Truly remarkable, not that I'm complaining about it at the moment I mean, he has some other not so fancy nick names too... Like for when he doesn't take a nap and 6PM hits.
Years ago I bought a clock on ebay. The guy had bought it from some kind of antiques fair, got it home to find it didn't work properly. He could have contacted the seller to ask about it, but didn't. He could have spent 30 seconds on Google but didn't. He sold it on ebay, where I bought it for next to nothing. When I went to collect it he showed me what was wrong with it, and when I got it home I fixed it in about 10 seconds. I was seriously tempted to offer to sell it back to him in full working order but decided to keep it for myself. That's the thing I like best about other peoples' children. You get to play with them for as long as it's fun, but when the tears start the line "let me give you back to mummy/daddy" makes the downsides go away. My wife likes to say you can get the kids hyped up and then let someone else deal with the aftermath. It reminds me of the sign I've seen in a few stores that offers variations of "all unattended children will be given a double espresso and a free puppy"
Started to unlace my boots and woke up, hours later, with bootlaces in my hands. "The sleep of a labouring man is sweet, whether he eat little or much..." Eccl 5:12a
Got another random dead length of knob-and-tube cable cut off. There's a knob somewhere under the floorboards that means I can't pull it out yet, but as far as I can tell I've identified both ends of it. Then laid some fiberglass over the junction I cut off, replaced the boards that ran over the top, and got them all screwed down. Then cut board to cover over another section. That was interesting - the floorboards had a couple of big nails holding them down that were under the edges of the wall studs that support the roof. I assume the floor was laid and nailed down before the wall studs were put in. Getting those out was interesting, but they had to come out to get new board into place. And then as a more interesting project I cut a 2x6 stud into pieces. I've signed up for an online woodworking course and the first project is a casual patio table, so I'm slowly making my way through that. It looks like I'm going to want a bigger table than I currently have available, so I might end up getting the biggest piece of board that will fit in the back of my car and a couple of sawhorses to create a makeshift table. Feeding an 8' long stud through my table saw was interesting. I decided to get a single piece of board to cover the space at the top of the attic stairs. That means the wiring in the crawl space will have to wait, because I need that in place so I have something to crawl back out onto. I don't want to be backing out of a very confined space and having to watch where I put knees and feet.
A '95 Terry 24' travel trailer. In quite good shape for it's age. We got back a couple hours ago. Returning necessitated a complete washing of the trailer as in the space of 8 km of wet gravel road, it was rather coated with dirt. The truck was about the same lovely shade of dirt brown. Regardless a nice weekend was had. Free camping right on the lake and we could even have a campfire. That will probably be the only weekend this season that fires will be allowed. Predictions are for another bad fire season.
My board for the top of the stairs is now acquired. Cut slightly oversize at the store so it would fit in my car, with the intention that I'll trim it once I've decided exactly how big I want it to be. That will give me something to look forward to tomorrow morning.
Travel trailer? That's not camping. Camping involves some type of canvas at least. Still sounds like a good weekend.
To count as proper camping you have to sleep under a tent, on the earth, with as little comfort as possible. You should ideally not get to sleep until about 4am, by which time you should have grown accustomed to the random noises from around you. But you need to rise no later than about 3am to catch something to cook for breakfast and gather the wood you'll need to cook it. ETA: I forgot to mention that unless your tent leaks it doesn't count, and if you don't inadvertently pitch your tent on top of a nest of angry fire ants it doesn't count. I think the scientific term for camping is something like "sleep deprivation".
Monster achievement today. I took a piece of board that was about 48x36 inches, trimmed it down so it was more like 45x33 inches, and screwed it to the joists in the attic. That was a Herculean task for today. Now I might sit in the sun for a bit and soak up some vitamin D.
I'm not quite that much of a purest. Tent camper is fine. No leaks is great. Air matresses, or other pad is great. When growing up we camped across country on vacation trips. One night stands in a 12 X 12 umbrella tent, which is how we started, can be a bit tiring.
Been there and done that with pure tent camping including hike-in camping with everything on your back. With three kids its a lot handier to have a dry respite and on those cold nights a furnace is a wonderful thing.
But you do rather lose your "four Yorkshiremen" points if you indulge in such luxury as a furnace and, indeed, in warmth from any source. Unless, perhaps, you grow trees from seeds and cut them down with your bare hands to use as firewood.
