Every Sunday, this site posts a new longform journalism article. There are some excellent examples in there that I haven’t gotten to, but I’m definitely bookmarking it. Also see: Longreads, which also aggregates longform reading.
I stopped into the orthodontist yesterday for a test fitting of new Invisalign trays. I was alarmed to learn I’ve been doing this for almost three full years. I’m probably the poster boy for the extreme edge of what is possible with Invisalign. It’s been a long road, but my teeth have made major improvements. I have noticed that changes have slowed down in the last six months; I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it or not. Meanwhile, our orthodontist recently retired, sold his practice to a new guy, and this new guy is taking a different tack with my final series of trays. He actually re-scanned my teeth and moved a couple of the nubs on my teeth around to better hold the trays to push my front teeth out. The new trays fit my teeth better now than they ever have in the past. I’ve probably got another six months before there’s any chance of me being done, but I will say that I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of this process.
The ladies took me out for dinner last night to the always excellent Clavel, where we sampled the tacos and drank fancy drinks. Finn had a non-alcoholic beet-based drink, Jen had a mezcal-based cocktail with vermouth, rose and honey, and I had one of the best margaritas I’ve ever tried. The tacos were delicious, and we capped things off with two slices of flan.
In the interest of making more room in the garage, I’ve been thinking about how I can set up a shelter out behind the structure where I can get steel parts and other things out of the rain and snow. The cheapest and easiest solution would be a lean-to or covered roof with open sides, so I started sketching out what something like that might look like.
The basic plan would be to build a basic frame from 2×4’s and extend it off a ledge below the existing roofline. I’m thinking 4′ deep by 16′ wide would offer me ~64 square feet of space. I’d cover it with clear corrugated plastic so there’s light underneath, and scrounge up a couple more pallets to get things up off the ground. That should be enough to cover the hood and tailgate that’s out there already, along with other bulky sheet metal taking up space on the floor. As of last count, I’ve got three C-series fenders and two C-series grille assemblies in the way, along with a Scout 80 windshield frame, a Scout tailgate, and a Scout hood that take up a ton of space. There’s also a spare tire I’d love to get out of there.
The first thing I have to do, however, is pull the ladders off the far and back walls, scrape any flaking white paint, and spray them the same blue as the house. Doing some quick back-of-the-envelope math, I figure this might cost around $250 all in, and perhaps a full day to install everything.
The resin I ordered a week and a half ago appears to be shipping from an address in Great Britain by a guy with a Russian surname. A shipping label was created and then canceled and then re-created last week, but apparently it hasn’t left the facility it’s being manufactured at yet. I have no idea when it’s going to get here, but I’d love to take the next step with that project. In this day and age of Amazon and overnight shipping, I’ve gotten very spoiled.
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This article hit my LinkedIn feed on Friday, and it answers a question I’ve had rattling around my head for a couple of months: How the cuts in foreign aid affecting my old employers at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health? The answer is: scorched earth. Hopkins will have to lay off 2,000 people across the globe, with a large percentage here in Baltimore. My program was called the Center for Communication Programs, which was focused on teaching family planning in the global south, with a focus on educating and empowering women. We did a ton of partnerships with USAID, which is where I developed my intense hatred for their current logo, which I still have to deal with to this day. At that time our program was focused on preventative measures (we did not advocate or promote for the A-Word) but I’m sure whatever shape the program has taken now, it’s directly in the crosshairs of the right-wing christians. It was good work and it raised women up in places where they desperately needed it. I hope there is a way those programs can be kept alive.
In the meantime, one of the main offices for Social Security is about three miles north of here, and apparently the stooges are already there poking around.
I had grand plans to get lots of long-standing house projects accomplished on Saturday, but was ony able to finish one of them. I’d finished hanging all of the under-cabinet lights last weekend but still had to do the four cans in our glassed cabinets on either side of the sink and the facing wall. I’d used plastic-friendly spray paint to paint them black and after a week of curing, the paint was ready to handle. With all the practice I’d had with the other lights this went pretty quickly, and within an hour or so the lights were in place.
Next up was the bathroom heater, which has been suffering from a faulty thermostat for years. I got the oscillating saw out and trimmed out the edges to make it easy to remove, then unboxed the replacement I’d gotten at Lowe’s only to realize it was 1″ smaller in each dimension (the measurements were for the cover, not for the box). After a trip to the internet I learned the original manufacturer isn’t carried by the big box stores anymore so I’d have to spend $180 plus shipping on a new one, or $80 for a replacement thermostat from Amazon. Wisely I chose the latter. It won’t be here until next week, which sucks.
