At an estate sale this weekend I wandered through a tiny little house filled with carefully organized possessions. What had reeled me in was the mention of tools on the sign, but each room on the first floor had all kinds of interesting stuff. In one bedroom I happened upon a box on a dresser filled with watches of different kinds, and two of them caught my eye. The first was a small (31mm) Douglas diver with a white face and location dial on a metal band. The watch is in decent shape but needs a cleaning, and does wind about two twists before stopping. I can’t get the crown to pop out to set the date or time. Some research says it dates back to the 1960’s; Douglas made watches for the military, including a diver Neil Armstrong wore to the moon (which is a very pretty watch in its own right) and was a name I recognized when I picked it up. With a 20mm NATO band and a good servicing, this $2 watch could be a nice addition to the collection. I can’t get into the back, as the notches down’t fit my case tool, so I can’t investigate further.
The other watch was an impulse buy, because it made me smile: a 38mm Irish Spring novelty watch with a date window, which did not wind and feels bound up inside. The dial face claims it’s Swiss made; opening the back reveals a 1-jewel Swiss movement in a Hong Kong-sourced case. I can’t figure out why the movement won’t work, and it was cheap enough that if I can’t fix it, no big deal.
Down in the basement I spent a half an hour going through the tables and racks of tools, practicing restraint in what I picked out: All hand tools, brand-name dupes of things I’ve got, but all very welcome: four Vice-Grips, a couple of C-clamps, four Craftsman wrenches, some metal files, a heavy-duty metal shear, some screwdrivers, and awl, and two tape measures. Not bad for $15.
Finally, I found a set of Farm Bureau insurance medallions that I got for a buck; these were attached to a license plate back in the 30’s and 40’s for things like advertising or NPS visits. Originally I thought it might look cool on the Travelall but I think it predates the truck by a couple of decades.
Two Sundays ago I was grinding welds out on the floorpan of the Travelall. Without thinking, I put my right index and middle finger down on the surface to gauge the smoothness and burned the pads of both on the superheated metal. For a week I had no visible fingerprints, which meant the touch-unlock feature on my MacBooks and older Apple devices was useless. It (my fingerprint) is still not working properly. So I’m going to get out and do crimes while I’m still untraceable.
Jen did some digging months ago and learned that our new Honda actually came with remote start as a feature. I used it for the first time this morning, when the temperature was 38˚, and I have to say it’s pretty amazing. The weather is getting colder—this morning I had to bust out the middleweight jacket to walk Hazel and I was still chilly—so the little things like this make all the difference in the world.
The little purple iPod I bought at a yard sale this spring has come in super-handy with an unexpected feature: it’s got a built-in radio receiver which uses the headphones as an antenna. When I’m out working on the truck on a Sunday afternoon there is nothing I enjoy more than tuning in to the Ravens game and listening as I work. Lately I’ve been doing a lot of work that’s loud, which tends to drown out any sound from the radio in the garage, especially when I’m bouncing from a welding helmet to ear protection when I’m grinding. And Mom will be happy to learn that I’ve upgraded my eye protection to a set of full-coverage goggles, which do a much better job of keeping flying debris out of my eyes, especially when I’m grinding under the truck.
The news is: holding steady on bloodwork. White blood cells are slightly down but the other main indicators are pretty much in the green, with the exception of Lymphocytes (slightly below the normal range) and Eosinophil Absolute, which has never reached the normal range. So I need to continue to be wary of parasites, allergens, foreign bacteria and outside organisms. It’s a miracle COVID didn’t just kill me outright, I guess. The CT showed no new passengers, so we’re free and clear for another year!
I did a yard sale this Saturday for all of the stuff we didn’t sell a few weeks ago; our house is uniquely situated on Main Street so we get plenty of traffic. I didn’t put one sign out. In less than an hour I’d sold a lamp, the keyboard, my glass carboy, a small table, $30 worth of baby clothes, and a bunch of other stuff. One of the things I’d put out was the Danish modern leather chair I inherited from my college roommate, who had inherited it from his father when we came back to school my sophomore year. It was the chair IKEA ripped off when they made the POÄNG, which later appeared in dorm rooms worldwide. It was comfortable, padded well, and made of beautifully laminated wood in single solid pieces (unlike the Swedish ripoff). When we got it, the stitching in the leather was beginning to come unraveled, and over time it got worse. By the time the chair made it to this house, the ottoman was in tatters and the set of the chair was not far behind. Finley used to try and eat the foam as a baby, so we retired it to the attic in the hopes that someday we could have it re-upholstered. After fifteen years, I gave up on that dream and out to the yard sale it went. At noon it was still on the curb with a big FREE sign taped to the cushion, and it stayed out there until this morning; when I got back from dropping Finn at school I noticed it was gone. I will admit, I was hit with a pang of regret; I will miss sitting in that chair as I remember it—all of the leather intact, with a beer, watching Letterman on our thrift-store color TV.
I’ve been having fits with my DJI Action 3 up until this past week, when I finally found a MicroSDXC card that was compatible with it; trying all ten of my existing cards (two of which are on the official DJI compatibility list) I was getting “card not compatible” errors and dropped sound and footage when it did actually record. With the new card, I can finally just turn the damn thing on and record. Having to wait around to see if it would bonk out and shut itself off was getting very irritating, and it sucks when you can’t depend on a piece of gear like that.
