Scott forwarded me this great retro image. I don't recognize the overalls, but the kitchen looks familiar:
The dishwasher showed up on Wednesday and the install stopped a step #1. It says "using a 90 elbow connector (not included)....". Sigh. I pulled all the old cables and pipes off the old dishwasher but I didn't see an old elbow connector, the piping went right into the pump instead into the bottom of the pump. OSH had a kit with new stainless lines and the elbow so last night I got it all hooked up. The instructions warn not to tighten the elbow too much, only finger tight plus 1/4 turn. Of course that started leaking almost instantly so I went finger tight + 2 full turns until it was actually tight and now it's fine. Yet another chance to use that 99 cent spool of teflon tape I seem to have bought a million years ago. Tonight I have to finish the job, the mounting brackets stick out about 1/4" past the edge of the counter and that looks dumb. There is also a big gap you can see when you're across the room. I would have to modify the brackets to mount it any higher, so maybe if I can find a piece of trim it could be cleaned up without resorting to all sorts of bracket trickery. They have the width on these things pretty standard, too bad they couldn't standardize the height.
This morning I went up to San Mateo to have a pre-purchase inspection done on this: 1997 Saab. Yea, I dunno why I'm looking at cars again either, probably just bored. Anyway, the thing looks OK but is a total POS. The mechanic guessed at $3500-4000 to get it up to mechanical spec. Ouch, on a car that's worth $2300 that's not a good deal. At least the seller took it well, only got a little defensive.
Now with the car deal off I don't have anything planned for this weekend. We're supposed to do dinner with Scott and Lina but otherwise I'll just be bumming around. I did get the shell holder I needed to load up those .417 Remington rounds for Dave, probably should make up one as a sample to have him check in the rifle before I make up a big batch.
Two things keep me from making regular updates. First is with my new job I have almost zero downtime anymore, someone is always bugging me about something. Second is stupid WoW. Before I would pop out a quick journal entry, now I check my auctions or go whack a few bad guys while I'm on double XP 'rest' time. Guess I can update at lunch if I force myself to not work during that time. Or I could stop playing WoW at home. :) Eventually I'll get tired of it, one would hope.
Saturday was the pheasant hunt with Seth which was way more fun than the pig hunt. They're farmed birds so you know they're out there but of the 12 birds we paid to have seeded we only got 7, even with two dogs doing the pointing. Crazy how those birds can hide even when you know they're somewhere out there.
Sunday I watched a youtube video to learn how to cut the birds into usable bits and we made honey glazed pheasant breasts over rice. It was pretty tasty which is good since I'm going to be eating it for a few days for lunches.
I did my first real fab project this weekend. The aftermarket tank I have has some craptastic mounting brackets and one of them mounts to the radiator. If you fall over, the tank bracket can rip the radiator off or open, which is a bad thing, so most people just leave that bracket off.
I finally got around to making a little mounting tab to hook the bracket onto the aftermarket crash bar I have protecting the radiator. I cut a little piece of plate with the dremel (it was too small for the torch heads I have), drilled a hole in it, tacked a M6 flange nut on one side to provide threads and then welded it to the crash bar. As you can see from the pic the final product after a shot of Krylon looks pretty good, except for the hole I burnt in the bar tube. Doh. When you want to stop welding you need to STOP, don't slow down, stop, then kill the arc. Burns through thin stuff fast! It seems pretty solid though, the tab is stronger than the crash bar and the weld (on both sides) seems strong. I beat on it with a hammer for a while and it didn't do anything. It's not much, but I made something. Finally.
Yes, I am using an old motorcycle jacket as my welding jacket (for now) and that picture it totally staged. The woman was no where around when I was actually working.
Another project finished is moving my reloading table and supplies upstairs. I want to get them out of the garage so that no one sees them and they're away from the welder and whatnot. I think I have enough powder for the moment. Well, enough rifle powder anyway. I'm signed up for another pistol psycho class and I don't think I have enough crap ammo ready, time to break out the dies and get to work.
Just some random pics from the weekend too. The woman getting more herbs at OSH (why I had the camera in my pocket I have no idea) and the woman attempting to feed the ducks by the house. Notice how there are no ducks in the photo, they've all swam/run/flown away as she came close with the bag of stale bread.
Saturday I went to the sportsman's expo with Seth up in Sacto. He and his buddy JP were looking for elk hunting guides in Colorado, Idaho and Wyoming. They're going again this year but wanted to see if there were better guides then they used last time (although they maxed out and got everything they were after so I don't know what could be better other than being cheaper). While they did that I managed to find a pheasant hunting place that's not too far away, only about half way up to the Shasta property. They sound a bit commercial, but they do rent dogs. A rental hunting dog, just seems funny. They even provide a bird cleaning service so after you get your birds they do all the plucking and gutting and turning them in to ready to use product. Handy, and reasonably cheep too. Their season is over at the end of March, but I'll make it up before then. The woman is OK with me hunting birds for some reason, but I'll take advantage of it.
Oh, and this week at work has been crazy with two network outages. I got to run the disaster recovery stuff on both of them because I'm the new manager. I also get to go in at 5am on Tuesday when we take the net down again so corporate networking can fix their screw-ups. We had 3 of 6 links down for months, they weren't actually monitoring, and our spanning tree setup was wrong, we had no redundancy on our links. Doh.
