morrowlife

Here are Loyal Reader Number One and Loyal Reader Number Two’s elbow hanging around by a really cool waterfall at one of the state parks in Pennsylvania a few years back.

Beautiful day today. I left the office at 3:30 and came home with the top down. It was warm, sunny, and just perfect. By the time the longish drive was over, I was adding just a touch of heat, but it still felt great. The car’s still not accelerating quite perfectly, though. I need to do a little more experimenting. I think I’ll test the oxygen sensor soon, and I’ll check for vacuum leaks too. Incidentally, my right hand is pretty sore tonight where I rested it on the shifter today. Need to baby it for a few days, I suppose. Better avoid hard labor for a while.

Monk is on. There’s a doctor who killed another doctor in the hospital, and he was just beating Monk with a crutch before a commercial break. I don’t want to rush to judgment here, but I don’t think he’s a very good doctor. Just my opinion, though. I suspect Monk will catch him.

Have a great weekend. See you on Monday.

Here’s a place most of us will recognize – the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It certainly leans. Photo courtesy of my friend Doug, I suspect, with whom I visited this lovely little town. We looked at the tower, ate a pizza, and went back to Cannes. The pizza was quite fresh, but Domino’s is better.

No post yesterday – the usual Wednesday late-night-meeting blues. Actually, the meeting was rather a good one. I just didn’t have time for blogging when I got home. My gain is your loss. Depending on how you look at it, of course.

It was a pretty day today – the rain has definitely passed through for now and we should be set for about a week’s worth of sunshine. It’s supposed to be in the very low 70s for the next several days as well. Loyal Reader Number Four reported that she saw lots of nice-looking plants at a store I’m too humiliated to admit we visit from time to time, and she bought several of them. Springtime is really in the air around here.

Of course, I spent 99 percent of today’s daylight hours inside my non-window-equipped office, which is inside a non-window-equipped office area. Such are the drawbacks of the super-secret work life. We do have to go outside briefly to get to our lab – we walk across the loading dock, which is sometimes one of the more picturesque areas of the building – so I get to soak up at least a few rays every day.

Let’s see . . . what else is going on? Ummm . . . nothing. I’m still letting ideas for my proposed Great Art generating machine roll around in my brain. Several promising ideas have surfaced, mostly for software-only solutions, which would be a start. I still want to gin up some kind of tangible machine, but the cooperative computer network is at least the first part of the puzzle, and I can get working on that right away. Loyal Reader Number One has some good ideas on getting the networking aspects working pretty easily. I may need to be on the lookout for an old used plotter, which would probably make a great starting point for the hardware portion.

And I might just as well quit while I’m ahead tonight. See you on Friday.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Twelve looking particularly determined to give Grandma a hard time. She did a pretty good job of it too, from time to time. This picture is a couple months old because I haven’t received any new ones from Loyal Reader Number Five. Hint hint.

How nice to hear from Loyal Reader Number Sixteen in yesterday’s comments. How’s everything in the frosty north? Got enough Global Warming these days?

I went directly from work to church for my new member discussion. The new member didn’t show. Talked to him on the phone. He couldn’t get a ride. We’ll try again on Sunday after church. Sigh.

Busy day at work, rainy day outside. The commutes were just a little bit slow – not as bad as Monday but not as good as usual. I went to a going-away luncheon at The Fish Market in Santa Clara. I’ve eaten there many times before when I was traveling to Sunnyvale with ILS. The food’s pretty good, if a little too expensive for lunch. It was nice to go out, though.

There’s not much else to say today. Maybe it will stop raining tomorrow. I hope so, since the landscapers haven’t been able to work at all this week. The concrete truck is scheduled for Thursday, but it has to not be raining for that to happen. We’ll just have to wait and see. Sigh.

I just got a new issue of Make magazine. There’s an article about art-generating machines. That got me thinking – maybe that could be a project for the Arduino. Then I decided it would probably be more suitable for one of the computers. Then I thought it might be better to link a computer and the Arduino together somehow. Then I had the brilliant flash – why not link together every computer in the house to either cooperate or struggle against each other to create Great Art? Brilliant indeed. I’m going to get right to work on it.

See you tomorrow.

Here’s one of the strangest racing cars ever built – the Bugatti Tank. Built in 1923 and raced – quite unsuccessfully – by Bugatti only once. Five were built and one was written off in its one and only race. That makes this a pretty rare car. Photo taken using my first (cheap) digital camera at the museum halfway between Nice and Cannes.

