That will teach you not to bend over to look for stuff you drop. You're supposes to take about 3 minutes trying to figure out how to get down on your hands and knees while staying close enough to the furnithure so that you can crawl back into an upright position. Getting old ain't for sissies. Praying for you, bro. I certainly understand the back out of whack and how debilitating that is...
It's like the meme that says at age 19 you can fall 50 feet onto jagged rocks, get up, brush yourself off, and finish your run. At age 50 you sleep on the wrong pillow and put your back out for two days. Praying for relief and healing.
Trying to figure out the best sequence to get some space trashed and rebuilt. I have a long narrow closet that I plan to split into two closets - it will become shorter while the back end of it will become a separate closet accessed from an adjacent room. The problem I have is that rebuilding the adjacent room is dependent on having the windows replaced, which means it's going to be a while (until it's warmer, given I need to make big holes in the outside wall when the windows come out completely). The stuff currently in the closet will need a new home while it's gutted, which makes things more of a nuisance. And I'm a little reluctant to have a drywall guy come in to drywall a space that's barely six feet square, but I'd need that to happen before I can put stuff back into the closet. The adjacent room is going to end up with some interesting storage spaces. There was a closet beside it, that I've broken through to make the room bigger. Beside the closet was a space over the stairs. I cut a small hole in the wall and found.... nothing. An empty space. It has wallpaper on the walls so presumably it used to be a room. It can't become a room again because the staircase is below it, but I figure I can turn it into some kind of storage. I just need to figure what kind of storage, and how sturdy the supports will need to be to make sure it doesn't end up being a quick way to get things downstairs. I'm thinking I'll turn a section of it into a space to hang clothes, and maybe put in a couple of built-in shelves or similar. Drawers would be of limited use because anyone shorter than about seven feet tall wouldn't be able to see into the top drawers.
Getting old sucks but it beats the alternative. The worst I managed thus far was twisting my neck and making it sore for a couple of days. Apparently turning to look out of the window wasn't a good idea....
These days I go with Red Skelton. When I wake up if I don't see flowers and don't smell incense I get out of bed.
Fun With Cable today. I went to run another cable from the breaker panel to an upstairs room. I have two adjacent rooms, both of which were powered by nasty knob and tube wiring that has long since been disconnected and mostly removed, leaving the two rooms with no power. I ran a cable from the attic down into one room, and have a heavy duty extension cord running through the wall cavities to a downstairs socket, but figured I might as well get some cable into place ready for when the rooms are rebuilt. A few days ago I ran the cable to the first room. That process left me a small roll of cable that I thought would be long enough until I tried to make it reach, but got most of the way towards reaching both ends before concluding that it might be long enough but would probably fall slightly short, so I pulled the cable out, opened a new 250' roll, and ran a nice new cable. Now I've got power in both rooms. The cable is long enough to run to the first socket in each room, and obviously from there I can run more sockets once I've got more rebuilding done. So technically now with each room having its own socket, a space through the wall between the two rooms, and the heavy duty extension cord, I've got three 20A sockets accessible from both rooms. At least until I start rebuilding walls...
