Ulu

I could start a bar fight, anywhere in the world, with absolute silence and but a single gesture. Not that I ever do such things! But, yes, there are a lot of troubled folks looking for someone to unload on. They're all too easily found, way too easily triggered, and literally beyond all reason in demeanor. I stay out of places that tend to attract those folks, and so I rarely ever carry a weapon. That was not always the case 40 years ago, when I carried a jack knife on my hip, and a dagger in my boot. But that was a far different time and place.

As a Dad, I'd always felt a bit deprived, having no sons, but "only" daughters. Still I couldn't convince myself to father more than 2 kids so I never tried for more. I'm divorced from their mother, and back when we were married I was criticized by her for not spending more time with my daughters. Yet in the end they both ended up taking after me. For one thing, they listen to classic rock and big band, where their mother is all country. They can change the oil & filters, or change a flat tire without help. They both still skate, and they like motorcycles. Their mother never skated and always hated my motorcycles. My eldest daughter is a supervisor at the IRS, a pro photographer with years of studio experience, Summa cum Laude grad in education, fixes her own computers, and has learned to do board-level circuit repairs as well. She overhauled her clothes dryer, rebuilt her big screen TV when it died, & MacGyvered the faulty ignition interlock system on her Magnum when it wouldn't start. She has delivered me 3 lovely granddaughters, all studying music & science. The eldest is now at University High School learning Latin (OMG!) & plays in the orchestra. They all skate. My younger daughter graduated Magna cum Laude in education & runs the front office for a national charity organization. She has 4 lovely daughters. She is a very strong skater on inlines. The day she told me she was divorcing her husband, she had really called me to say she found her power steering was leaking when she crawled under to change the oil. "Why isn't he changing the oil?" I asked? "He can't do anything. I'm divorcing him." This will continue too. Her new squeeze is some kind of chemist. He goes around to all the dairies testing milk. Nice guy, but I don't think he knows which end of the hammer to hold on to. She'll be the one teaching my granddaughters how to fix a flat tire. Not yer average Valley Girls at all, which is truly how I expected them to grow up. Anyhow you can tell I'm plenty proud.

After reading this all, some things occurred to me. First, I can never remember how many c's and r's are in a word like "occurred" so without spell checker I'd often be lost; but I will not rely on a PC to fix my grammar or idioms, and thus neither do I depend on it to translate the grammar/idioms of other languages. Second, as I can barely use one language, and don't want to be guilty of slaughtering a second; if I ever go abroad I'd better hire a translator to do any business. I know just enough French, German and Spanish to get me punched in the nose.

This guy takes his car to the Jiffy Lube and winds up removing his own oil filter anyhow. I had to laugh at this one

"Prolly" only works if you're a hipster under 25. For us geezers, it's pronounced "Prob'ly".

The birdhouses are cute. My wife's were taken over by wasps, so I had to "cap" them. Now they're just decorative.

Thanks Robin! Best 2:50 I spent on the internet all week.

Sometimes it's a crapshoot. I have some old no-name tools that have outlived their name-brand counterparts. And then I've got some total junk I keep around just in case I need to smash something useless. I enjoy buying high-quality tools, and I just got a set of Porter-Cable hole saws that are making me smile right now. ;-)

I did mine that way, but you have to jack the car up until the roof touches the ceiling. Well at least the left front corner must go up. It all comes right out the bottom.

I'll never buy another tool from Black & Decker. Their quality has gone from mediocre to pitiful. I bought a nice compact B&D 1/4 drill some years back. Worked great until I put some real pressure on it. The main reduction gear just slipped on the shaft as soon as the motor got hot. Somehow I had a brain malfunction, and bought a B&D electric screwdriver. Small, and perfect size for working on computers. It did the same damn thing. Gear slips on the shaft. Lord, I'd be embarrassed to build that junk! Even the tools I've bought from Harbor Freight have all been better that that.

My daughter had the smaller 6 cyl engine in her Magnum. What a piece of junk that was. Crap was always failing on that car. Spun the cam bearings at 89k & went to the scrapper. I don't miss it.

English as a Second Language (ESL) is an official state school program in California. The school where my wife teaches, in an outlying town, is largely hispanic. In her grade, the school has a "Spanish-model teacher", who teaches the predominately Spanish speakers, and an "English-model teacher" who teaches the predominately English speakers. The funny thing is that my wife, who is Mexican and rather brown, but born here in Clovis, was never taught Spanish at home & speaks very little. She is the "English-model teacher". The "Spanish-model teacher" is a pale freckle-faced Irish looking gal, whose parents spoke native English, but forced her to learn Spanish in school. Funny how these things work out.

Nestle (a Swiss company) bottles water in California and sells it nationwide. Go figure...? California actually still has a lot of water. It's just not where all the people are. I guess if you can charge $1 a bottle for water, you can afford to ship it coast to coast too.

Sorry guys. Some days I run out of common sense before quitting time. Also, as much as I may gripe, I've made a fair living at this business & I love it. I dig being able to drive to work every day, past projects I've worked on over the past 4 decades. Just on the 10 miles I cover to work, there are at least a dozen buildings and complexes where I drew the structure, or some major part of it. I wasn't born in this town, but that's the sort of thing which gives a man a real sense of belonging to a place. ++++++++++++++++++++++ Back to the topic, the lawn is staying green with minimal watering, due to the recycling and a couple minor showers recently. I've been recording the water meter every day trying to determine how much we're using for various activities during the week. On the two days a week we're allowed to water, we're using about 7x more water than other days. I could reduce my water use from 10k gals/mo to about 6000 if I let the lawn go and just water trees and plants. So far, the water we're recycling won't be enough to keep it all green. It'll be a bit better if I can get the shower recycling going, but we're even saving some of that now, using buckets. (Big PITA using buckets.) Right now, based on our historical usage & what we use now, we won't be fined by the city unless we go over 19k gals per month; and I expect to be well under 15k even with the lawn watering. We basically used 5450 gals in 11 days, or average about 500 gals a day. This is three times the baseline residential ration of 5k/mo & the lion's share is going onto the greenery.

