One year ago today: October 27, 2023, burn barrel anniversary thing.
Five years ago today: October 27, 2019, Atlanta sucks.
Nine years ago today: October 27, 2015, not a cheap shop.
Random years ago today: October 27, 2013, unbeatable adventure.
Pancakes, coffee, and a good book. That’s a good Sunday morning. Me and the cardinals. By 10:38AM it was 78°F and Sammy has rallied. He’s sleeping peacefully and eating again. Knowing not to tax myself two days in a row, I left the extra shingles on the roof and spent an hour creating the Master vacuum tube list. I said the other guy and myself took the same courses, I did not say he understood the relationship between data and the real world. I made a number of changes to his list to make it sensible, but scanning down the columns in that corrected format reveals a lot.
First, there are far more tubes that I don’t have. The 3,000 listed in my inventory are not (as I expected they ought to be) a good cross-section of the material that is out there. Tubes for demand. The good news is, though my data is designed to categorize by brand, when pasted into a sheet designed to use tube names, it works perfectly. Take a pause to view this box, the very latest in my self-schooling. Then I’ll tell you more about the tube progress.
This box has a number of new features. The one I like best is the joints are all rabbet cuts. The lumber looks ragged as these are the rough-cuts being dry-fitted. Look closely. Each piece, top, sides, ends, are rabbet cut to fit into each other. It’s at the corners the action takes place. This is where all the cuts have to be right to fit together as shown here. Note also that the top is not flush with the ends, but sits into a recess all way around the inside perimeter. The lid slats will be biscuit joined, making this the most complex box I’ve tried. Yet due to experience, it did not take any near as long as other new designs.
The wood shown has been conditioned and I may pin the corners with dowels. I have not considered how this design will complicate any hinges. I want to build another soon, but recess the top and bottom so that only 1/4" or so is revealed. Maybe this will spur me to use my router table to fancy up the edges. This is an ordinary tool box for my 12V hobby drill. What would you say to a nice cherry finish? I hope you said yes, because that’s the only color I have enough left for this. I have lots of polycrylic coating, however, so may this box shine. How do you rate my progress with this very satisfying pastime? If you like, speak up, for as the saying goes, I cannot read my tombstone when I’m gone. If you don’t like, show me your boxes.
Back to business. Our list contains 2,800 tubes. The buyer’s list has 901. I’m about to learn for the nth time that Excel has no stepping lookup function. This is where you compare two lists, called A & B.. The first item from List A scans the entire List B for a match and prints all it finds. (I’m presuming here you are familiar with list sorting and manipulation.) Then List A steps to its second item and again scans all of List B. This is different that finding duplicates and as far as I can discover, the Excel Match function works on single items, it will not step. But it’s 2024, maybe there is something. Later, there wasn’t. (Exam question: why would I choose the shorter list to apply the formula?)
After an hour and two coffees trying to find any on-line examples of this very common search requirement, concluded it best tackle the problem independently. (And women wonder why men don’t ask for directions. It’s not the directions, it’s the idiots giving them.) This was good coffee, and I’ve come up with a plan to replicate the formula 901 times. I already know this will flood the columns with that Excel #N/A flag that cannot be sorted or type-converted properly.
Don’t expect any fast results, as Excel has a lot of dough-head default features that reveal the primitive level at which their coding departments operate. One I remember is how if it doesn’t find a match, it will print out the next lowest number as a match—always, always triple check your results for reasonableness. By noon, I have identified 116 matches. On paper. That’s enough for one morning, I’m declaring the rest of today off unless I get hit by a truckload of inspiration.
The total offer for those 116 tubes works out to $220 dollars, and they don’t pay shipping. As I did not have the patience to write formulas and Excel won’t ignore #N/A cells, I ran through the list manually. My conclusion is doing this work all morning was not even worth my while. Many of the tubes commanded prices of only 25¢. The plan remains to pick out the expensive tubes and try selling a test order to the company in Orlando. This was no goldmine, but nobody knew that when we began.
That is why I will now go out to the silo, which is rather comfortable now, and play some old computer games while I think out the next move. How do I sell 2,000 tubes real quick like? Do I treat the offer list as a low-ball? For instance, they offer $1 for a PCC88 that I know retails on eBay for $40. If it wasn’t for that cracked manifold, I’d go for a Sunday drive. Pick up some fence posts, maybe. I looked up the directions Agt. R gave me and they are upside down. As if he was driving to Brooksville from the north. Could be he thinks I’m now living in Tennessee. But if I was living in Tennessee, that would make my entire house and operation in Florida little more than an elaborate workshed with accommodations. Say, what a concept . . . .
Tennessee River valley.
