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WEEK 34 2014

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Saturday 23 August 2014

Saturday - Warming up a bit.

Mowed, edged, weed whacked. Generally (if the local winds haven't blessedly blown the stuff away) I have to sweep up the debris from edging. I've tried "blowing" it into a pile, but a lot ends up in the always damp gutter, where it turns into sludge that I have to shovel out later. This time I tried the "suck" option on the blower. It worked pretty well, actually, and I only had to empty it twice, once about 3/4 of the way through, and at the end. Noisy gizmo though.

I actually didn't want to mow, it'd be better to wait until my heel healed, but it was getting pretty overgrown. I wanted until late morning and my tendons relaxed, wore stiff boots, had ibuprofen an hour beforehand, and took it easy. No particular problems, so that's good.

In the afternoon I worked on the app, until about 7pm. I've got the dragging and dropping going pretty well - I need to implement some "snap-to" functionality, to keep the students from overlaying stuff where they shouldn't, but it's a promising start. It's a bit of a kludge, as usual I'm having trouble with wanting to use global data, which iOS really doesn't like. But at least I'm at the point where I can look at it and say "Hey, it works", even when I have the sneaking suspicion that there has to be a better way.

I was actually planning on spending the day at the Fair, with friends, but that fell through and I didn't feel like going by myself. Oh well, it comes around every year....

Friday 22 August 2014

Friday - Doing a bit of housework and yard work. Worked on the app a bit, starting the drag and drop stuff.

Not much to say, really. I need to replace those swamp cooler bearings - and I will, as soon as I've organized the garage enough to find the gear pullers that I know I have in there somewhere.

I haven't done much in there, trying to stay off my feet. Essentially I need to create a little paint booth and varnish stuff.

Thursday 21 August 2014

Thursday - Not much to say, a few errands, work on the app, work on the house. I was busy but it doesn't feel like much got done...

Earlier in the week, walking barefoot around the house one morning, I pulled or tore something in my right heel. Identical circumstances to when I tore something in my left heel a couple of years ago (walking down the stairs). Not quite as bad, but all the time on my feet working around the house and visiting at the fair is making it fairly sore, I need to take it easy for a bit, and wear my boots and not sandals and tennis shoes. Bah.

I did finish Book #35, The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Invincible, by Jack Campbell. This was light but entertaining reading, space opera sort of stuff. At one point the protagonist wryly suggests that if anyone ever writes a book about him, then on the cover they'll probably put him in space armor holding a gun, something he's never done (being a naval officer and not a marine). Of course, as I mentioned in a review of one of the earlier books, the covers to the actual series are, in fact, like that....

Looking at Amazon I see that this came out in 2012, and that there are a couple more volumes of the series out already. Time flies.

Update: Looking at my own web page in 2012, I see that I claimed to have read it, but I have no memory of that. In fact I have a clear memory of the cliffhanger from the previous book, but not this one. Weird. So I'm leaving it in.

After Altzheimer's really sets in my list will just be the same book, over and over....

I actually feel guilty about reading these days, with so much work to be done on the app and house, but I guess that's silly, one can't work all the time.

Wednesday 20 August 2014

Wednesday - Hot, but not dreadful.

Worked in the garage, putting stuff back against the wall. More churning, really. I need to make a little paint booth, to keep dust off the varnish. I discovered that I had bought the wrong pre-stain, so I couldn't start. Bah.

Worked a bit on the app in the afternoon, did a few other things.

In the evening I went over to the fair again with R and S. S entered her candy in the "open" competition - and came away with the blue ribbon! Congratulations to her!! We then walked around a bit, visited the museum and photography exhibits and headed home about 10pm

Tuesday 19 August 2014

Tuesday - Cooler, with some winds and even clouds. I actually turned off the swamp cooler about 8pm, it was getting cold in the house.

I spent the morning cleaning up and moving things in the garage so that I could paint the garage wall, and then finally doing the painting. There's a lot of "churning" going on - what spurred all this garage work was the lack of storage space, and halfway through the job that lack is really making itself felt.

