Late last week, I pulled from my mailbox a strange little card... It was the size of a business card, and looked basically like one, except that the name and phone number was hand written... You know, with a pen... Not just printed to look that way... Now that seems like a crappy way to make a business card to me, but then I looked at it more closely... Obviously this was placed in my mailbox by hand, which if I recall is illegal unless you work for the postal service, because it had no address, or stamp... On further inspection, in very small type at the bottom, was "US Government Form ####-##" or something along those lines... So apparently, the government prints generic cards for the people that work for the department in question... What office you say?... Well the Office Of Personnel Management... Under the person's name, but before the phone number was the word INVESTIGATOR, in all caps... Now, am I really supposed to be impressed with this thing?... The rest of the card rants on about how I may have information regarding someone I may or may not know, and that I should call this person to set up a personal interview... The area code was for DC... That was it... Now, if I didn't have free long distance, I might have blown it off except that my girlfriend works for NOAA, and it was possible that they were finally getting around to checking her background so she couldn't pose a security risk from looking at algae from space... So I called, and the person actually answered at 5 minutes to 5... She answered the phone as "insert name here... INVESTIGATOR" I almost dropped the phone laughing... At any rate, Once I found out it wasn't my girlfriend, I thought it must be one of the guys I went to college with that work in the aerospace industry, and have crazy clearances already... Mind you, I haven't seen or talked to these guys in years, but I still hear about them... Well eventually I managed to beat a name out of Ms INVESTIGATOR, and I swear to you I didn't know it... So I asked how it was that the government thought I might or might not know something about this person, and she told me that the person lives in my neighborhood, and could we schedule an interview for the next morning?... Two things struck me there... 1) I didn't know the name so what good could I theoretically be, and 2) I do have a job, and while I have a flexible schedule, she couldn't possibly know that, unless she had already been asking my other neighbors about me... which led me down other mental paths, but they're not important right now... So I asked for the name again, and was told, and then she started asking if I was in the blue and brown house... Now I'm getting a bit creeped out... Yes, I'm in the blue and brown house... Well apparently the person under INVESTIGATION is one of the neighbors to my right as I look at the house.... Sure, I've met them... They have a couple kids, they're lesbians, I don't like their landscaping, they don't like my landscaping, and that's about the sum total of what I know.... Hell I can't remember the names now... So I tried to explain to the INVESTIGATOR, that I was fairly new to the area, and I really didn't talk to my neighbors, and I'm basically a hermit in my house, but she just really wanted to have that interview... I explained that I'd be happy to take time out of my life to talk to her about someone I knew, but I would not waste my time, or my tax dollars paying her salary to get together with here to tell her I didn't know the person... She said she would be in the area anyway to talk to the other neighbors, and it would be no trouble, and I reiterated that I wouldn't waste MY time, ignoring the wasted tax money for the moment... I then explained that I had nothing against the government, or the OPM, and that I had gone through background checks myself, and had interviews about other people in the past, but that I really had nothing to contribute to this INVESTIGATION... She said fine and hung up....
Why do I get the feeling there is now a red mark next to my name in a folder someplace... Personally I think she was feeling just a bit too self-important... She probably used to work for the IRS...
Yea... You know how I haven't been doing a bloody thing?... Well after this weekend, when I'm going to PA with my girlfriend, I begin on the show from hell... We've got a couple little things going on the first week and change of November, but this show ships out late in January... If I start building it in mid December, I might just make it happen... Of course, I won't get approval until early January for the final design, and budget, but that's a matter that might frighten mere mortals, not me... We have after all been down this road before... (of course, we also picked up a show or two that go in in Mid January that will suck away time, but at least they aren't big builds)
Check your social life at the door please... In fact check your entire life at the door, and bring your pajamas to the shop this is going to get ugly...
I'm stuck home today, waiting for Verizon to come figure out why I have no dial tone... Of course since all they let you speak to when you call is a machine, they dispatched a line guy to fix my problem, even though the lines must be ok since my DSL works... Gotta be computer on their end, but I digress...