Another round of Fun With Cables. I decided it's time to get rid of the last bits of knob and tube wiring in the house. They aren't particularly causing problems, it just seems like it would be good to get rid of them. It would also mean that part of my work in the section I'm fixing up will be easier, as I can get rid of a stretch of nasty wire that currently powers the switch that feeds some outside lights. The first step is to figure out how things hang together. That's not always easy, given how knob and tube doesn't follow the same rules as more modern cable. But I figured the last fixture that this particular loop powers, and how to get at the crucial points I needed to reach. Cables attached to knobs make it impossible to use the old cable to pull the new cable, and the way whoever put the cable in secured fixtures to joists rather than back boxes means it's all but impossible to use something like a fish tape. So I used a hook on a long pole to loosen the short piece of cable that secured the main cable to the knob, so I could lift the whole thing off the knob. From there I could use the old cable to pull a string to the most accessible point, and then use the string to pull a new cable. There were still many frustrations along the way, not least when the new cable wouldn't quite align with the hole in the joist despite being pulled by a string going through the hole. In the end I used the head of a construction grade nail to poke into the hole alongside the string while pulling on the string until suddenly everything gave and I had the end of the cable in my hand. Then I just had to wire a new switch because the old switch had no grounding screw, and connect everything together in the basement. Now that is done I've got a little less knob and tube in the house, the ends that once powered this particular light are cut off and taped over. Now I have two light fittings that are powered by knob and tube. The next one to remove is the ceiling fan in the kitchen. I can get at the point where the wire goes down to the switch and where at least one wire feeds out towards the fan. I know how I want to get at the underside of the switch to feed power in so, assuming there's nothing hugely ugly with how the wire goes from the ceiling cavity into the fan (and that's a big assumption, knowing my house) it should be a relatively easy process. Once that is done I just need to do the same for one final light fitting, replace the light fitting while I'm at it - neither my wife nor I have ever particularly liked the fitting that's there - and then there will be no more knob and tube connected to anything. As we go through and pull rooms apart we can physically remove the last of it as we go.
Standing in a freak blizzard like some sorta numbskull. Temps go sub zeero this week. Prepping for the west coast. Prepping for... I forgot. Whatever happens that was it. So long.
Yesterday's walk was interesting. The forecast said there might be 40-50mph wind gusts. What actually happened felt more like 40mph sustained winds. One stretch of road has no shelter from it at all, so I walked that half mile right into one of the strongest headwinds I've ever experienced. The wind was cold too, but I got there in the end. Today was a lazy day, we skipped church because we didn't have anything specific we needed to do, went for a walk around town this afternoon and then I spent some time tinkering with an old laptop. We bought it for my wife, found it had lots of problems, so got her a different one (we bought it used, and didn't find the problems until some time after we bought it). I took the back off it wondering whether things would be easy to fix, only to find everything worked more or less perfectly. It's underpowered, but to bring it up to maximum memory would cost $90 and an SSD would be another $50 or so. Not a lot of money, just a question of whether it's worth doing it or if it's better getting something newer. Sometimes I think it would be kinda fun to have something that's little more than a random collection of parts, that could act as some kind of totally custom firewall. But as with so much else it's a question of where to keep stuff and how much cash it's worth burning on something that sounds like a fun concept but might never come to anything.
My kitchen light fitting is less simple than I hoped. I took a look under the floorboards and found the cables go a couple of feet and then through the joist, into a space I'm not sure how to access. It may be the fan is attached to the joist that the cables go through, but it may equally be that it's attached to the next joist across. There's another space I think I can get at without ripping apart spaces that would leave our living space looking awful, that I'm hoping will give me the access I need. Assuming it does, the kitchen fan becomes easier to work with, as long as I can figure out how to get it down and back up again without trashing anything along the way.
You have no idea how many times I have considered the appeal of multiple variations on themes like that. Unfortunately terms like "insurance fraud" and "prison sentence" substantially detract from the attractiveness of these options. Even the less intrusive "homeless in winter" makes them seem less enticing, even if less powerfully than the legal implications.
Went for a walk in the woods today. I had hoped to take in one of my regular loops but had to stop and turn around when I saw just how much snow and ice was still across the trail. The point I decided to turn back was an area that I could probably have passed safely but seeing the growing amounts of ice on the trail reminded me of the last time I decided to press on regardless, and ended up going at a desperately slow pace using hands and feet because the trail was lots of loose rock, all of it covered in ice. I slipped once and landed on my rear (thankfully a well padded area) on a large flat stone, but knew if I slipped on the uneven rock it wasn't going to end well. Today I decided discretion is the better part of valor and turned around while it was still easy to do it. It was still a nice walk, the patch at the top of the mountain had some snow left but the sunshine was very warm. Too warm for February, but I won't complain. Ironically it was at the very end, on a section that I would expect to be well used, that I had problems with the ice. I walked 7 miles without issue but on the last half a mile or so before getting back to the park I found lots of small patches that were very slippery. There's a small stream beside the trail, that was higher than normal because of all the melting snow. I nearly ended up in the stream a few times.