Short shrift today. It’s 9:31, home evening just ended, and it’s already time to wind down for the night. So there’s not much time for anything else.

Loyal Reader Number One was deathly ill all weekend. Very sad. He’s not fully recovered yet by any means, but I’m happy to report that he’s doing much better. Sadly, he had to miss some things he really wanted to do, some of which were mentioned in his comment to Friday’s post. Poor LRN1.

Otherwise, not much news. I did some Ward Mission Leader work, some home teaching, and a lot of reading. I really wanted to get my lantern rebuilding project done, but neither the weather nor my photographer’s health would support that. There’s always next weekend, though. Didn’t work on the websites either. Sigh.

Loyal Reader Number Four volunteered me to maintain the Modesto opera company’s website. They called today and were very interested in having my help. They asked her for my websites’ URLs. Having looked at those, I’m pretty sure they won’t be calling back. Sigh. I really need to get my website designer’s input (that’s Loyal Reader Number Two to you and me) and prettify these things up. It’s hard to get his attention on this subject, though.

I’m really enjoying those Bob and Ray radio shows. They’re low-key and hilarious. Highly recommended.

See you tomorrow!

Here’s the aft end of a Proton rocket on its way to the launch pad a few years back. Picture courtesy of me. It was featured briefly on the ILS website, but it came down pretty quickly when the upper stage developed a problem immediately after it got to the pad and had to be returned to the processing facility for rework. And a several-week launch delay. Oops.

Fine day today. I ended up staying home, and we canceled our daily 10:00 meeting due to lack of interest, so I didn’t have to think about work much at all. I did read a bunch of emails and respond to some of them, and I did time cards in the afternoon.

Also finished all the planned weekend work on the Miata. I put the window channel rubber back in its proper place and lubricated it with silicone spray. I also lubricated the other window rubber just for good measure. They’re both moving up and down much more quickly (the windows, that is, not the weatherstripping, which was the problem in the first place). I kind of wonder whether the previous owner actually worked on the windows at all, as she had promised she would do. Miata.net was a great resource for how to get it apart, as usual.

I also installed the new plugs and wires and I’m delighted to say that, while there’s still just a little power drop at around 3,000 RPM, it’s running way better now, it feels a lot racier, there is no longer any misfire, and it doesn’t smell like raw gasoline at the tailpipe anymore. There’s a nice, fresh exhaust smell now.

I love the smell of freshly-burned gasoline, don’t you? I mean really properly burned, catalyzed, and muffled exhaust. Maybe I should figure out how to make air fresheners with that smell. They’d sell really well to single guys. I have a sneaking suspicion married guys probably won’t be buying much of that particular product.

And speaking of the Miata’s previous owner, I had asked her to realign the headlights when I agreed to buy it; they were pointing in pretty much every direction but straight ahead. She promised to do it and said it was done, but when I got it home that first night, the headlight aim was just as bad as before. I was trying to figure out why she would have lied about it when I noticed a picture I had taken of the car at her house before I picked it up. The headlight doors were WAY out of alignment with the hood, and now they line up beautifully. So it turns out she misunderstood me and aligned the wrong thing. No problem, though, since I took care of the headlight aim myself, which was simple to do, and I have no idea how to align the doors with the hood. I may not have gotten what I wanted, but I definitely got what I needed. Cool.

The landscapers did a bunch of work on the back yard today. The cement forms are mostly in, the sprinklers are mostly in, and the cinder blocks for the wall are mostly in. They think they only have a day or two more work to do. I don’t have any reason to disbelieve them, but I’ll be pleasantly surprised if that turns out to be true. Seems to me like there’s still lots of work left out there. It will be really nice to have a pretty back yard again.

Spent most of the afternoon at an alignment shop in Stockton. The Suburban’s alignment has been pretty bad for a little while now, and we finally found the time to get an appointment. It seems to have stopped pulling, so I suspect they did a pretty good job.

Loyal Reader Number Four’s sister Melanie (link note: I wonder why Melanie is conducting college predatory classes) is coming to town tomorrow. LRN4 will pick her up at the airport and bring her here for the day. We’ll have a nice dinner and then she’ll go back to San Francisco for her conference or whatever it is she’s doing here. I’m looking forward to seeing her.

Poor Loyal Reader Number One. He’s feeling really sick today. He has a big piano competition tomorrow, and he hasn’t been able to do much practicing today, and he’s really hoping to at least not feel any worse tomorrow. I’m hoping the same thing. Get well soon, LRN1!

I think that’s enough for today. Have a great weekend.