With nothing really to do, I ran through my blog stats... I'm always curious about what search strings send people my way, and if something is really popular, I might update the post, or do a follow on... Nothing new showed up, but damn do people seem to hit me looking for Pella window info...
If you scroll further down to the one hit search strings, that's when you get some really strange hits... Today, I actually found this in the log, and honestly, I don't ever remember using these words together in a post, but I guess I must have someplace...
"feeding kittens to snakes"
Now, I absolutely hate snakes... I love cats... I'm pretty damn sure I wouldn't have written about feeding one to the other... Apparently Google works in strange ways...
Update: I couldn't stand the curiosity, so I Googled it... Not only does it show up, but I'm #4 for it... It points back to my post from ages ago on my old blog that I imported here talking about me... How bloody bizarre...
I've always been told that people that have a "normal" job tend to get used to their daily cycle... They get up at basically the same time every day (lets ignore weekends for the sake of discussion), go to work, and get home around the same time at night, finally going to bed around the same time... Me, I don't get that so much... Hell I basically only work full time about 6 months a year at this point... Even when we are working, there are only short runs where I hit the same points on the clock in succession...
I'm not sure if that is keeping me young, or is going to put me in my grave earlier...
I've known for some time that I was going to have to do some masonry work on the house... Once upon a time, there was a little side porch on the house, and someone decided to close it in to expand the kitchen... That has meant any number of annoying little problems in the kitchen and especially the plumbing therein... The weird part of it all is that when they built the little foundation for that addition, they stuck a couple windows in it, even though they only led to a crawl space... (sarcasm)They had since been boarded up with OSB, which we all know holds up extremely well exposed to the elements at ground level... (/sarcasm) So when I looked into the crawlspace from my basement, there was light streaming in from outside, and a cold wind following it...
Well today I woke up to a beautiful fall day... It was sunny and clear if a little cool... While I wouldn't call it perfect to be doing masonry work, Too hot isn't good either... So I ripped out the old OSB, window, and frame... I then had to pull out all the scrap lumber, paneling, and sheetrock that some moron prior to me and stuffed in there... Then it was off to buy some bricks, and cement and home desperate...
Back to the house, mix cement, wet down slab after cleaning, butter and stack brick, clean up joints, and shezam, I had a nice brick plug for my wall... The only part I couldn't fill was the very top, because its behind the sheathing enough to make it annoying... Since its not a load bearing area, I'll simply wait until the cement sets, and then fill that space with expanding foam, wait for that to harden, and then trim it back neatly...
Now I really don't have much need to do cement, and brick work very often... I have the tools, because it has come up occasionally at a friends house, or out in PA at the farm... There was a decent cement mixing pan buried in the crap in the garage when I moved in, which made this much nicer... At $0.63 each for bricks from home desperate, I can assure you there will not be much masonry work done here from them... I'll go to a real supplier from now on, but since it was only 30 bricks, I didn't feel like waiting until they would be open tomorrow...
When I was done, and had cleaned the joints, and slab in front of it, I was quite happy with the result... All the joints are pretty consistent in size, and the courses are straight... They're not perfectly level as I was stuck following the grade of the slab, and trying to match the courses on either side of the opening... That won't matter soon enough, as next summer, I'll get some exterior coating from a family member who has a dealership in one of the big names in that type of product... While I'd actually have exposed brick all the way around, there are sections that have already been covered by a previous owner, and doing so will actually seal up the whole foundation from surface water, which will be a good thing...
Yea, this is way outa place on my blog... Deal with it...
As I sat at the lounge at the Trop last week (like I had another choice since that's the place that had the WiFi and I had things to do), I noticed I can't tell you how many women wearing heels that shouldn't have been... Now, this is not me being judgemental saying they are too fat, or their legs didn't look good enough, any number of them had great legs, and had perfect bodies... The thing that set me off was that they couldn't walk in the damn things...