What I thought was four or five year old pure white was actually ancient Swiss Coffee from Behr, circa 1994. I didn't think it'd be usable, it had really separated, but since the cans had never been opened I thought I'd give it a whirl (heh). I stirred the heck out of it, even making my own stir widget for the drill, and after about 20 minutes I had (apparently) good paint. To make sure I painted a small piece of sheet rock that I had, and it dried normally and looked OK.

So I then painted the wall. It was only about 125SF, but there were various pipes and obstacles in the way, a water heater and a house furnace, and a door to be painted around, wall plates and a fire extinguisher to be removed. All in all it took nearly 5 hours to do what I originally thought would take 2. It also took about 3/4 of a gallon of paint - the old garage paint was sprayed on and fairly porous I guess.

Oh well. It looks a lot better, I'm glad I did it.

Fedex delivered the cherry stain from Amazon, so I should be set to go on all that.

Yard work has been light. I put some Weed-and-Feed on the front lawn.

I've also been hunting tomato worms. They've been devouring my plants - even the pepper plants. So far I've found 11, I'm sure there's more, but they are really hard to see, particularly the smaller 1.5" critters. Ugh.

And I started putting some anti-cat-climbing mesh on the trees. Jimmy is determined to follow those birds right up into the sky...

After lunch and a shower I tackled Bill Pay with US Bank. After various issues that required me to contact them via phone I finally got into the Bill Pay section - and discovered that pretty much every utility except DWP is there. Huh? Eventually I just manually added it, but it means an already late payment won't be sent until next week. Hopefully they don't turn the tenant's power off!

After that I went online and ordered some new glasses, so hopefully I can set up a DMV appointment soon.

Monday 18 August 2014

Monday - There was a very close conjunction of Venus and Jupiter in the predawn AM hours, a few seconds of arc. I tried to get up, but didn't manage until nearly 6am. They were still close together, but so low in the sky that they couldn't be seen from my back yard. Rather than set up a tripod in the middle of the street I just held the camera with the stock lens, with fairly poor results. Jupiter, at upper right, is a bit yellowish in color and there is a hint of belts; Venus is blown out, it should be about 1/3 the size of Jupiter. But it'd be featureless, so no big loss.

It was visually pretty spectacular.

Back to school! I even have a student ID (with picture, that's new). It is S's idea, she wants to take some computer graphics classes, both for the knowledge and for networking, and talked me into going. So, OK, Digital Media 101 here I am.

The instructor was late, and unprepared. This really annoyed me, my time is actually worth something to me these days. On the other hand he seems to be kind of a hard nose, and won't take any guff from students who think they are entitled. Which is a plus.

It's Monday's, 8 to Noon, but of course we got let out early. We used the time to get our Student ID's, then spent the entire rest of the morning filling out forms to setup a business in LA County, and getting the Fictitious Business Name thing done in the newspaper. We used the British Weekly newspaper again, Merile Woolfe there is very helpful and knowledgeable about the arcane and senseless hoops that the County and State make you jump through.

The I swung by the stores, bought some stuff and went home about 2:00.

I did put the pictures from the fair, of various engine bits for use in the app, onto the google drive for S, which for some reason shut down the system for use in anything else while it uploaded. Which, on top of a huge Windows update, and a big OSX update, used up the afternoon.

Pretty darn tired, and didn't get much done for the rest of the day.

Sunday 17 August 2014

Sunday - Hot again. I was out of town in the morning, but it was 104F when we returned in early afternoon.

We'd gone down to Little Tokyo to see the Taeko drummers. Unfortunately for us, they weren't there. In fact, they had performed the weekend before, but not even at the same site. Apparently whoever owns the square in front of the Japanese Cultural building has started charging rates so high that the sponsors haven't been able to afford renting there for the last couple of years.

We made the best of it, going through some of the displays and presentations in the museum, and wandering around Little Tokyo, and having lunch at the street booths there.

I texted my friend Tim and suggested that they stop by on their way back from Ventura to San Diego, but apparently he owns a map...

I was pretty tired when we got home - it's been a long, long week.

Picture of the Week

Photo Notes: Quilt detail, AV Fair, August 2014.

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