frobzwiththingz

Spent the morning getting rained on and putting a bunch of tomato plants into
5-gallon buckets and the raised bed outside. I don't think they really liked
the change from the relatively warm and dry inside into what they got thrust
into today, but hopefully they will perk up and deal once it turns bright and
sunny again in a couple of days.

Then spent the afternoon in the shop, some work-y stuff and then finally starting
to work on the automatic ball return for the outdoor bowling lane. Could not for
the life of me find the second of the two 36T bicycle chain sprockets i'm sure i
had kicking around. Though about ordering another one but then said the heck with
that, there's a 36T sprocket sitting right there in that scrap piece of aluminum
plate, I just need to dig it out. So spent the next few hours at the Bridgeport doing just that.

Probably way more work than it's worth, but it really is more satisfying this way.

So - goose eggs - just got some from a friend - should I want to hard boil one, how long should I boil it for? I could just ask the Intertubes, but rather than do that...

Just like the Cheez-Its of yesteryear, out came the calipers. I measured the long axis of every "large" chicken egg I had in the fridge, which came from Market Basket and I think originate on farms that Mitlitsky Egg Company uses. Would you believe that out of the 10 eggs I measured, they all came in within a range of +/- *15 thousandths* of an inch of each other? 6 of them were 2.140 +/- 3 thou, the other 4 were 2.160 +/- 3 thou. Insane! who knew chicken egg production is so consistent? Of course, maybe this is a sorting artifact of the Mitlitsky company? So, on to the goose eggs from my friends in Ashburnham... and damn! Of the 6 I measured, they were all within a range of +/- 10 thou! Some 3.000 inches +- 3 thou, others 2.980 +/- 3 thou. again, insane. these came from 4 specific geese that I have met and heard honk. I would never have guessed that they'd be so consistent.

But anyhow, there we are. Chicken eggs, long axis number ~2.15", Goose Eggs long axis ~2.99". This gives a ratio of radii (assuming your "idealized spherical egg") of "goose egg radius is 1.39 times chicken egg radius". Which leads to "Volume (and thus mass) ratio should be about 2.68, and the surface area ratio is 1.93.

I then weighed all the eggs, and found that the goose eggs actually only weigh a bit more than twice as much as the chicken eggs, on average 131 grams versus 62 for the chicken variant, which tells me that there must be more percentage air space in there, and using that 2.68 theoretical mass ratio would be a mistake and lead to overcooked eggs. [Every f*cking time I try to type "ratio" into this thing, either FB or my browser insists on autocorrecting to "ration". G*d D*mn it]

So, I'll use the actual weighed mass numbers, and assume that the limiting factor is heat transfer across the egg shell. There is 2.11 times as much mass to heat up and 1.93 times the surface area available for heat transfer. So I should boil my goose eggs for ~9% longer than the chicken eggs. this really small increase seems counterintuitive, but Math is Math and ignoring all the model simplifying steps here, i'm going to believe the math. I usually boil my chicken eggs for 9 minutes, so the goose egg is going to get 10.

I'll report later with the results.

OK, it's that time of the year, later than last year, but still earlier than most. I'm putting the snow shovels away. Now officially on PeeperWatch...

It's mid Fall, and it's time to harvest the dried bean pods. Every (well, most) years for quite a while now I've had a small bean patch right in front of the house, with maybe 15-20 pole bean plants in it. They started out being a few different known varieties but as the years went on, they cross-bred and now I've got who the heck knows what sort of pole beans. Every year I plant seeds from the jar of previous harvests, every year I eat fresh beans during the summer, every year I eventually let some dry out for next years seeds. Every year I start out with a pile of pods and the empty bowl. Every year I crack that first pod into the bowl and think "This isn't going to amount to much". Each individual pod I crack seems to make hardly any change in the bowl volume. Every year I end up with a decent bowl filled with beans.

This is a thinly veiled metaphor for voting. It's not really about the beans.

I thought I had heard one solitary peeper last night, for about a minute, but wasn't sure enough to make the report.

Tonight they are out in full force here in Westford MA!

YAY PEEPERS!

Anywhere between 12 and 16 depending on where in the yard you are. Nowhere near as much as some of the boston area or south shore folk got. Totally light and fluffy, west coast powder type snow.

We cleared it in 2 passes, pass 1 saturday afternoon, pass 2 about 9-10 pm. Cold out but perfectly fine exercise.