Plymouthy, I can see how that would come in handy for lots of things. I've got some experience with metal punching, having spent a few years programming presses similar to this one: If you can draw it in AmadaCAD, that baby can punch it out fast. Ours went up to about 35 tons & would punch 3" dia circles in 12Ga. We also had a 50 ton with a "pizza cutter" punch/die setup, that would cut free-form shapes without nibbling.

(Put yer muffs on. I'm gonna rant a bit...) It's tough to get things built, and it seems so insane to the average engineer. The bureaucrats and bean counters and politicians argue and fight and take forever to get off the dime, then they expect us to design something perfect, on a tight budget, and in a big rush. They expect the contractors to build it overnight. They want it to defy the laws of physics and nature too. (Just look at the crazy stuff that gets built nowadays! Oh, sure it's amazing architecture, but is amazement adequate justification?) And it's a tiered system: As you go from the Kindergarten to the University level, the insanity ramps up with the price of the job. We don't do dams and bridges at our office, but it's the same story there, amplified again by the larger price tag of the project. Anyhow, that's not how you build public infrastructure in a sane world, but that's how every public building & public school gets built here in our world. I'll tell you this: 40 years in and around this business I've never seen a public job come in on budget. Never once, and it's because the government can't go out of business. You screw up? You overspent on your offices? New factory cost too much? Your company goes broke? Too bad. But the government will be open from mon to fri, same as usual. They're not closing the doors because the new City Hall was a boondoggle. They'll raise taxes to cover it. They'll rob some other fund to cover the overruns. They'll dance and sing on TV and obfuscate every issue with a slather of emotional drivel. Our government is Barnum & Bailey on steroids. BTW, the huge central high school we've been preparing (in a big rush so it can get in early on the budget cycle merry-go-round) is on hold because the local district can't get their part of the money together. This is not uncommon. The state requires these things to be planned years in advance to avoid this, but nobody knows what money they'll have by then. Will it be enough? Nobody knows. (I know: see above. It's never enough. It always goes over budget.) This means the state won't have to pay out their "matching" portion if the local district fails in the last act. I better stop now. This could go on forever. Anyhow, water will get more expensive. That's a given.

Is that a brake lining riveter? <EDIT...oh, a gasket punch? Pretty elaborate. Never seen one like it. I just have these little hollow punches you hit with a hammer.> <Edit again... Huh? Hole punch? For punching anything in particular?>

Those do look very worn.

Yes, there's going to be some "green envy", or "green shame" as they call it in a drought! As long as my meter has the right numbers, the city will not care. I'm kinda off the beaten track, so I wont have to explain to too many.

I don't get this either. My P-15 just has three #2 Phillips screws that go thru the wheel. Stick a shorty screwdriver between the instrument panel & wheel & there they are. Oooohhh...1950 Coronet eh? Does this car have a little "cowl" between the wheel & instrument panel?

OK the Kitchen cistern is in and working, so now on to the shower. I haven't decided how to plumb this shower cistern yet, but I want to build a Japanese style soaking tub in situ from concrete & tile. I'll elevate it a tad to avoid digging up my slab, and it'll have to have a step as my wife is kinda short. I think I'll drain it by gravity siphon to an underground tank, to avoid having a pump in the bath. I'll put a cheap sump pump in the tank to bring the water up to an elevated cistern. I'm going to build a tool shed in the back yard, and I may put it right over the underground tank, with a trap door or such for access. Geeeze...at this rate I may never get back to the P-15.

Ya got 3 scoops in a Float for 19 cents, & it didn't have guar gum or carrageenan in it either. Nowadays we have lots of "fast food workers" but you gotta make yer own soda. I haven't seen a real Soda Jerk since the 60's, when on my 13th birthday we went to Bridgeman's in Duluth MN, & I ate the LaLaPalooza Sundae. It cost over a dollar & it had like a dozen scoops with everything on it & if you ate the whole thing you got a flashy button which served as the eternal testimonial to your act of expensive & self-abusive gluttony. And a grand tummy ache as well but damn the torpedoes...I had to have one! Anyhow, Bridgeman's had real Soda Jerks in the white hats & aprons to whip it all up just like American Graffiti.

I did a prelim test of the dishwasher/cistern #2 system last night. The dishwasher appears to deliver about 8 to 9 gallons with a normal load. That's a lot less than the clothes washer (14 gals on a jumbo load) so that may be just 30~40 gals a week from the dishes. It'll be a bit more when I plumb the left side of the sink to the cistern too. The dishwasher pump will lift water 6 feet, so the back cistern is going to get elevated a bit to help create some water pressure.

Guess how I lost reverse gear on my Evinrude Lark? (electro-magnetic clutches in the trans...) Oh, I feel for ya man. we've all done something like this at some point.

Yeah, my flathead has a home-made bracket which supports an aftermarket filter, with tubes running to ports on the block.