One year ago today: August 20, 2023, hinges & hardware.
Five years ago today: August 20, 2019, part of the charm.
Nine years ago today: August 20, 2015, the wiring alone.
Random years ago today: August 20, 1979, my old Roadmaster.
Please let this be another generic day. Today I would like to putter, after the sun comes up of course. Let’s see how far I get with that, since it is also Festus Tuesday. In my old age I’ve become like most men in their middle age. Slow to get up to speed, or even started, but once I’m out there, I’ll work all day. The recent delays in your photos (a blog bonus, I remind everyone) are because they built the library on the far edge of town. I finally got started and now have three more shelves. What’s happening in the ones I had installed years ago were heavy duty and two feet apart in height.
That would include these boxes. Here is the progress by the time I knocked off, around 3:30PM as the rains began.
If you notice the lettering system on the boxes, yes there is a method but you don’t know what it is. Ready? Okay, when using the spreadsheet as a database, one of the key fields is the box number. If a given tube set fits into five boxes, you would find five different keys, such as WF or YP all down that column. Have you got it yet? It’s the type-ahead feature in Excel. It will, under the right circumstances, fill in the rest of an entry that matches the first letter or two. Aha, so why two letters? Why not one? Tell you what, I’ll let you ponder that and explain why two. If you note, there are no English words that start with WF or YP. If you used WH, you would eventually run into problems with it backfilling who, what, where, and why.
Remember the electric cable Howie ran over with the mower? Well, he replaced it and I had to find a use for the segment that was still good. I have a wire inside the house I would have to more the desk to get at, so I often did laundry by moonlight. Kind of rustic, you might say, until you had to do it. Ever folded laundry in the dark? I haven’t, I bring it inside, smartie. Anyhow, here is the last 150W bulb from the shed, one of those fancy old fashione coily things I would on by if I found it on sale. Scout around, the picture is here somewhere.
The continued boycott of Bud Lite has caused more layoffs and the shutdown of an entier brewery. Too bad the workers get canned but not the higher-ups who screwed up. The Reb called to report the fridge is giving out. Without me there with a truck, she has no way of replacing it as it is not part of the lease. (Turns out it was left behind by the previous tenant some nine years ago.) She is not going to get a lot of help from anyone around there. Not while they are busy soaking up the DNC circus. Claiming Kamela is the greatest and has been working toward this moment and her proven track record. Gag.
Now they are proving incapable of reading their own teleprompters. Kamela gets lambasted the instant she goes off script. And Joe with that “women without electrical” gaff. It’s past the point where the wise thing for them to do is step down gracefully. They’ve lost, there is no chance they can win legitimately. Their buildup that Kamela is the greatest has flopped. And the timed news releases have become too routine. Kamela’s true ratings are below 20% but they persist is portraying her as coming from behind to over 50%. Except this time, only the party faithful are buying it.
Church, Stry, Alberta.
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Inside for noon break, the news is Kamela has withdrawn from the slated debate in September. Some say chickened out, as she would be forced to defend dozens of unsavory acts and policies. It’s worse than it appears, as the popular mood is “Trump was right.” The left has spent so much demonizing him that most of the electorate on both sides know any debate would have to de-focus on politics and ramp up attacks on his personality. That’s a Democrat lose-lose scenario.
Some Governor (Beshear) at the convention said Trump’s VP’s family should be raped. Here is a warning about Fauci from 1999. It’s scary but laughable to imagine being locked in a room with Democrat spinners and told they have to come up with something before the disaster hits. They’re out of options, today they are bringing back the old debunked story that Trump supported the Nazis. They though they had this campaign slander down to a science. I never followed the mechanics of these conventions enough to understand, but I can see Trump rallys that are drawing twenty times the audience. That part I get.
I hate Windows and you should, too. An entire batch of photos went missing. In fifty years, Windows can’t do a proper file move. It went through all the motions, a process I use almost daily. Later, after I deleted the originals off the camera chip, you got it. They had disappeared and with the latest Windows, all searches are a bitch. Sometime you hit enter, other times it starts by itself—and wastes time searching while you are still entering the criteria.. Starting over again is often more efficient than working with Windows. What’s happening is with the tubes out in the shed, that’s where the sorting has to be done. And there is no computer out there.
Thinking ahead, if sales are good, the boxes will have to regularly be moved and reboxed. Watching the bulk sellers on-line I note that they do not offer to sell in batches. That spells they have no filing system and cannot readily pull batches. If it is still raining later, I may ponder the best way to take advantage of this. It would involve somehow letting the buyer know what I have so he can pick and choose.
It may not make sense to list the tubes by name, since they vary in function. But I could list all the “6AF” tubes or all the tubes containing a “W”. The W signfies a ruggedized tube, probably for the military, so I’ve taken to calling them War tubes. And so on. I have this hunch I could stumble on some way to move the tubes that would not be possible without the database. For clarity, I have seen some of the advertisers exhibit good organization, but only at the ad level. They do not offer to customize an order. I stress that I am only at the research phase. I would love to find a chart of all the tubes that are equivalents.
Later, back from the library, yes, I can post any valid format on eBay, I was able to paste in lists, columns, and tables. Then by clicking the HTML view, most of the formatting commands are not suppressed. I’ll have to make sure I don’t run afoul of some eBay regulation, because I also noticed their “variation” categories are limited to items like clothing and dishware. I was also able to apply my old accounting formulas for order quantities and pricing.
Festus Tuesday starts at 6:30PM and this time we watched a complicated drama of a guy who leaves his wife with six kids to fool around with another lady who is fooling around on him. Plots had more depth back then, though we prefer the shoot-em-up episodes. We got to talking about our university days. He was accepted at Columbia in the sixties, today it is the most expensive school in the land, the average cost being $520,000. Turns out his marks were lower than mine, but I was not allowed to know a thing about the univeristy process and did not know I could have gotten a free ride until it was too late.
My plan is to calculate how to sell dissimilar items the way eBay allows. I will use their multiple quantity field to specify I have, say 250 for sale in batches. I stayed an extra hour at the library to find anyone else doing this. No, but my plan is instead of listing say, coffee mugs which are identical except for the color, I list tubes which are identical except for the label. As always, I am not claiming to have invented this, only that I have derived the idea with no outside help. There is nothing on-line and the few eBay people I know could not follow my questions.
ADDENDUM
Today is a milestone for this blog. I thought years ago the Internet (yes, it is a proper noun and should be capitalized) would be a way for me to share what I was writing and further serve as a memory aid, knowing what too often happens with old age. The plan has many flaws, one being is I’m now entering my 24th year on borrowed time. They call it a blog, I call it a journal, is long past its projected run. Yes, I was happy when my total clicks reached one thousand, then ten thousand. Around that time, I wondered if I could ever reach one million. I’m not there, but today passed a marker.