Now, I suspect that wearing heels has got to be a pain in terms of walking... Some women though have no problem, and some just can't hack it...
Ladies, whatever effect you were trying to achieve with the heels will be ruined if you can't walk... At least to me...
Just a delayed thought...
Have I ever mentioned I hate the cold?... My house was 58 degrees when I got home in the rain this morning... I was too tired to turn the heat on then, so I just got around to that now... It's naturally not hot yet, but I can hear the boiler roaring away in the utility room... While I can't stand the thought of what I'm now going to be paying until it gets warm outside again, it sure is nice to know that in a few hours, I won't have to be cold in my own house again...
I'm in Vegas... I am surrounded by money... I give a rats ass about gambling, so I'm not annoyed that I'm not winning... I'm annoyed because the "ATM" in the Trop isn't really an ATM... You have to buy a players card first which costs money... You can then put that card in their ATM and take out money, which costs you more...
FUCK THAT!...
I ran across the street to a real ATM in a little store that didn't even have a fee...
So I'm sitting here in fabulous Las Vegas... I'm sitting in a lounge at the Tropicana... I'm blogging here because this is one of only two place in the Trop where you can find broadband... How Lame... But that's not what I'm talking about...
I'm sitting in fabulous Las Vegas because a company hired us to handle the lighting aspect of their trade show booth... This is a recurring event every year, though the city usually changes... We come in and basically handle the direction and focus of the dozen or so lights in the booth... The hardest part is transporting the 5 custom glass templates to and from the show without breaking them... The actual work on site takes no more than 15 minutes... No, I'm not kidding, it takes me 15 minutes to drop the templates in the units and have them pointed where they need to be... That however is not how I actually earn the outrageous fee we charge for this event...
Trade shows are typically held in convention centers... How very logical... Convention centers are typically the target of union labor contracts... Also actually quite logical... Las Vegas Convention Center has a number of different unions that are all vieing for the same piece of pie... While logically it is the jurisdiction of the IATSE since its a production event, they have a very limited slice of the pie... They have to compete with the Teamsters, Carpenters, and IBEW, with a few smaller unions that I really can't specify as I don't have to deal with them... Those three alone are huge, powerful unions, and they don't give up anything easily to the IA... So the end result of being at the convention center all day is this... I didn't get the 15 minutes worth of work done... I had to play politics all day... I had to dodge all the bullets in the turf war I found myself caught up in the middle of...
You want to know why the union movement in America is having problems?... Come out here and try to do an event like this... 4 unions are involved in this booth... They all have their minimum charges, and their minimum personnel quantities... The reality of this booth is this... Given myself and 2 other of my usual employees, I could set this booth up, including the scenery (which is handled by someone else than me on this event), and lighting in all of about 4 hours... Throw in the carpet, and I'll make it 5 hours... The bill for labour from all the various interests for this very small booth I can assure you will be no less than 25 - 30 hours... It might be far worse than that... Last time I was in Vegas with this show the labour hour total was 57 hours...
It all brings to mind the question of "how many monkeys does it take to fuck a football?"
Perhaps tommorow, I'll get my 15 minutes of work done...
So the folks at NASA are trying for a spring launch of the shuttle... That's great as far as I'm concerned, pending they can get a handle on what's going on with the foam on the external tank... From what I've read since the last flight, they are pointing to the foam falling off due to repeated contact by employees doing work in that area... They're not talking about employees smashing it with a sledge hammer, just possibly leaning, or inadvertent contact... Now this foam has to stay put during lift off when everything is vibrating heavily, and there is god knows what kind of turbulent air whipping over it, and they're trying to tell me that an employee leaning on it would cause it to fail?... Ya know what, if the foam I put on my scenery fell off, or got damaged by someone leaning on it, I'd be out of business... These guys are actually rocket scientists, and they can't come up with a more durable system?... How about some ribbing on the tank exterior so you end up with a mechanical interlock for the sprayed on foam?... How about an elastic coating for the foam?... I mean come on, there has to be something they can come up with that will make the shit stay in place... Yea, it was really only a little chunk that came off when you look at the tank as a whole, but apparently it was enough to do in Columbia...