This morning's fun job is trying to figure out my ugly wiring in the bathroom. In order to save myself from multiple trips between a confined crawl space and the basement (three flights of stairs each way) I've engineered a temporary setup whereby I have my entire bathroom wired onto what is technically an extension cord. An extension cord made from 12-gauge cable and on a heavy duty plug, but an extension cord nonetheless. What it means is that I can unplug the entire bathroom from within the crawl space, which will then let me connect and disconnect different parts of the ugly clutch of cables without needing the endless trips up and down the stairs. And then, once it's all worked out, another bunch of ugly wiring can go in the trash and I can reconnect it in a more permanent way.
You do what you have to do We did have a space heater that kept our, by then, fold up tent camper nice and warm. That assumes we had an electric connection.
My wife was out with a friend this morning so I decided to get busy with the cluster of cables. Trying to sketch out what it might look like inside the wall had been an exercise in futility because nothing quite made sense. So I unravelled the tape on a couple of joins expecting something ugly and.... I found something ugly. It looks much like a couple of switch loops, which is all well and good but there seems to be an extra cable that's joined up in the junction box but doesn't seem to be needed anywhere. And then there's the way white and black cables are switched around. Historically I've wondered whether putting a tag of black tape on the end of a white neutral wire is really necessary, figuring that if you don't recognise a switch loop you might be better off not doing electrical work. But having seen this hideous clutch of wiring that seems to do a horrible job of blending single-core cables with twin-core cables, dropping one core down through the ceiling while connecting the other in the attic, I'd have really appreciated a tab of black tape even if only as a bit of assurance that whoever put this in had even the faintest idea of what they were doing, rather than just kludging it until it all works. It looks like they've put all the switches in the neutral side of things, so the connectors in the ceiling fixture are still live even when it's switched off. It turned out I could have just killed the switch at the breaker panel because much of what I was doing was with everything disconnected, isolating cable ends and running up and down stairs (only one flight, thankfully) to flick switches with an electrical continuity tester connected in the attic. So now, after an hour or more of getting increasingly hot and sweaty crawling in and out of a confined space, I've got a good idea of just what my ugly bathroom cabling is actually doing. So at least that's progress. ETA: needless to say the rogue wire core that is connected but doesn't seem to do anything useful is connected to the live feed. Because, obviously, right?
Curiously, if you take the face plates off the switches and sockets in the bathroom what you see is nice white cable with ground wires and all. It's just that the ground wires aren't connected to anything. A socket tester confirms the sockets have open grounds. So I can only assume some knucklehead has put just enough white cable in to look like it's done properly when the truth is it's botched together. So when it's time to replace the wiring I'll have to hope I can use the old wire to pull a new wire, and pretty much start over. Either way I think I'm going to have to drill some holes from above and use a cable offcut or a fish tape or some such to try and work my way down. This one isn't the worst botch I've seen in the house but it's certainly on the list.
Tango, if we hear a bang followed by a thump we'll know you ran afoul of the screwed up wiring and call the ambulance.
No thumps today. I wanted to go for a walk in the woods on Wednesday but just as I was getting ready to go the phone rang. It was my roofer, wanting to know if he could send his guys around to do a job I asked him about a couple of weeks back. Not the best timing but I need the roof fixed more than I need a walk in the woods so I told him to go ahead. Yesterday it rained pretty hard. The ceiling doesn't leak any more, so I'm happy. And today it was sunny so I got to go out for my walk. I took the harder walk today - the route I've used as my "go to" route the last few times is about 6-7 miles of rolling hills. Some of the hills are steep but none of them are very long, so it's an alternating work-rest-work-rest kind of walk. Today's route was another go-to hike but harder, the base hike is still about 6-7 miles but the first half is relentlessly uphill, then along a ridge, then downhill. Today I added another loop to it, to take in a particularly nice vista. It added about 3 miles to the route, and another 600-odd feet of climbing. Fitbit's tally for the day so far is about 18000 steps and 185 floors. The hike today showed me I need to do more work to maintain and regain fitness. There's a route I've got in mind that would be about 25 miles all in, and end up at a brewery/pizzeria my wife and I rather like. I need to explore the far end of it because it takes in trails I'm not familiar with at all, and of course I'd hope they wouldn't throw me out if I showed up really hot and smelly from hiking all day to get there. Of course the fact my wife likes the place too means that getting home afterwards would be nice and easy