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It’s become nigh impossible to ignore politics in America because it is crammed down your throat every other minute. But I had to post this one. Here is an ad that appeared in the New York Times, one of the most irresponsible of left-wing fanatical newspapers. If they were equally right-wing, they would have been arrested long ago. Like most of the desperate last-minute attacks, this was planned long ago and will likely backfire. The majority of Americans support mass deportations and now understand much better the Democrat tactic of accusing others of what they are [themselves] doing. Still, this ad is overboard.
Aspects of politics that would normally bore me are very interesting when I see the parallels to military strategy. But here’s one that is purely tactical. I say again, Trump has learned who not to trust and does not make the same mistakes twice. That would include wisely not leaving the transition of power up to a corrupt team formed on November 6 after seeing who won. This time, Trump put his own team together in August and today I found out the good news. There are no corporate lobbyists. I got a feeling the heads of every major government department will be replaced. We also know Trump has not been sitting idle knowing they will attempt another steal.
That’s the reason I concluded he has some last minute surprise. But this is the last minute and nothing so far. Trump has hinted he’s got something planned. And the ballot cheating now has a name. Beth MacBride. Remember the broken water pipe and how Fulton County ran out of ballots in Republican areas. Her name shows up in these and other anti-Trump operations.
Just enough glowing coals gave me reason to load up the burn barrel again. This time with Spanish moss and more papaya. Here’s a video of the smoke, this isn’t bad but you can see how resilient the papaya stems are, acting like chimneys and kind of glowing away instead of burning. Where it the George Washingon Carver of the papaya? Wood that unusual just has to have some clever usages. I’ve nothing to report, but I burned some carboard which reminded me of a job I had back in the early 2000s. I was still flush with cash from my buyout and my habit of learning a little about many jobs as was convenient [for me] saw me working for various temp agencies.
And that is where I met Sandy. She kind of fell for me and that put me on the spot,. Nice as she was, there was no spark for me. She was not my type but talk about a no-nonsense gal, well suited to middle-management work. That production line hummed when she was around. However, step back for a bigger picture. Most people were there because it was the best they could do. All jobs in the vicinity paid about the same and I take to routine work fairly easily. Most of the people had been there a long time and were lifers. Shall we say it is not the career that attracts too many educated males.
For me it was the usual, the temp agency sent me. But there were signs. I show up in a Cadillac, learn the job in five minutes, quickly become a lunchroom favorite of anybody who needs a form or application filled out, can translate office memos to the Latinos, and don’t need any management to get my job done. At the time I was the only employee who knew anything about the Internet and I could fix most computer and printers in the office. You could say I was rather well-known in the area. My habit of finishing a crossword puzzle during noon break lent to the legend although I never did find a local band to jam with.
But I was still not over the Reb, who I did not know was less than 350 miles away. Anyway, Sandy took a shine to me, but let me explain. This was a hard-working gal who knew the ropes. I learned to deal with not being 6-foot-2 and likewise she had learned to deal with not being pretty. You quickly reject anybody who cannot see past those parameters. So she was very subtle about it, which made it easy enough for me to pretend everything was a common courtesy.
There has to be some physical attraction when you are young and that would not be Sandy to me. She was short, overweight, and rolly-polly. But she carried it well, she was young and active, and over 25. The world knows the odds are long on that one for even the best of women. I felt a bit sorry for her situation, because even a successful woman in Hickory, North Carolina, is not going to meet any eligible males.
I had to allow for the possibility that no other man ever in that factory had appealed to her. I was only there a few months, I left in December and it was getting cold. I did not keep in touch, as nobody had email. I wonder sometimes how things worked out for most of them. I read about some layoffs around 2005, but had well moved on by then, and in February of that year I was laid low the next five years. Almost did not make it. And that is how it goes, people. January 1 next year you wake up and it hits you—1975 was fifty years ago. I cannot recall ever having wasted a single day of my life. May you be able to say the same.
ADDENDUM
Now I’m really befuddled. You see, there is no logical explanation for anniversary coincidences in this blog. Yet exactly one calendar year ago today, I used the burn barrel. The burn itself is random and depends on a half-dozen conditions from the weather, time of day, amount of material, and if I have Yueng-Ling. Utterly random, and this time I even had no Yeung-Ling. Spell check that for me will you, I’m busy. I make no conscious note of which days I burn, they are not marked on any calendar.
There is no chance of subliminal association, since this happens in no other area of my life and fact is, without the blog, the coincidences would probably never get noticed. Look at the lead-up to y’day, it happened because a dude I have not seen in months donated some shingles and I took the dry spell to get up on the roof. Also, by the time I post each blog, the material has already been written the day earlier. That is, I am unaware of the coincidence until the following day as the last step after the blog account is already posted. Now explain to me how these things are possible.
