out dumb advice like find something you enjoy—without regard that it pays below subsistence level. Let’s look at it from another standpoint but first admire how I’ve learned to cut the pieces so the brand shows.
           People who say do work you enjoy make the massive assumption that one is otherwise comfortable. But if you have no house, no car, no good clothes, cheap food, and nothing in the bank it is foolish to work for less than you possibly can—plus when you do that, you’ll be surrounded by hordes of others in the same boat. For me, the turning point came at around age 36. If I stopped working before that, I would fall behind. After that, if I stopped working, I just got ahead at a slower rate. Those who were born already past that point have no business dishing out advice, but they love to.

Last Laugh

(Oil painting.)