Whatcha doin????

Sipping a beer and watching some TV. Nice walk in the woods this afternoon, probably walking again tomorrow. Sunday the weather is supposed to be dismal so I'll finish gettng the ceiling fan fitted in the guest bedroom.

 

I must admit I find myself more and more of the persuasion that if something works it's probably best to leave it alone unless you need the update. I like the notion that if a new update is available the questions to ask are pretty simple - if it doesn't offer anything I need/want then leave it. If it offers something I need/want the next question is whether it includes something undesirable, and if so the decision is a balance between the pros and cons.

My laptop still runs Windows 7, on the basis it works and does everything I need it to do. It's protected by internet security products and a heavy dose of paranoia. When it's time to replace it (hopefully not any time soon) the chances are I'll pretty much have to move to Windows 10 but I can deal with that as and when.

 

Wondering why there has been a sudden surge in pickup trucks driving past my house revving far louder than is necessary. The drivers seem keen to demonstrate that they have large engines, leaving me wondering whether other things aren't quite as large.

 

In the mountains I can see why you need a big truck. If you're the kind of person that goes into the woods and hauls back a ton of firewood you can't do that in a Prius. But when you get the people with a huge pipe sticking through the truck bed belching black smoke I wonder what kind of inadequacies they are trying to mask. When you get the truck with a lift job and huge tires, revving furiously up the hill when it probably has an engine big enough to do it while barely turning over (of course the truck is never hauling anything), and that looks like it has never seen dust let alone mud, I just start to think "compensating".

Some friends recently said how they didn't like driving past our house towing their camper because they know we don't like noisy vehicles, but as I said you can always tell the ones that are making a bit of noise because they are working hard from the ones that are making a lot of noise because the driver has some unmet need and wants strangers to notice him.

 

I got the ceiling box in place in the guest bedroom ready to wire the ceiling fan. I've got the fan ready, the hole in the wall ready to take the switch (going to make it wider to put a 2-gang switch in, to control the light and the fan separately), and three wires poking out of the hole. One is incoming power, one is going to head out to the next fixture, and the third is the switched power going to the fan.

Tomorrow I can do the rest of the work while my wife is out. Hopefully by the time she gets back I'll have the ceiling fan installed, the next fixture connected up, and maybe a little more picked off along the way.

 

Onboarding a new associate today.

 

This is pickup truck country too (and we have one now). Since the usual yardstick of having the fancy sportscar or high end import sedan is not as practical, the strata of owners seems to be determined by tire size, lifts and aftermarket exhaust systems, particularly on the diesel trucks.

 

If it ain't got a dent it ain't really a truck, just a fancy car with big wheels.

 

After a few false starts I got some electrical work done. It took longer than I had hoped, largely because getting cables routed where I wanted them proved trickier than expected thanks to a random joist or two that made using a fish tape impractical. But now there's a working ceiling fan in the guest bedroom, the third bedroom (which was the study until I started ripping it apart) is now wired ready for a ceiling fan once the new ceiling is installed, and the next stage of cable is ready to link to whatever light fitting proves to be next in line. The most obvious candidate to be next in line is a simple light with a pull-cord fitting, and the one after that is going to be tricky because it involves getting into a closet that's currently stuffed full of the stuff that was previously in the study before I ripped it apart. So maybe that can wait until the study is fixed up.

 

Wer sagt denn das... Off to Berlin.

 

Voluntarily or at gunpoint?

 

Got underway making a patio table. My wife liked the look of a woodworking plan I found, so I went and bought some nice red oak to make it. Then I looked further and noticed that the style is more associated with cheap pine, so figured I wouldn't use the red oak just yet. From there I ended up with a piece of 2x6 and a piece of 2x4, cut to the right dimensions rather than trying to find something specific at Lowe's and paying their rather optimistic prices.

So far I've got the two ends made. I realised I forgot to buy some larger clamps at the hardware store, so the rest will have to wait until tomorrow.

 

A little of both.

I have to say, I couldn't live here. I thought it'd be similar to Vienna given the shared language, but Berlin feels oppressive in comparison. Something seems off socially (even with historical events in mind), and I'll be genuinely glad to be leaving soon. This is a culture that I'm completely at odds with, and that's a first.

 

I got my clamps sorted out. Two 3-foot pieces of pipe, paired with pipe clamps. The pricing of the pipe was weird - it was something like $8 and change per foot, or the entire 10-foot length was a little over $40. In other words, if you want five feet or more you might as well take 10 feet because it won't cost any more. So I had the 10-foot length cut into four pieces and threaded so I can join them together. So that means I can make 2-foot clamps, 3-foot clamps or 5-foot clamps and have two of each.

Something went a little wonky with my table. I'm not sure if I cut something a little off-length (this is the first time I've attempted to make a piece of furniture), or if something is a little off-square. I hope it's something as simple as a leg being a little too long because I can fix that with a hand saw easily enough. If it's out of square that's harder to fix.

 

As a bit of fun I've been fiddling with some of the floor I lifted from the attic. Being 100+ years old it's not as clean as it might be, but running a miter saw across the end shows a really rather nice looking wood. I tried using a sander to clean up the faces but it's desperately slow, so I ran a planer across it to just take a whisker off. A single pass cutting 1/32" off the thickness stripped off a century's worth of crud and revealed a really rather nice grain. Not sure just what I'm going to do with it as yet, thinking I might make a feature wall behind my wife's piano once the room hosting it is finished.

 

Been looking into smart lighting. I must admit I prefer the thought of paying 79c for a single pole switch to the thought of paying more like $40 for a switch, particularly when I'm going to need so many of them. That said I do rather like the idea of being able to click a single switch and say "all lights off" at the end of the day and not worry about whether I left the basement light on or something. It's just a lot of money to get that freedom. If I'm switching lights and fans independently (and it seems silly not to) that means one room alone would cost something like $200 in switches, which seems like a lot. Bedrooms that only need to be switched from one location would cost about $80 each, and the downstairs rooms that need switches in multiple locations would run to more like $140 each. Of course the bridge that lets you control everything from a phone app is extra...

Part of me recoils at the thought of dropping north of $1000 on switches, although next to the cost of the overall project it doesn't seem quite so bad. Of course it doesn't make a lot of sense to do some and not others, because that would result in some nice pretty futuristic switches and some old physical flip switches.