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Sunday we got dressed up and walked across the street to the church, which was hosting an Iftar dinner at the end of the Ramadan fast. This is the third Iftar dinner we’ve attended; they are organized by a local mosque and Turkish cultural organization who promote interfaith events. We met a nice woman during the opening remarks who sat on the pew next to us, and I invited her to sit with us at the table we’d staked out. She and her husband lived in China for 15 years before moving to the US; both have a PhD in linguistics. We were fascinated to hear of their time in China; her husband wrote the first Turkish to Chinese dictionary. I was seated across from a nice man who came to America and taught STEM in middle and high schools until COVID hit, and then pivoted to his own business laser-engraving headstones. It was lovely to meet new people and learn about their lives, as well as Muslim tradition, and it’s something I look forward to every year.
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Meanwhile, my ribs are almost back to normal. I can walk stairs two at a time again, lift most objects, and get out of bed without feeling like I’ve been shocked with a car battery. I spent most of Sunday crawling through a couple of cars in a junkyard, and with the exception of yanking the dashboard cover out of a Nissan Versa with my hands, I didn’t feel it at all. Even standing up from under the car wasn’t hard—I felt it more in my knees than my ribs, which was a nice change.
I’m not sad to have this one going through my head this week: Beck’s Dreams, from the 2017 album Colors. Beck’s catalogue has always been pretty reliably good stuff, especially after Sea Change, and this album has more standout tracks than clunkers. No Distraction and Seventh Heaven are also fantastic tunes. This video is a live recording; I’m told his concerts are fantastic to attend and he puts on an excellent show.
Finn is not a huge fan of chemistry this semester. Her grades have wobbled between “terrible” and “passing” with peaks and valleys along the way, and we’ve had to stay on top of her studies every night to keep things on track. I can understand her indifference; chemistry was never my strong suit (I had no patience, a raging case of ADD, and a terrible grasp of basic math) but the stuff she’s learning is light-years beyond what I was exposed to in my school. She completely surprised me last night, however, when I showed her the latest iteration of my silicone mold project.
So far I’ve done three metal pours after I got a silicone mold to set properly. The first pour was terrible because the metal didn’t find its way down into the cavities fast or smoothly enough before hardening, so I pulled it out after it cooled and re-melted it. The second time I used the sharp end of a file to guide it into the cavities but the fill was still inconsistent. So I pulled the metal and took the time with an X-acto knife to carve out all of the edges of the mold as much as possible to open things up. Then I did a third pour in three stages. This one was much more successful but still didn’t fill the entire mold. I’ve learned it’s very hard to control molten tin before it cools—I suppose I need to get it hotter than I have been—but even then I’m not thrilled with the results. The tin is very malleable when it’s cooled, making it easy to bend, and my design has a lot of small, easily bent details.
Showing this to Finn, she was fascinated with the cast and asked to make some molds and casts of her own. After I mentioned I was thinking about making some kind of small smelter to try aluminum instead of tin, she idly suggested I try using resin instead of metal.
Sometimes she surprises me with her wisdom.
Resin looks to be a much easier substance to work with, is tintable, and the heat resistant variants get closer to the melting point of tin: I found one at 300˚F, which I think would be good enough for something mounted on a metal box in direct sunlight. It’s worth a shot in any case, so I’m going to pivot to chemistry and leave my foundry days behind.
Update on the kitchen lighting: everything under the cabinets is installed, and the old garbage has been cut away and tossed. I’m using heat shrink butt-weld connectors to join the wiring up with the speaker wire they ran behind the cabinets in 2004, which doesn’t thrill me, but given the low voltage these LED lights demand I’m not as worried as I might be. Something that is shocking, though, is how BRIGHT these lights are. They outdo the old halogen bulbs by a factor of about five. I wasn’t able to find lights by that manufacturer in black, so some plastic spray paint had to suffice. Four of these go at the top of each of the glass cabinets, and I still have to put those in.
The next project is to replace the wall heater in the half-bath downstairs. The thermostat on this thing barely registers, so you can crank it all the way to 10 and it’ll have a long hard think about things before it decides it might kick on. This should not be the case, because the porch areas are generally 10˚ cooler than the rest of the house in the wintertime. And nobody enjoys a frozen toilet at any time of year. The trick with this installation is that the heater went in before I put the headboard on the wall, so it’s going to involve some careful deconstruction of the heater unit to avoid ruining the woodwork. I did inquire into what a replacement thermostat would cost but found that the part itself cost as much as a new heater, and that there were so many different versions of this heater produced I wasn’t sure if I was going to find a compatible part.
My ribs are feeling better after a week of low-impact activity. I’ve learned to pull my knees up to my chest and pivot my entire body when I’m rolling over in bed as opposed to using my core to do the work for me. Stupid stuff like pulling the handbrake on the OG-V , pulling on my socks, and taking stairs two at a time are still out of the question, but I’m not as stiff as I was last Friday. Sneezing still sucks, though.