They are talking about reusing the tank, boosters, and engines in future equipment, so its not a waste of time to solve this now...
They need to get off their asses and fix this... They've only got a few years left to fly the shuttles as it is...
Excuse me while I whine just a bit...
Why the fuck can't my truck simply be fixed and be ok?
The diesel guys did a great job with the injection pump... The truck runs like a clock, but it seems to be idling just a little faster than before... Not a big deal really, just an observation...
Where the bottom fell out was that they must have missed plugging in a harness connection someplace... I have lost my tachometer, and my cruise control... So I crawled under the hood to find it, and find a broken connector on the brake system... Now I know they didn't touch the brakes, so this is probably going back to the brake job I had done a month ago or so... I have no idea what that connection does, so I can't panic... Beyond that though, I can't find the unplugged, or loose connection... What I need is my Haynes manual to look at the connections that deal with those systems... My Haynes manual is naturally in Baltimore... I'd take it back to the guys that did the work, but unless I have to, I don't want to hastle them since they gave me a great price for all the work they did... I will if I can't find it myself, but that will be a week and a half from now since I have to go out to Vegas Sunday...
Why can't it just be simple?
Ok... Enough with the bloody rain already... I need to get a bigger rain gauge as I've had to dump mine a few times already, and I'm just not going out there again... I trust that we've had a pile now...
We're nowhere near what we had when Floyd came through years ago and the Raritan hit 42 and change feet up, but we're at 29 feet currently... That's certainly screwing with any number of people in the area... Looks like NOAA is calling for the crest at 30 feet... 'Course, their prediction seems to be falling short of actual observations, so who knows...
My place is up on a hill... It was high and dry back at the 42' flood of '99 (Floyd), so I know I'm fine, but I really don't want to see Bound Brook floating down the river again... That was just too creepy...
Update: Make that almost 33' predicted... Major flooding happens at 33'... Main St floods at 30.5, and we're at 30.05' right now... I hope those folks kept up their flood insurance...
I've been sitting on a pile of pressure treated lumber for almost a year now at the shop... My neighbor (at the shop, not the house) has been doing a frame off restoration on his 70's pickup... This started a couple years ago mind you... The original plan called for him to restore the original bed... Then as time got tight last fall (he usually plows with this truck in the winter) he asked if I could whip a temporary bed together for him to get through the season... No problem says I... And then he got busy doing something else, and our season exploded, and well, the truck sat for yet another winter... So the lumber has been sitting around for a year... Pressure treated lumber has this tendency to start warping if you look at it strangely, if it isn't built in to something as soon as you buy it... Somehow this stack stayed almost dead true... The 4x4 and 4x6 I had for the cross frame beams twisted, but the 2x and 5/4 were straight as an arrow... A little work with a hand plane and the 4x material was perfectly fine. (I haven't used a hand plane in years... it was actually quite satisfying, and justified my purchasing a few nice old planes a couple years ago...) End result, is a pretty damn nice truck bed... I imagine I'll actually be sad when he refinishes the right parts and pulls mine off to scrap it... But then I'm pretty used to seeing my work tossed in a dumpster after not existing for very long...
My girlfriend live in Baltimore... She's got a great place in a nice neighborhood... The problem is her neighborhood is only a few blocks from a bad neighborhood... So what does that mean?... Well, the tally so far is one stolen car cover (hers), one stolen temporary licence plate (hers), one smashed window (mine), and now one knifed tire (hers)...