Got the backyard paths to basement bulkhead, compost pit and backyard shed, and fire pit dug out. Dug out fire pit, hot tub, and the outdoor woodfired sauna-on-trailer we're hosting this winter for some friends of ours.

Took a walk through the trail system that starts right across the street from us. First time being the first people to stomp through there after a snowstorm!

Now to get downstairs and form/weld some things.

I went to pick up a piece of rigging equipment I had a local supplier make for me this afternoon. They're a vendor I've used almost exclusively over the years, when I need some piece of wire rope gear fabricated and it's a larger size than I can handle in my own shop.

So I get there, at the time they said to show up, when I called them yesterday, at which time the owner of the small shop said i was all set. The piece wasn't actually done when I got there today, it was still in progress of being made, so I left the location and came back a half hour later. Mildly annoying, given my schedule constraints for the day, but not the kick in the nads referenced above. *That* happened when I returned.

I enter the premises, for the second time, with my mask on as i pretty much do anywhere at the moment, and walk in on the owner and one of his employees having a conversation. It's about COVID. And how the employee just lost a friend of his to it. 44 years old. This isn't the kick in the nads either. It's what comes next. The owner asks the employee if they had any, um, "comobidities". Which he did. OMG, he had asthma, and was a smoker. I guess that rendered him not worthy of consideration. I then watched the entire Trump-MAGA-god-knows-what conspiracy playbook revealed before my ears, as the two of them rail against the new boston vaccine mandates and proclaim the magic of their somehow superior immune systems and "I got it earlier this year but I TOOK IVERMECTIN and then everything was OK" and christ on a stick, you name the MAGA/antivax talking point, they supported themselves in it. But By Golly, this country still lets them have their guns, so at least that will work out for them. I stood there, listening to this exchange, just getting more depressed by the minute, but not engaging in any way. These folk were, in the back room, swaging a piece of life critical equipment i would be using next week. I gave them my credit card, paid for the order, wished them a happy end of the year. and left with my item.

It is the last order they will ever see from me.

I fucking hate people today.

Today L and I took a trip out to western(ish) mass. I had scored myself a first dose Covid19 vaccine appointment via the vaccinetime twitter bot on the first day I was eligible, the only issue with it was that it was in Greenfield. So be it, If i can get jabbed in Greenfield, i'll drive to Greenfield. Told L (who had gotten one via her health provider much closer by), and she proposed driving out with me, and making a day trip out of it and doing some wandering around the very pretty Western MA route 2 area.

So I drive us out there, find the location in downtown Greenfield, and get Moderna #1. They've got a pretty streamlined setup going, initial door entry person asks some questions, send you over to the kiosk-mounted temperature scanner, which I had to stoop fairly far down to line up with, then into the main hall where they have a grid of tables with chairs at roughly 10 foot spacing. A card folded into an A shape reads "APPT" with a red rectangle on one side and "**DOSE**" with a green rectangle on the other side. The usher has me sit at the table and points the side of the card saying DOSE on it toward the front of the room. A paramedic from the fire department, and a nurse practitioner show up with a roll cart, ask me lots of questions about any symptoms i may have had today, and about any allergies I may have, including listing off some of the carrier chemicals in the Moderna shot and, this I found a pretty great example of good UI for the target audience, showed me several sheets of paper with pictures of products that also contain these chemicals. Things like yogurt cups and shampoos and deodorant sticks. Asks again if I have ever had any issues related to these things. I say no. They jab my arm, then turn the card around so the "APPT" faces the front of the room. I pull out my ancient yellow International Vaccination Card and ask if they can fill that in along with the CDC card. The NP apparently *loves* this, and tells me how she had brought hers in to her appt, and the folk there seemed to think she was crazy, hardly anyone still has these things any more. They were happy to add their entry to it. They tell me to wait at the table for 20 minutes and then i'm free to leave. The APPT is supposed to attract another staff member to show up to your table with a laptop to schedule your second dose, but it seems something is holding that up, I can see that person with the laptop working with the table in front of me and he's been there for a *while*, way longer than you'd think needed. I wonder if I can point the Green/Red card in an orientation that results in the Brazilian waitstaff showing up with tasty grilled meats on swords. Soon after one of the paramedics comes over and says that something is clearly slowing down the APPT laptop person, so here, scan this QR code with your phone and it will take you directly to the page for this clinics appointment slots 28 days from now, and you can grab one yourself; yell if you have any problems. So I do that, and it works, and I leave.

