Tag Archives: blog post drafts

2015/08/10 (M) Keep on Buss’in

We have a doe and her spotted faun that have been coming in the early morning to the deer block we set in our back yard the other day.  They were there again this morning and the block is close enough to the house that we got a good look at them through the bedroom doorwall.  They must be comfortable with the setting as the faun wandered off towards the western part of our property and the doe let it go while she continued to lick the block.  Eventually, however, the faun was out of sight and the doe headed off in that direction to find it.

We had cinnamon raisin toast and soy yogurt for breakfast, with orange-grapefruit juice to wash down the vitamins.  I used up the last of the Sweet Seattle Dreams half-caff coffee beans for our pot of morning coffee.  Keith usually mows our grass on Mondays and he came to the front door around 9:30 AM to ask if we wanted it cut this week.  That’s the first time he has done that this summer but it was an appropriate and timely question.  We have had very little rain the last couple of weeks so the grass had not gown much since last Monday and was a little brown in places.  We agreed to skip this week, which I think was what Keith was hoping I would say.  There was a high probability of rain starting around noon and I suspect he had another yard he wanted to cut before it started.

We have been very busy the last few days and I have not had time to do more than outline my blog posts.  Linda needed to work on an analysis for the bakery so I spent much of the day filling in the details of my recent posts.  Our days are very full and if I wait too long I cannot capture them accurately.

Linda looked up the information on the DTE Energy “Energy Efficiency” appliance recycling program.  I called the 866 number and was assisted by Reginald.  The earliest available pickup date was Friday, August 28 so I took that.  It took quite a while to arrange the pickup but Reginald appeared to get all the pertinent information and give me a confirmation code and a phone number to reach the truck on pickup day.

Once the refrigerator pickup was arranged I texted Chuck to let him know the details.  That prompted a return phone call and a conversation about refrigerators.  Having seen how our swap went on Saturday he and Barb are also thinking very seriously about replacing the refrigerator in their bus.  The rationale is the same as ours; the fridge is old, so it is noisier and less efficient than newer ones, and having it break on the road would be more than inconvenient.

Replacing a refrigerator in an RV, especially a residential unit in a bus conversion, is not like replacing one in a home.  Access is a major problem and there is not a lot of space to maneuver it or get more than two pairs of hands on it.  If they replace theirs here (in Michigan) their bus will be inside their garage/shop, the forklift will be available to do the heavy lifting, and trusted friends and family will be available to help.  And, most importantly, they won’t be living in it and dependent on the fridge for preserving their food.

Before the day got away from me I pulled up the PDF of the manual for the wireless keypad for the large garage door.  When I installed the new opener for the small garage door and reprogrammed the wireless remotes for our cars I inadvertently rendered the keypad inoperable.  Reprogramming it was simple enough once I had the procedure.  It’s the small, simple tasks like this one that become big burdens if not taken care of in a timely manner.

The predicted rain started around noon and was steady until 3 PM.  It was just the kind of rain we needed; gentle enough to give it a chance to soak in but hard enough to provide a useful quantity of moisture to the ground.  Six to 10 hours of this would have been even better but we were glad for what we got.

I had thought that we might mask off the inside of the coach today with painter’s plastic but with the rain and humidity, and plenty of other things to do, I decided to defer that until tomorrow.  During the afternoon Jarel texted me a couple of pictures and a brief status update on our custom woodworking projects.  Not surprisingly he is already well along on the construction of the pull-out pantry and has spray lacquered the pieces for the built-in sofa.

One of the photos showed one of the 1/8″ thick aluminum plates that will form the side rails for each shelf in the pantry.  He applied a brushed finish to the plate and countersunk the screw holes so the heads would not protrude beyond the surface.  Jarel did metal work at one time before he became a cabinet maker so he knows how to do this kind of stuff.  He is also meticulous and takes great pride in his work.  Given a choice I would always prefer to hire a craftsman who cares as much, or more, about the quality of their work as I do.

When I know I am going to have a long full day, such as this coming Wednesday, I will try to “write ahead” on my blog, basically outlining the plan for the day but obviously not filling in the details of things that have not yet happened.  Along the same lines, I often use future blog posts as a planning tool.  As things occur to me that I need to do I will note them in the draft of a future post.  If the thing actually gets done on that date I flesh out the details, and if not, I move it to a new date.

I think I did several loads of laundry today and spent some time editing and uploading blog posts during the evening, but as I am finishing this post later in the week I have lost the details and will just end here.