My promotion is official as of today. I'm still not a real employee, but I'm now the manager of the other 4 contractors and the rest of the 'tactical' group unofficially reports to me as well. When I go full time then I get all 10 of them. Whew, I'm a manager once again, I can stop thinking so much. :)
Yesterday I went with Seth down to Predator's Archery... only to find they didn't open until noon. Lazy archery people. Instead of waiting around 2 hours we drove back up to Sportsman's. Seth got his carbon arrows but they said they wouldn't refletch mine, but would sell me the tools to do it myself. Ugh. I don't want to get into archery reloading! But alas, it is cheaper to buy the tools and do it myself, the ROI is there with your first dozen arrows so it kinda makes sense to learn to do it.
After getting the KLR tire and other misc crap the woman and I went to dinner with Ellen at Straits. It turned out to be really good, the woman as worried because she went o the SFO version and it sucked ass. Fortunately other than being in Santa Row, this one was 10x better. I'm also 80% through Kitchen Confidential now so I have a better appreciation of what's going on behind the scenes.
This morning I finished servicing the forks and got the tire back up. New rubber makes a world of difference. The oil that came out of the forks was pretty nasty and left this strange metallic gray residue in the drain pan. Probably due for some new fork springs in the future.
The weather was nice enough today we went for a walk and then fired up the grill. Salt and rosemary encrusted rack of lamb, spaghetti squash, leek and zucchini medley and rolls. We're like real cooks! Well, sometimes.
So the sickness didn't play nice, I went home early on Wednesday and worked from home on Thursday AM. I did come in though because I got to a point where I needed physical access to some systems we're setting up so staying at home wasn't cutting it. Even my boss said I was dumb and should have stayed home. Oh. Today I just skipped the gym and slept in (like yesterday) which helped but I'm back at work doing stupid physical crap that needs to get done and is going to push me over the edge again I just know it.
Last night the woman and I talked (OK, it was more like a therapy session) about why I have such trouble making decisions and sticking with them. Apparently I don't do things because I want to, I do them because it makes logical sense. The problem with that is that as soon as the decision is made the variables I used to make the decision start changing so when you re-evaluate the decision again it seems 'wrong' to me. This is why I buy cars, I get them because they either make sense or I want them. If they make sense for some version of logic I end up keeping them forever (like the Jeep, the Montero and the KLR) as long as the logic holds even if I don't necessarily 'want' them any longer. For things I buy because I want it (GTI, Porsche, etc) I rapidly lose sight of the 'I want it' part and it just becomes a logical nightmare and I want out ASAP. She points out that everything I'm spending money on now is because it makes sense. I really don't want to have 6000 .308 bullets, 27 lbs of powder, 6000 primers and 1500 pieces of brass taking up room at the house but because prices continue to rise and things are only going to get worse it's easy to buy it all because it makes logical sense. I will use it eventually and it doesn't go bad so why not use all available income to obtain it? Practical, but boring.
The tailpipe fell off the Tracker yesterday too, my weld held, but the metal around the weld broke because it was 90% rust. Doh. The muffler itself is OK, I just need the tailpipe part. I tried to order it but parts America said my account was locked because I never selected a 'security question' and now I have to call to unlock it. What bozos. So instead of my 8 character random password I have to tell them the city I'm born in? I'll pass, now I have to find someone else to sell me parts.
Stupid sickness. I've been slowly going down hill for the last few days. Hopefully it just lingers until the weekend when I can sleep rather than going down hill fast and me having to stay home. No more sick, ugh!
Yesterday we had a 'cross functional' get-together luncheon thing (on our own dime, to the tune of $19 each for lunch). We went to Ethiopian food at Zeni and I was a little skeptical at first but it turned out to be really good. There were 10-15 different types of goo/meat/whatever to mix and match and everything had it's own unique flavor. Nothing tasted anything like anything I had before, even the chicken didn't taste like chicken. Well worth the money for a one-off adventure.
Got all crafty today and got some stencils to re-label the bike. It actually turned out pretty good, the leakage past the stencil was minimal and won't be noticed once there is a coat of road grime on the bike. I really need to get some exhaust paint though and wire brush the rust off the exhaust and get it repainted before it becomes a problem. Unfortunately I can't paint the plastic tank (gas leaches out and will bubble the paint off) so the greens still don't match but it's never been a beauty queen.
I think I'm running out of things to paint.
Made good progress on my continuing efforts to clean up the spare room. Threw out/recycled as much as possible (and now the trash and recycle bin is full so I'll use that as an excuse to stop for now) and dusted. I moved my desk to the other side and tie-wrapped all the power/video/keyboard/mouse/speaker cables into nice little bundles instead of just a huge mess. Makes a big difference. Probably next week I'll figure out what to do with the room as it will be ready for 'something'.
This morning I went to the gym for the first time since the vacation. Little weak, I tried to just continue my workout from before and failed miserably. Guess I'll have to work back into it.
Was going to go for a ride today, but it was raining on and off the whole day so I decided to skip it. The paint probably isn't fully dry yet anyway.
Probably easier to just make a big list to catch up on the happenings for the last few weeks:
I think those are the major things so far. Hopefully I can get back to normal updates so I don't forget as much.
So here is my attempt at painting a rifle stock. I carefully used the blue masking tape and taped all the areas I wanted to keep black (unpainted) and the paint ended up going under the tape anyway. I thought I could just use a little acetone and clean it up but no such luck, it's on there really good. It's livable. Better than all black anyway.
