“This is what I learned from those years in the prison camp, where all those constraints just were oppressive. You must never ever ever confuse, on the one hand, the need for absolute, unwavering faith that you can prevail despite those constraints with, on the other hand, the need for the discipline to begin by confronting the brutal facts, whatever they are. We’re not getting out of here by Christmas.”
I saw this last week and meant to post it sooner: Admiral Jim Stockdale was a POW for seven years in Vietnam, and this is what he learned about faith and optimism.
Until a vaccine or another protective measure emerges, there is no scenario, epidemiologists agreed, in which it is safe for that many people to suddenly come out of hiding. If Americans pour back out in force, all will appear quiet for perhaps three weeks.
Then the emergency rooms will get busy again.
I heard the author of this article on The Daily, the New York Times’ podcast, and what he said was sobering. We’re not out of the woods yet—this is going to continue for months. There is no vaccine coming soon. And it’s going to take careful, intelligent government to help us through the pandemic with as little pain as possible—something we haven’t gotten at all.
What you see there is an engine after being sprayed liberally with Simple Green and pressure-washed. It wasn’t as dramatic a result as I was hoping for, but then, I knew this engine wasn’t a beauty queen to begin with. I was able to get a fair amount of grease and dirt off of the engine, steering box, front pumpkin and steering gear. The valve covers cleaned up pretty well. The top of the transmission is visible for the first time since I’ve owned her. And the cowl is mostly the original Gold Poly International shipped the truck with back in 1975.
While I had the cowl exposed I pulled it off to see if I could get the wiper motor mounted correctly. Way back in 2012 I was troubleshooting two dead wipers and unbolted the motor without checking the linkage first; this was a stupid mistake. It turned out the linkage had come undone and the wiper motor was all but impossible to re-attach to the underside of the windshield frame without removing the entire frame. I figured I’d fuck with it some more today and even dragged one of my spares out of the garage to help understand the angles and positions of everything, but ultimately I was foiled—it’s just too difficult to align everything upside down and out of reach. So, I buttoned everything back up tight, fired up the engine (it caught right away and idled happily) and Finn and I took her for a spin around Catonsville to stretch her legs.
Before I put her back in the garage, I took a closer look at the lift gate and realized I’d never put any of my spare weatherstripping around the hatch, so I pulled some from my stash and fitted it around the opening, then put her away for the night.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
This is where we stand on Sunday evening. New beadboard paneling is up on the ceiling, nailed and glued over the old paper/asbestos tile, and the original crown molding is back in place over the edges. Once Jen figured out a way for the three of us to put it up together, we had the whole thing done in about an hour.
The rest of the weekend has been endless painting, caulking, sanding, cutting and trimming of new wood (the door to the office has a wood surround for the first time since 2010 or so), vacuuming, and more painting. We’re at the point where Kilz has done all it can, so we’ll order a gallon of semigloss for the ceiling and another gallon of high gloss for the woodwork and get some final paint on the whole thing. Jen has a fantastic idea for flooring that won’t require carpeting but will make things look good. And we have new window cranks on order from Home Depot to replace the broken mechanicals we inherited.
It’s come a long way in three weeks, and we’re pretty excited about what happens next…
This is a cover of an Interpol song that, in my opinion, improves upon the original. And everything on that Interpol album is pretty fucking tight to begin with. You may have issues with Hazel English’s voice but I dig it.
I’ve got a batch of Shiner Bnock-Off in the fermenter waiting to be kegged this weekend, but both my kegs still contain the remainders of the last two batches I brewed. This means I need to drink through the rest of them in a hurry—Darn. They feel empty but I’m still able to pull beer out of them. I ordered a session IPA kit from Northern Brewer on Monday but with the delays in fulfillment and shipping I don’t know when that will get here.
