One year ago today: October 21, 2024, Plan E.
Five years ago today: October 21, 2020, they’ll gladly help . . .
Nine years ago today: October 21, 2016, on avoiding milo.
Random years ago today: October 21, 2008, bloodmobiles, shoplifting, etc.
An hour on the phone and three cups of coffee, the day is off to a roaring start. JZ may finally be getting his license back and he wants to buy a Cadillac. Um, I think he’s remembering mine and thinks they still make them out of metal and chrome. Maybe he’s finally concluding Miami is not the paradise he grew up in. We talked about generic plans and he recalls how this area is full of blonde single women, if a little on the tarnished and unimaginative side. He still refuses to visit any place older than 25 years because they are not “vermin-proof”. And I told you, there’s fifty ways critters can get into old cabins like mine.
Not quite back to full steam, I’m taking this morning off to finish building that hinge jig. At the meeting last evening I carefully went over each measurement and marked the pilot holes. This was a reminder of the gulf between my own theory and practice, that is, a gap between how well I plan and how amateur my workmanship. Banks have begun their retaliation on silver prices, knocking it below $49. They like to do this around most Octobers.
It’s back to the drawing board. The hinge jig had a number of issues. One is the smallest router I have many be too powerful. The special it is also a bit to big, but maybe I and work around that. JZ has seen the drawings and calls it “friggin’ complicated”. And that is why I cut the slot in the wrong place a second time. And I was right about no way to secure the jig without blocking the router path. And this expensive bit has a bad quirk. If the router plate is not 100% secured, it can bite into the sides of the slot. So, we start over.
That’s twice I cut my own design in the wrong place. Then finding out the router cannot be held stead with out clamping, which I cannot do. Coffee to the rescue, follow my logic. If the router can’t operate on the fixed wood, how about we fix the router in place? It’s a complete redesign, but isn’t that what I’m already up against?
Realizing I had never actually see a radio crystal, I found this ancient manufacturing video fascinating. Especially the sizes of the raw Brazilian chunks. Turns out they can be enormous. These links are to those old slur-talking gimp videos of the 70s-90s that you can watch at 2x. Many training videos and presentation of the day had this defect. Because there might be one half-deaf gimp in the room they made everyone suffer. There are still people who do that sheeiit today. The world has moved on, if you want a gimp video, use A.I to make a gimp video and leave regular folks alone. The mid-terms and next elections will drive this point homeward to a lot of woke types.
El Paso Amtrak station.
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No sugar tonight in my coffee, I didn’t make it into town. My back is already troubling me again and it’s been like three months? Some medical marvel age we live in. On top of that, there was no Festus. It was Festusless. The blurb had a pretty girl, so we chose “Matt’s Love Story”. He gets the Hollywood Disease, some folks call it amnesia. He meets this lady rancher, (Michael Learned a.k.a. Mrs. Walton) whose roll I found most amusing. And we saw Matt Dillon smooch a girl and they were not married or nothin’! We almost fell out of our $1500 rock-a-loungers. This was 1973 for cripe’s sake.
I get it, she was supposed to be falling for Matt in the classic woman-meets-stranger sequence, but I saw the deep side of the very behavior that changed the way I “chase” women. While 100% of the men around me tried every trick in the book (and are still doing it wrong fifty years later), I was busy getting more than my fair share. My only complaint remains that after 30, this means meeting a ton of the type of women you just don’t want.
This is the box I almost finished today. I just could not abide a day of nothing getting done, so this is a project box. I carry the parts for my latest project, some sketches, and light tools such as rulers and pencils. The design should look familiar to you by now, what do you think? And unlike the town I’m surrounded by, at least I have something to show for the day. The round dowel handle cost more than the rest of the box. But it has the laser burned logo you probably were already admiring.
Love that new meme that hates when clerks check if his money is real, saying if he could counterfeit money, he wouldn’t be at Dollar Tree.
While the Social Security office keeps saying their payments will not be affected by the shutdown, they are making conflicting statements about medical coverage. It would be interesting to see if the vast industry of medical offices and clinics were forced to return to the law of supply and demand. Right now, it is a big circle jerk with the insurance companies.
ADDENDUM
As always, a few stragglers (unrecorded expenses) show up near year end, and this time I am only $1,008 over for the entire year. This reflects the fewer trips to Nashville/Miami and a stricter compliance to my own rules. There is still some $30 or $40 left in this month's travel allocation. Can we find anything interesting for $30?