And if I were to stand out there with a shotgun, blow the assholes away, I'd be the bad guy... (not in her mind, its those pesky police that aren't around when they should be)
I was over reading Outfoxed today... He has something of a space issue currently... Boy can I sympathize much of the time... Imagine if you will building a ballroom that is 120' x 60' x 15' tall... Now imagine figuring out how to make that happen in a space that is 30 x 60... Now imagine that all the gear is in the shop, so you're actually down to 15 x 20, of which some is work tables... Been there... Done that... How about building a touring set of a diner in that same space that took up so much room we had to send lumber through the table saw and it passed through a door on the set... Yep, done that too...
There is no shop in the world that has enough space... (well except the metal fabricator I sometimes use who bought an entire steel mill to set up shop in) No matter how much space you have, something will always be in the way, or too close to something that makes dust, or the glue spray area... Its just the way of the world...
Of course your projects expand to fill the space you have too, which doesn't help... For example, we just took on a second warehouse... We moved our old work tables over there so we can build new ones for the shop space... Between the pallet racks, tables, forklift and such, that space is full right now... In the shop space, I've got a couple walls I have to build for a TV studio, and a 70's vintage truck I'm building a flatbed for... Realistically, apart from the two walls, there is no paying work going on right now, and I'm still confined to working on one 5 x 8 table to build them...
And somehow, if I had to I could start building that ballroom in that space again tomorrow if I really had to...
Shortly after the last post, while I was letting the system cool down, my cell rang... It was a number I did not know, but with nothing major to do I thought I'd screw with the telemarketer... Fortunately, it was not a telemarketer, it was a client... This is 2pm on Thursday incidentally, keep the times in mind...
The person in question owns a major company in the entertainment business. Multiple locations across the country kinda large... Unfortunately for them, their fabricator had just bailed on them, and they needed a number of aluminum structures made, and ready to go Saturday... This was not good... They called us, because we rent from them when we run short on gear, and we had just been up there chatting with them about possibly doing some work for them... At any rate, the bottom line was there was a very limited number of hours until the gear had to move, so off I went to the shop, praying my heating system held out while I dealt with this...
The material came in at 5pm, along with a sample unit. I looked and knew right away we were going to have to dress every piece of material as they had just cut them in a hurry, and all the edges were sharp... There go a few hours... Mind you, I am still the only person in the shop... I have not been able to round up another welder (the machine, or the person), and I had not thought we would need to dress everything, so I hadn't gotten someone to do that... Well by 7pm my partner got back from the event in the city, and I put him to work dressing and cutting aluminum to fit my needs... I started welding by 8pm... My partner ran out of material around midnight, and went home, I kept going until 2:30 when I was about to fall over. I grabbed 3.5 hours of sleep on the office floor, and was back at welding by 6:30... Our second welder (both machine and man) got in around 7:30, and we were off to the races... We kept at it with one interruption where the other welder had to go home for a couple hours (I kept going) until 1:30am.
I dragged myself home, took a shower, found it was actually painful to stand on the shower mat since my feet were so sore, and then passed out, knowing the truck would be there at 11am to pick up the finished product... We hadn't cleaned up the last 3 units since we had all that time in the morning, and we were beat...
I got in around 9:30am today... Made some coffee, and by 9:50 the truck was there... Ugh... Now the nice easy cleaning session turned semi-urgent... We blew through what we could, and sent them on their way...
Were the units as nice as I might normally make them?... No, I'd never send something like that out of my shop normally... Were they done?... Hell yea!..
I just did a rough count, and there are around 1120 welds on the entire project. Those welds consumed 20 pounds of aluminum electrode from the welders. That wire is .030" in diameter... If I had my reference book handy, I'd figure out not many feet of wire that is, but rest assured that its a whole lot... Thankfully the welders never really broke down... One major problem on an overnight, and we'd have been dead in the water...
Hours later, after some more sleep, I still feel like hell... What a crappy way to start a weekend... Good to build up some professional collateral, but rough on the body...