Yesterday I put the seedlings outside for a couple of hours in the shade to start hardening. They got very leggy until I adjusted the lighting, so some of them are taller than I’d like; when I went out to check on them there were several that had blown over in the breeze. It’s overcast today so hopefully they’ll do a little better and stay upright. The goal is to get the soil bins prepped over the weekend and have the seedlings ready to go by late next week. I’m also thinking they need to be transplanted into bigger starter pots so they get more nutrients while they’re hardening—some of them are a little wilty, which is concerning me.
The front porch continues moving slowly forward. The patch next to the front door is 90% complete and the hole that claimed my thumb has its second skim coat of mud. Jen and I tried to hang one of the headboard panels last night but we could not find a way to get it to stay up without flopping out of place almost immediately. I’d built an 8′ brace for Jen to hold, but what I realize now is that we need three of them about six inches longer so that they’ll snug the panel up against the ceiling until I can tack them in place. The big thing right now is to get everything cleared out of there so that we can work without tripping over furniture or air conditioners or other junk.
I’ve been using an iPhone 6 for five years now, and the battery is getting weaker and weaker by the day. It’s been an excellent phone for that period of time, and it’s a testament to Apple’s quality that it’s still functional, running a modern OS, and none of the components have broken down.
The reality is that I’m going to need to upgrade soon—both Jen and I, actually. Apple has a whole suite of iPhones to choose from, starting with the ludicrously large XS Max (stupid name, Apple) down to the 8, which I guess is sort of a supercharged version of my 6. I haven’t kept track of all the permutations of the iPhone, because, well, I have better things to do, but it seems to me that they’ve clogged up the product line with too many models. I don’t know the immediate difference between the 8/8 Pro, the 11/11 Pro/11 Pro XR, or the XE, and while a younger version of me would have investigated the differences for several hours and built a chart to visualize the pros and cons, the modern version of me just doesn’t give a fuck.
Steve Jobs famously axed 3/4 of Apple’s product line back in 2001 when he took the company over, and it was for the best. There were four products with several configurations, and that was it. There’s something to be said for keeping things simple; if I had to advise my Mom on which one to buy next, I’d be caught short.
Apple just announced the new iPhone SE, which has a form factor very similar to my 6 but apparently is faster and better than the more expensive 8. I’ve seen people wrestle modern phones with both hands and I’ve decided that I want to stick with a smaller phone—I have no desire to fumble around with an iPad-sized device, nor would it fit in my pocket—so this size looks perfect to me.
The SE has traditionally been the low cost buy-it-for-Dad phone, with a smaller screen and lower powered processor. This new model has the A13 processor, Touch ID (but no Face ID), a single camera on the back, and is priced out at $450 for the 128GB version. Given current events and my desire to tighten our budget, the iPhone SE looks like a serious contender for the next five years.
You didn’t see people in masks standing in the rain risking their lives to vote. Not in America. You didn’t see the leader of the free world push an unproven miracle drug like a late-night infomercial salesman. That was a crisis update. You didn’t see homeless people dead on the street. You didn’t see inequality. You didn’t see indifference. You didn’t see utter failure of leadership and systems.
Jen found this article and read it aloud a couple of days ago, and it really struck home. In Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting, Julio Vincent Gambuto makes the case that this strange reality is the best opportunity we’ve ever had to stop, look, and evaluate our lives, our country, and our future, and prepare to make changes for the better right now before we are lulled back to sleep.
OK, so the folks that came up with a digital back for medium-format cameras now have a Kickstarter for a limited set of 35mm cameras: the I’m Back is a kit that bolts to the back of a film camera and provides a 2″ touchscreen display, 14MB RAW files, and as much storage as you can stuff into a Micro SD card. As I would expect, none of the cameras I own are on their list of supported models, but I’m going to wait and see if someone mods a Minolta x700 or a Fujica AX-3 and then maybe consider one of these.
