June 22, 2025

Yesteryear
One year ago today: June 22, 2024, that’s 36x the price.
Five years ago today: June 22, 2020, looking for dessert.
Nine years ago today: June 22, 2016, a radiant heat problem.
Random years ago today: June 22, 2009, burning Karaoke disks.

           Happy Barbarossa Day, I think. More news of bombings and conflicting reports of damage. I believe the US military is far too corrupted and infiltrated by foreigners for a true surprise attack. No way the Iranians left their nuclear facilities in the open after what, some twelve attacks since 2005? I lost count. Today, I see about buying a special router to modify for hinges. My ancient tools are beginning to give out from constant use. The real crisis is I’m still out of grits. Last time downtown, I forgot the Dollar place doesn’t sell them. (So is it a big batch of rice instead.)

           This is what I had in mind for storage boxes, showing two electric drills with their all warts, and one has a spot for loose drill bits. I probably own sixty drill bits. I also own eight or nine drills, it works out. I started the box design shown here specifically to keep my tools and charges separate, but in one spot.
These boxes are also a changing technology as I gain hours put in. I think I will make the little box for the bits removable, for example. These lack lids because they are trays, not boxes, meant to be stacked for convenience. They are not for transportation. They sure help keep my work area tidy.

           Aha, 9:30AM and the neighbor is pounding iron. That house up the road with the renovations is still seeing crews moving around eight hours per day. I suspect the building was condemned and the city is making them sorry for their choice. I disagree, as this neighborhood was around long before any city inspectors, who are not elected and not from this area. Just by the sounds and effort, I doubt they will make much money flipping that place. I estimate the crews have eight men and it only takes five to build a house new.

           I give up with these mangos. One day green, the next day overripe. They get mushy and messy, my original objection. They won’t slice and won’t peel right. You know what I’m going to do? Plant pits with five of them each in my yard since I know they will grow a hundred feet away in the neighbors. Fair? If I get one tree out of it, I’m happy. Shade is shade in Florida.

           And no masala on my rice, it seems it got so expensive the only outlet, Wal*mart, quit stocking it. Aha, the construction people just fired up a generator, so I can turn on my compressor. And I balked at the $200 price tag of a new band saw. That’s the el cheapo model. This photo shows the back yard with that orange-flowered plant taking over. It can be cut down in a few minutes, that is, trimmed to the ground. But it leaves a clump of short shoots that spring up again and are hard to uproot. They also make walking over them tricky, I call them punji sticks.
           I treated the yard birds to leftovers, which included yellow peas, pizza crusts, dried pancake batter, chopped mango, and the woodpeckers like chopped up chicken bones. Normally they chirp wildly at feeding. Today, silence, but there is no breeze and each feeder has a dollar store “disco ball” that dances my back room the instant they land. So I know they are out there and busy.

           Here’s the J-box from y’day, now complete with hinges and a latch. It has already found a use, see, it is full. Yes, as a matter of fact, I do know where all my operator’s manuals are.

           To complete the morning, I re-read my favorite chapter on navigation sight reduction to assimilate my recent grasp of the assumed latitude and the declination. It now makes sense why they chose such a weird method of adjusting the actual declination. It is not, as expected, a ration between two integers, but a number looked up in yet another table. I once saw the formula and will use that if I ever find it again. Because that table is not used in every version of the almanac. For that matter, the almanacs contain quite a lot of outdated material not used by sight reduction, such as the equation of time.
           Then I fell back asleep and so should you. Tonio from Valdosta reports the boxes remind him of those small hi-rise garden beds. The kind apartment dwellers use to grow herbs on the balcony. I have not made a box twice as long, but in a sense, the Golden Ratio still applies. I’ve gained some twenty solid hours knowledge with jigs and feel it is time to take another look a box joints. I’m happy with the Z-box, so this would be more for appearances.

Picture of the day.
Natural flint chips.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.

           Here’s what I mostly slept through, it’s a Florida summer thing. This came down for roughly 40 minutes. Since I rally have nothing for you that’s truly novel, how about we do a star sight? It is still today in England at 20:01 03 and let’s pick another star in the northern hemisphere. How about Rasalhague, with a sidereal angle of 96°05.5’. Converting to decimal, will we hit land? Aries is at W96°05.5’ and the star is N12°33.2’ above the Equator. Note these are not a siting, the star is not visible here in the middle of the afternoon.

           We are just off the coast of Yemen, at the mouth of the Red Sea. The coastline is pretty bleak-looking but there is an island. Let’s zoom in, isn’t technology wonderful? It’s called Barim Island and I never heard of it. It’s a dead volcano but sea levels were once lower and it may have been a migration route out of Africa, apparently a great place to migrate from. Barren and waterless, population 4,500 (doubtful), it has a natural harbor great for Europeans to blockade the Egyptians.
           There is talk of a bridge across the straits to Djibouti. Somebody bulldozed a bunch of rocks into the shape of a runway, the island has been a coaling station, a radio relay to Australia, and is considered essential for Saudi oil transport. There is a lighthouse as the passage to the north is treacherous and all supplies for human settlement, including water is shipped in. It came under Houthi rule in 2015, who planted landmines all over the place and left.

           Here is the lady squirrel checking out the newly inaccessible birdfeeders. She can get as far as the ever-popular birdbath. But there are no vantage spots to leap onto the feeders, the next round in Squirrel Wars. There is plenty of food, so she’s hardly hungry, just spoiled. I love how she finally gives up, thinking the squirrel equivalent of "phooey!" Ah, be we know she will be back as Nature always finds a way.

           Feeling ever more energy, I set the game camera on the birdbath. To the left is the open wire mesh which I’m training a bit of kudzu to climb as a shelter for the bath. We know from birdsong we have four, possibly five species. The wire mesh seems a good idea, they can perch safely and wait their turn. Some prefer the dripper, others like the standing water afterward. I’ve so many pics of the squirrels using it as a drinking fountain I delete hundreds of photos unless they act cute, like this one.

           Getting only minor things done all day, I also took a closer look at the Suez Canal, not as a waterway, but as military strategy. Like the underwater tunnel to Europe, the British originally opposed the canal as a threat. But weak Egyptian governments allowed them to keep control. My viewpoint is the 1956 canal war was the last nail in the coffin of the British Empire. They got their noses bent for not realizing that the world had changed from European colonialism to American capitalism and Soviet communism. It was around 1970 before I paid much attention to the politics, but I knew about the weapons and wars. Still strange to me is all the land-claiming going on. Without politics, I see the land as barren desert and stinking swamp. But I also well know how quickly the peasant mind-set changes the instant you improve or create anything.
           I was always leery of Egyptian claims to the canal, as it was built with foreign money amdI find it arbitrary that the Sinai is part of Egypt that just happens to be on the wrong continent.

ADDENDUM

           Something I’ve never seen before, this is a storage device using old stick RAM. They have a battery, as RAM is volatile. It’s a good idea but not popular, meaning it probably doesn’t work that well. I have a stick I’ve been studying to connect to an Arduino even if the microcontroller cannot access that many memory locations.
           One good idea that's not been well-followed-up is the drive controller. Back at the old computer shop, we had to specially configure a unit to handle six or eight hard drives. I suppose these days with plugs an hubs, the need is decreased. But if I find something that plain looks fancy, I'd buy it. I've seen the numbered SATA plugs, up to six of them. I have time tomorrow, maybe I'll research that. Does it really mean six can connected? If so, I know a guy who can build a fancy wooden box to stack them in.

Last Laugh