Meanwhile, after 11 years of working with GoPro cameras, I’ve run into my first problem with corrupt video files, and I can’t figure out how to fix them. I had a beautiful Sunday to work on the truck, and I made a conscious decision to set up the Hero5 on a tripod, external battery, and a 256GB card and just let it record what I was doing so I’d have some more footage to cut into and out of when I built a video. The first two files recorded fine, but everything after that corrupted; I wound up with about 30GB of files that I can’t view.
Most of the online solutions are Reddit threads directing to paid services (or copies of those threads; the Internet is a cesspool these days) but I did find a couple of suggestions that made sense. Opening and re-encoding in VLC didn’t work. Handbrake can’t even see the file as valid. I don’t have enough command-line experience with ffmpeg to understand how to use it—although I might be teaching myself in the immediate future. There’s an online service called restore.media that I fed a couple of files into, but haven’t seen any success with it. I guess I have to accept that all of that footage is gone, which really kind of sucks.
So I’m glad I was able to get one of the cameras working, because if I hadn’t, I would have no footage of the weekend’s work.
I posted over on the Scout site about a welding project I got up to on Sunday: I dropped the gas tank on the red bus, cut out a section of the passenger floorboard, worked up a cardboard template, cut out some 18 ga. steel, fitted it into the hole, and got about 40% of it welded in place before the sun went down. I’m still shocked at how far I was able to get on a project I was only considering a week ago.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
Our local library, the one within walking distance of the house, recently reopened after a two-year renovation. built sometime in the 1960’s, it was probably a marvel of its time: a one-story brick building with a full basement, sweeping skylights in the main shelving area, and a windowed front facade. As a preschooler, Finn spent hours in the kids section, which took up one whole side of the building; I’d take her down there and (when she was in her bookworm phase) she’d get lost in the shelves, simply reading quietly by herself, and it filled me with pride and love.
In recent years the building was showing its age; the original wood paneling had darkened over time, and the skylights had yellowed and dimmed. The downstairs areas were even darker and creepier. But the shelves were still stuffed with books; while there wasn’t a huge selection, they clearly had reached the limit of their space.
So I was happy to see they’d re-opened it, and stopped in on my way home from work the other night. The girls had checked it out a few days prior and sent me some pictures, which piqued my curiosity. The floorplan is roughly the same, but it looks like they used architectural tricks to open up the space further, widening out the available space and making it feel airier inside. The surfaces are all modern and clean, and the furniture is all new and shiny. And they’ve added several enclosed glass spaces for things like podcasting and meetings, which is a nice idea.
What didn’t come back, at least not yet, are the books. The shelves are shorter, there are fewer of them, and they’re not full—not by a long shot. The areas I used to frequent, the military history, detective fiction, CD/DVD areas, and graphic novels, are threadbare. I was, frankly, kind of surprised. Meanwhile, their online e-book selection remains limited, with few titles I’m interested in and fewer copies to actually check out.
Howard, our adjoining county, recently put up a new library on the other side of Ellicott City. It’s at least three stories, covered in glass, the size of a small office park. The parking lot is huge. It joins another one in Colombia of similar size. Interesting how a county with a population less than half that of ours can prioritize and afford amenities like this.
I work with a woman whose husband was an employee of Hodinkee, an oddly named horology website which many credit for raising the visibility of luxury wristwatches to America. She’d mentioned recently that things were a little funky with the company, and recently he left to pursue a different opportunity. Hodinkee just announced they’ve been sold to a British watch retailer, and the article explains the troubles she was hinting at; pandemic-era acquisition and market contraction left them in a dicey financial position. John Gruber writes:
There is a name for a publication that is owned by a retailer: catalog.
I would never be able to buy any of the watches featured on the site then or now, but it was pretty to look at.
It’s been quiet around here lately, mostly because the entire East Coast, for those who haven’t been watching the news, has been under a giant raincloud for the past two weeks. We didn’t suffer any of the horror Appalachia did, and for that I am forever grateful, but it sure was nice to feel warm sun on my pale, shriveled skin walking the dog this morning.
I had, with my cereal this morning, some of the best blueberries I’ve eaten in the last 10 years. In September. Modern civilization may be crumbling but I appreciate the small things.
The Check Engine light on the OG-V (164,000 miles and counting!) has been intermittently coming on and then shutting itself off for no discernible reason. I had the knock sensor replaced a few months ago at the behest of the computer, and immediately after that the light came back on and the computer threw the same code, so clearly the squirrels have been down in the engine munching on wires, or there’s a ghost in the machine. The clutch is definitely on its last legs, so we have to make a decision as to when that’s going to be addressed.
I was in New York last week for the briefest of moments to shoot video for a work event, and it reminded me both how much I love to visit that city and how much I could never stand to live there at this age. And for that matter, how much I dislike dragging video equipment through a train station. I think my remote shooting days are mostly over, unless they offer to send me someplace really cool; it’s cheaper to hire a local crew in most cases anyway.
Hazel found a way to wedge herself in between Finn’s fort and the raised bed sometime last night after 8PM; She backed herself out of the tac harness and went on the lam. I wasn’t aware until I went outside to collect her and found the evidence at 10:30. Jen and I suited up and prepared to canvas the neighborhood, but she came trotting back up to Jen in the backyard, panting, and immediately went inside to drink all of the available water. This is progress; her usual M.O. is to follow her nose to the Mississippi River and points west until someone can grab her and read her chip. I’m going to order a simple collar for her tags in preparation for the next time she slips the harness.