Friday morning I drove up to the Towson library, loaded a file onto their 3D control computer, hit START and reviewed hundreds of applicants for a graphic design position based in Africa as two new dealer badges printed in a slightly larger size. After the fiasco with my first silicone mold attempt destroyed the first badge and the second printed too small, I needed a couple of examples to work with. Luckily I was able to reserve a block of time long enough to print one decent example, abort a second misfire, and print a third excellent example slightly larger than the original. After work I sanded down the rough edges, built a proper mold box out of foam core and hot glue, and mixed up a new batch of silicone after I’d let it warm to room temperature. After pouring it, I set it on a seed starter mat to keep warm overnight. Saturday morning, the silicone at the top is hard to the touch—unlike my first attempt, which took five days and a heat lamp to finally set.
The next step is to go and find a cheap used pan at the thrift store and melt a lump of lead-free tin I bought from Amazon. This will get poured into the mold and, hopefully, provide me with a metal version of the dealer badge that will stand up to heat better than the plastic will.
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The under-cabinet lighting in our kitchen has been dimming and dying for several years now, especially after I switched the annoying halogen bulbs out with LEDs. They are small round unmarked pucks connected by wire snaked in and behind the cabinets and connected with a bespoke two-prong plastic coupling, making their removal or replacement impossible—there is no manufacturer information to trace back to to match the couplings. So I’m resigned to swapping the 20-year-old pucks out with new LED units and splicing the old connectors onto the new units. This does not thrill me, but LED carries very low voltage (the original lights go through a big brick of a transformer, while the LEDs plug right into the wall) and I’m confident in my soldering and splicing abilities. It’s just going to take a lot of time and crouching under cabinets, which is going to be murder on my ribs.
It’s been a week since I went snowboarding and I think this might be the first morning where my rib is feeling better. The larger soreness and pain in the overall area disappeared on the second day, but I’m still feeling a sharp jab right under my armpit, at probably my fifth or sixth rib. Yesterday morning I woke up feeling really good laying in bed next to a snoring Hazel, and yawned deeply, which seemed to aggravate it almost immediately for the rest of the day. On top of all this, the girls and I went to the local pharmacy and got our Covid shots Friday afternoon. Without thinking about it, I got mine in my left arm, so Saturday I felt sore pretty much all over my body. I fought through it and worked outside for the entire day, because I spent all of last week trapped behind my desk. Despite all of this it felt really good to be outside and moving around, even though by about noon, all I wanted to do was go inside and take a nap. Today it’s sore but not actively reminding me it’s there, so I’ll take it extra easy and see if I don’t make it angry again.
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I’ve been working on a new project: pouring a silicone mold of the 3-D printed dealer badges I made. I bought a simple mold kit off of Amazon last week, boxed in a square on a piece of scrap wood, mixed the silicone, and poured it on Tuesday evening. The silicone didn’t set overnight like it was supposed to, and a little reading revealed that that was probably due to the cold in the house, or perhaps my imperfect non-scientific mixing process. The silicone is supposed to be mixed according to weight, which is about as easy as measuring the volume of a sneeze. I put the mold on top of a radiator in the spare bedroom and let it heat up for a couple of days until the top was tacky to the touch—by then it should have been completely solid. To get it to firm up, I put it down on the workbench under a photography bulb and let it sit for a couple of hours. What wound up happening was that the silicone heated up to the point where it started melting the PVA plastic underneath and the whole mold basically fell apart into a sticky glob. So I’ve got to go back to the drawing board. I’m going to make an appointment to go back to the library and spend a good three hours printing a new version of the badge, then remix some silicone and try to set it up for success this time.
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Sunday morning the cats and dog seemed to be really interested in the fireplace. Sipping my coffee in the den before the girls got up, I heard a flurry of commotion in the living room and investigated, but found nothing. Nox sat in front of the fireplace, staring into the glass as if he was watching a really good episode on TV. The sound was not a cat sound, and the dog was laying next to me on the couch, so I was perplexed—but saw nothing wrong.
Later in the day the same thing happened, but this time I was in the room. Both Hazel and Nox were glued to the fireplace window. I heard a fluttering and realized there was a bird trapped behind the woodpile. I got my welding gloves from the garage, we shooed the animals away, and I opened the glass to find a very frightened, very tired catbird waiting to be released. He fluttered over to the window and sat on the sill, so I opened the one next to him and gently shooed him outside, where he flew up to sit on a branch on the oak tree. By the time I made it around to the back door, he was gone.
A brief internet search for the symbolism of meeting a catbird brings up as much contradictory information as a horoscope. It could mean good news, it could mean deceit; it could be a harbinger of new relationships or it could warn against manipulation. I choose to believe he was sent as a reminder for me to stick my head into the flue and check on the chimney, which is clean and clear.
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Finally, I’ll leave you with this retro commercial from back in the days of beepers. Someone on a video I was watching referenced it, and I LOL’ed just as hard watching it yesterday as I did back in 199-whatever.