 

2015/07/30 (R) Number Theory

We awoke to a decidedly different air mass than we have been experiencing the last week or so; cool with noticeably lower humidity.  Linda turned off the air-conditioning and we opened up the house for the first time in a week.  We had a light breakfast of grapefruit and cinnamon raisin toast and then spent an hour enjoying our coffee.  I finished the little treatise on cryptology yesterday at Panera and started reading Oystein Ore’s “Invitation to Number Theory.”

Linda needed to make a quick grocery run for miso so I worked for a while on the sofa design, laying out the pieces that will be cut from a 48″ x 96″ sheet of 3/4″ plywood.  When she returned from her errand she went for her daily walk while it was still cool.  After her walk she made a cold black bean salad and then made roll up sandwiches using multigrain pita bread.  It was delicious and healthy; the bread alone had nine grams of protein.  After lunch Linda attended to some nutritional calculations related to the dinner she planned to fix and I gathered up the tools I thought we would need to take care of some things in the bus.  That included some small zip lock bags for small parts.

My first task was to remove the screws that secure the shorter head end of the bed platform to the foundation.  The platform is in two pieces joined by a piano (continuous) hinge.  After doing this I lifted the other end and was reminded that I had already disconnected the two gas springs that normally hold it open.  I also realized that the wires which supply 12VDC power to the two compartment lights on the underside of the platform were routed under a fixed cross member and cable-clamped to the other piece of the platform.  I already knew, or assumed, that they were hard-wired and had spade lug crimp connectors ready to go.

\With Linda’s help I was able to detach the wire loom at several points to create some slack.  The +12VDC wire was connected to a microswitch with a spade lug so it was easy to unplug.  I clipped the neutral wire, stripped both free ends, and attached an insulated male spade connector to one and an insulated female spade connector to the other.  With that the entire platform could now be removed from the bus to get it out of the way while we install the new floor tiles.

In the kitchen area of the bus we unscrewed and removed the walnut trim around the fixed window on the passenger side.  I reinstalled all of the screws so we would not misplace them while Linda took the trim to the garage to store it.  I removed the screws that held each of the three reading lights to underside of the upper cabinet in front of the fixed window.  They were wired with very clever little insulated terminal strips which made them easy to disconnect and will make them equally easy to reconnect.  Linda bagged each fixture and its parts separately in one gallon zip lock bags.

The AC light fixture was trickier to remove.  First I turned off the circuit breaker on the inverter sub-panel and verified that the light no longer came on.  By lifting the false bottom of the cabinet I could see that the fixture was installed onto a ceiling junction box.  That meant there was probably a post threaded into a cross bracket with the post protruding down through the center/mounting hole in the fixture and held in place by the decorative nut.

I was not able to turn the decorative nut by hand so I got the faucet wrench.    I have had this unique and specialized tool for a very long time.  It is designed to reach up behind a sink and grab the retaining nut on the underside of a faucet 12 inches away.  The head is spring loaded and flips over to allow the wrench to be used to tighten or loosen the nut.  Occasionally, like today, it finds an alternate use.  I like it when that happens.

\With the fixture loose I was able to color code the neutral wires with white tape, untwist the wire nuts, and then put the wire nuts back on the two supply wires.  Linda took the fixture to the garage and figured out way to store it safely using an unused waste basket.  We talked about the built-in sofa and some HVAC details for the passenger side of the cockpit before wrapping up our bus work for today.

While I put the tools away Linda started working on dinner.  Tonight’s special creation was vegan Pad Thai.  Regular Pad Thai was a favorite of ours for many years even after we switched to a vegetarian diet as we were still eating eggs.  The dish has a lot of ingredients, so it is a lot of work, and a good vegan version is a real challenge, but Linda executed the dish quite well.  We finished up the watermelon for dessert, which was sweet but light and refreshing.

I try to write every day while the sequence and details of the day’s events are still clear and my thoughts and feelings about them are somewhat “in the moment.”  But I don’t usually finish a post and upload it the same day.  I often finish it the next morning which means I have a chance to sleep on in it.  We have been so busy with the bus remodeling project that I have barely had time to write the drafts of my posts and I have not had the time to transfer them, edit them, select photos and post-process them, and upload everything to the blog.  I don’t like getting so far behind, but there are only so many hours in a day and I do need at least seven hours sleep a night.

After dinner I e-mailed Josh to see when we might get the extra fabric we ordered to make seat and back cushions for the sofa I am designing for the bus.  I then settled in to read about number theory before drifting off to sleep.