So sooner than a block away from the clinic building, as we are headed off to check out a covered bridge nearby, I hear Google Maps say "GPS Signal Lost". Well, so much for the advanced tracking upgrade i thought the shot was going to give me.

We check out the bridge, then head down into Turners Falls, a little village of Montague right on a river that has a power generating station that also doubles as a fish ladder, and some abandoned mill buildings, and a small town center that is clearly in the first stage of gentrifying. We wandered around the river bed near the abandoned mill building, I picked up some very nifty rusty old bits of metal stuff that will be turned into an art piece in the future. (Having just gotten my Covid jab, clearly what will actually nail me is Tetanus). We called in and got some nice burgers at Black Cow Burger Bar, carried them down to Unity Park next to the river and ate them there. On the way back, I got a couple of Tacos Al Pastor, from the new Mexican truck which is now where the Pierogi truck used to be on French King HIghway. Having just stuffed ourselves with burgers, and a nice stout, I got them to go, and am eating them now at home.

A fine day if I say so, and i'm looking forward to driving out there again in 4 weeks.

So, one day way back in 2008, I'm running some network cable through the attic, in order to get a network drop into the back studio. And as I'm pulling cable up there, I peek through a tiny hole in the insulation/joists down into the first floor. And suddenly realize that there is the large chunk of space inside the house, sealed away in between the dining room, hall closet, and back bathroom. WTF? Why is this large space unused? How did this happen? Why did the contractor who worked on this place leave it *filled* with old broken up chunks of drywall and other detritus? Anyhow, it's location was perfectly centered along the dining room wall, and so I told Liz about it and asked if she would mind if I busted through the dining room wall and turned this space into a builtin, with shelves and a place to put tea making stuff and drawers. She was OK with this, and so I started. The start date turns out to be critical here - It was January 20th, 2009. Sometime past noon that day, As I listened to Barack Obama give his inaugural address, I took a sledgehammer and smashed through the dining room wall.

As anyone who has started a home renovation project knows, they seem to take far longer than you would expect. I had seen many a project at friends houses that had been in progress for years, and wanted to avoid that sort of thing happening. I decided to set myself a deadline for finishing it. Given the synchronicity, i decided that "I will finish this project before Obama leaves office"

House projects, of course, being what they are... Thankfully Obama won a second term. The project made slow progress - I decided to get artsy with the drawers, and given that fine art drawing is totally *not* in my wheelhouse, I shamefully cribbed a design for the first, smallest drawer, by using a design from an Alphonse Mucha poster. I translated it into a form I could CNC on my router, and made the first drawer. Inlayed it with a mixture of polyester resin and black pigment. It came out wonderful. At which point I realized I had totally screwed myself - I now had to make 3 more, much larger drawers, and give them designs that would match stylistically with art stolen from Alphonse Mucha. And there was no freaking way I was up to that task. Luckily, Liz is an amazing artist, and she was able to do that design work for me. So in the pictures and video here, the small drawer design credit goes to Mucha. the rest, to Liz. I actually did the ceiling panel design; my first attempt at trying to generate something Art Nouveau on my own.

The project continues, at it's slow pace. It's now august of 2016. I realize that Obama's term is getting toward it's end, and I *really* have to finish this thing. I get the shelving, and the lighting, and all of the structure taken care of as November approaches. There's not *too* much left to do. I still have to stain the sidewalls. there's an annoying gap at the top left that needs to be fixed. I'll get to it.

It's election night 2016. The Orange Monster fucking wins.

Suddenly, I just can't finish the project. Finishing the project, at this point, now equates, in my mind, accepting the fact that Tr*mp is sitting in that chair and Obama (or anyone not a total sociopath) isn't. I just can't do it any more. I decide that it's just going to sit unfinished (perfectly usable, but *not* finished) until that f*cking monster is removed from office. Yes, I realize how illogical this is, but so be it. It has remained un-worked-on ever since. Tonight, as election returns start to come in, I am hoping beyond all hope that we start the process of ridding ourselves of this cancer, and that I can finally finish the dining room builtin.

 
The frogs started across the street from us today. None heard on our street side of the swamp yet, but that should follow real soon now. Maybe tomorrow? Also lots of bird calls! 

One day later than last year. I really thought they'd be earlier this year given the very mild winter we had.