Pitchfork did a great interview with Turnstile on the eve of their new album release: it’s great to see them repping Baltimore and getting their due. I really hope they are able to keep their feet on the ground and stay connected to their roots—it sounds like it’s working.
I’ve mentioned this song on here before, but it’s made a comeback in my brain this week: True Widow, Theurgist. Something about the groove has been stuck in my head since Friday. I’m waiting for them to release new music—it’s been nine years since they put out their last proper album. They’re still touring, but there’s no news about new songs.
Over on the Scout site, I recapped the weekend trip Bennett and I made up to Cumberland to wake up our departed friend Alan’s napping Scout and sort through his parts stash to prep it all for sale.
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.