You know, with all of the stuff going on in the last couple of months, I completely forgot to mention the fact that this weblog, as of March 22, is 20 years old. My first post was about the choice of outerwear I was noticing in Washington, D.C. as I worked there; it wasn’t the most emotionally wrenching subject, but it kicked off an almost daily habit I’ve kept ever since then. To that date, I’d posted 5196 times, or roughly 22 times a month. Because of a huge spike in 2004, my trend line is slowly declining, but it looks like there’s been an general uptick since about 2017 or so.
In terms of content, I’ve stripped out some data that skews the average for the category counts; all of the Scout categories are out, as well as the Shortlinks category, which overlaps half the posts and skews everything else.
As I’d expect, photo is at the top of the stats only because it’s there to tell me when there’s a photo linked from Flickr. House is second, followed by Finley, geek, and humor.
It’s hard to believe I’ve kept this going for 20 years, but it’s also become an invaluable tool for remembering where we’ve been, when things happened, and maybe a little bit about who we are. Here’s to another 20 years.
On Saturday Hazel had me up at 6:30 with the first rays of light over the trees, so I snuck her out of the house and we took a nice long walk around the neighborhood before anyone else was up. Our usual morning route maps out at about a mile and a quarter, and by the time she’s pulled me down the hill and back up again, she’s worked off her early morning energy and is ready for some food. After getting some breakfast and spending a little time with the girls, I brought some tools up from the basement and started demoing the half-wall on the front porch.
To recap, the front porch had been enclosed sometime in the 1940’s, and the area to the right of the front door was used as the waiting room for the doctor’s office. It was furnished with wood panel-faced drywall and a dark green carpet that was probably very fashionable during the Eisenhower administration. At one point there was a radiator out there to attempt to heat an area with little to no insulation, which the doctor had moved from the dining room. We’ve been using the space as catchall storage since we moved in, so it’s been cluttered with all kinds of crap for years. In 2005 I went out and rolled three coats of Kilz over the paneling to try and brighten things up, but the dark windows, carpet, and ceiling kept things feeling grim out there.
The half-wall was meant as a windbreak for the unfortunates sitting in the waiting room, and really did nothing but make the whole place look and feel darker. We’re looking to brighten the whole place up on the cheap, so I took it down with a crowbar and a hammer. It took only about a half an hour to pull out completely, and the debris filled two contractor’s bags. Inside the wall I found Christi’s car keys, deposited there sometime in 2011 by Finley, who, at the time, was fascinated by a hole in the wall left by the doorknob. Apparently someone in an earlier decade found it equally fascinating, because I found a second set of car keys next to hers, from a 70’s era Ford (years on the repossession lot taught me a lot about identifying keys).
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After I’d bagged the debris I cut up some leftover drywall to patch the hole in the wall, and taped and mudded it. I was trimming a second patch to cover another section of wall that had been holed and then covered in tape when the blade of the boxcutter hopped over my guide and bit into my left thumb, opening a pretty good gash below the knuckle and leaving a divot across my thumbnail.
Jen busted out the supplies and patched me up quickly, and we let it sit for a while before she convinced me to reopen it, disinfect everything, and superglue the whole thing shut. We numbed it with some lidocaine cream and then she got to work. My labors were pretty much over at that point, so we took the dog for another walk and settled in to our new book by the fireplace.
We’re finished with the Golden Compass series—overall very enjoyable, and not at all what I was expecting—and have moved on to the Alchemyst, a fantasy book about Nicholas Flamel and magic. It’s been very relaxing to sit by the fire with the menagerie around us and not have them try to kill each other; usually at reading time Hazel is winding down and the drowsy nature of the fire seems to calm her down even more.
On Sunday Jen changed my bandage and I went back out to the porch to do what I could with one hand; this basically meant I was painting all day. I washed the woodwork with warm water and TSP (commercial detergent) and then painted the outside of the front door for the first time we’ve been in the house, as well as the trim around the dining room window. Then I moved a bunch of stuff around and painted the frames surrounding the outside windows with about ten coats of Kilz, and anything else I could reach or cover. At about 6:30 we stopped for Easter dinner and some family calls, and wound our evening down early.