As I intimated in last night's post, I developed a leak in the plumbing again. It didn't show up until I filled the system, and then heated it up. That leads me to believe that some of the flux had somehow hardened at a point in the fitting that wasn't clean enough. The flux is water soluble, but when I was just charging with air to test, it held up... Add water, and you have a leak...
So I drained the system, and then blew it out with compressed air to get as much out as possible... I pulled a valve body apart at a point just below the bad fitting and let the remaining water run out there... I kept pumping air at the open fitting from both directions until I got nothing but air... Why?.. Well it is impossible to get fittings hot enough to solder when there is any water nearby... It simply does not work... While it was an annoying point to work, it was actually a good point to be able to drain thankfully...
I heated it up with the torch, and then tried to get some of the flux in there... It seemed to be ok, so I proceeded to heat the fittings and try to re-solder them... This is a heavy bronze valve body connected to a copper pipe, so it takes a lot of heat to get the valve to solder temperature... I worked the solder around the fitting and again it appeared that it would be ok... I then walked away for a while to let it cool on its own, rather than hitting it with water, which I imagine just isn't the best way to go...
This morning, I came downstairs, and looked at everything with fresh eyes... (well as fresh as they are first thing in the morning...) Break out the inspection mirror and flashlight, and look... Sadly, I am not convinced that it will hold, so rather than filling it with water again, it was off to the plumbing supply... I bought a replacement valve as there is no way in hell to easily reuse sweat fittings... The rest of the fittings I needed to deal with this, I already had here... So I cut everything out, made a short career of cleaning everything, and then went to work with the flux, torch, and solder... This time, the joints look like they are supposed to look... The solder fills the gap between the fittings all the way around and appears to have flown smoothly...
Right now the system is getting up to operating temperature again after re-filling it with water, and bleeding the air again... Once I'm up to temp in the whole system, then I'll start cycling the zones one and off in 20 minute intervals to see if I can break anything else...
Have I mentioned lately how much I hate plumbing?...
I had a post thought through on money woes, and how its almost impossible to get ahead financially today, but it'd just depress me to type it up...
I had a post thought through about the leak I found in the heating system after I filled it with water and fired it up, but that would frustrate me to type up...
Instead, let me ask you this... What is the point of super/mega/nuclear hot wings?.. As I was sitting in a pub tonight having dinner, the guy a couple seats down was talking (way too loudly or I wouldn't have this topic) about a batch of wings he had had a few days ago that was so hot he had to have 4 drinks after the first wing... While I understand the need for the drinks, I can not understand the fact that he said he loved them... Now, I like spicy food, but I'm not crazy about HOT things... I think the spice should be there as a flavor, not as a punishment... I've had nuclear wings (once only thanks) and they were hot enough that I not only drank a pitcher of beer after the first wing, but I could not taste the beer, or anything else until the next day... Now I accept that the wing is really only there to carry a sauce since there's not much meat on there anyway, but don't you want to enjoy the experience rather than crying through everything after the first?...
Simply put, I just don't get it... If you have the answer, let me know please... And spare me the crap about the euphoric high the pain can give you... I don't buy that in the least bit....
That's right... The End Is Near!!!
The end of the plumbing that is...
The last radiator came in... After taking a few days off after the wrong hole drill placement, I installed the unit yesterday. The system held full pressure all night, so that aspect seems wrapped up... I spent today (well part of today after I was in the office) dealing with the wiring...
3 Zone Valves + 3 Thermostats + 1 transformer + 1 Low Water Cut Off + 1 Circulator + 1 Emergency Switch + 1 Breaker = A Ton of Wire and Connections...
I just couldn't manage to get myself to install the last two thermostats today... I'll deal with them tomorrow... The weather isn't giving me the hurry-up treatment, so I'll probably fill the system Monday so I have an entire week to look for any issues prior to going to Vegas for a week on business... (I hate Vegas incidentally)
If everything works as advertised, I can stop posting about plumbing, switch banners, and get back to wood butchery...