heart scare

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I woke up at 3:30am to a fire alarm.

Okay, so it wasn’t a fire alarm but, rather, an alarm clock.  It was F‘s.  He’d had it for several years but no longer wanted it.  It’s one of those folding travel clocks, wind-up, of course.  Because I collect old pre-antique things (vintage, you might say), it was a nice addition to my collection of clocks and other such devices.  I had no idea I had set it for 3:30am.

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the nuts-and-bolts of life (or, waste naught, want naught)

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As mundane a task this is, I’m sorting through Father’s bizarre method of consumable hardware storage.  He, presumably like most of the population, just threw a machine screw, washer, or not into a coffee container until which time, days, months, or years later, he would fish through the container to find the right size, material, thread type, and grade of hardware.

My way of dealing with his legacy is “fixing” it.  No, I don’t mean that in a terrible way.  Just that, to gain independence from our parents, we have to sort through stuff and make determinations of what they want to keep or abandon of the legacy left to them.  This is not just physical things, but ideals, habits, beliefs, etc.

My belief is that I should walk up to a container of organized smaller containers that are organized further until they become unique and usable items.  I should be able to stretch out my arm, read a label (mach 1/4″ med) (quarter0-inch, medium thread machine screw) and pick the length I want.  In the same bin, I want to pick a nut that is the right size to fit it.

I do not want to sit there in a shop, dump a bucket of rusted shit onto a table, and sort through it all to find that something doesn’t exist.  That’s horse shit.  As Trevan Wong would say, Remember the Seven Ps – Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.

So, this is my statement to the Old Man – thanks for leaving your shit for me to clean up.  I will continue to be my father’s son and do those duties.  The Book itself says to honour your parents.  This is my version of it.

inside looking out

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If I were a wild animal, I don’t think I’d want to be in an enclosed area.  But in Parkbridge, deer come in in the morning and leave at the evening.  They spend their days meandering around the park, eating what they can, and sleeping the rest of the time.

I saw this one on the back way home from shopping.  We just stood there looking at each other.  We, as people, personify various animals.  The deer is obviously thinking, “Why is that guy outside of the enclosure?  Doesn’t he know the dangers?”

Reversing that, would the deer be personifying (or, rather, deerifying) me?  The human is obviously thinking, “It’s too bad that fence is there.  I’d like to kill that deer and eat it.”

abandoned clothes

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Did someone on the way to Wal-Mart just say to themselves, “I don’t think I want pants today,”?  I mean, what the heck?  What a strange thing to see on the side of a street.

Maybe it blew off someone’s clothesline?  But people don’t have clotheslines anymore.

Apparently, they don’t need pants, either.

wind storm

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We had a wind storm yesterday.  It’s been windy for 6 or 7 weeks with maybe 2 or 3 days of calm.  Headaches abound.  No sub-zero temperatures.  Now this wind.  Hopefully it will have blown itself out.

 1/13/2021  9:08 AM     23828819 wind storm, Parkbridge, Lethbridge, AB 20210113_090836 med.mp4
 1/13/2021  9:08 AM     23570363 wind storm, Parkbridge, Lethbridge, AB 20210113_090836 med.wmv
 1/13/2021  9:08 AM      6792223 wind storm, Parkbridge, Lethbridge, AB 20210113_090836 small.mp4
 1/13/2021  9:09 AM     82211396 wind storm, Parkbridge, Lethbridge, AB 20210113_090836.mp4

CNC birdhouse #1

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This is the first CNC-cut birdhouse as well as the first 3D object created with AutoCAD Civil 3D and cut on the CNC.  Many mistakes!  But it’s a learning experience.  I know I’d likely not use AutoCAD again.

 1/10/2021  8:15 PM       965096 birdhouse 1 20210110_200729.jpg
 1/10/2021  8:15 PM       983134 birdhouse 1 20210110_200746.jpg
 1/10/2021  8:15 PM       995958 birdhouse 1 20210110_200802.jpg

garage thermostat

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It seems ‘cloud-connected’ thermostats are all the rage these days.  Google doesn’t own enough personal information – they want to dissect how we heat our homes, too.  I went to Rona, Canadian Tire, Lowe’s, & Home Depot to find a manual thermostat suitable for the garage – that is, one that goes down to zero degrees.  Finding one that goes that low is not as easy as it sounds.  They’re all made for the insides of homes and only go down to 10°C at best.  I absolutely don’t want to keep the garage at a toasty 15°C in the dead of winter – just keep it above zero.

I finally one at Home Depot.  It’s made for electric baseboard heaters, overkill for this application, but it goes down to 0°C.  Now I see that Canadian Tire has the same one, but I dismissed it at the time because I didn’t know if a baseboard heating thermostat would be compatible with a forced-air type.

Yes, you can use a baseboard heater thermostat to drive a forced-air furnace but not the other way around.  The line voltage on a baseboard heater thermostat in North America is 240VAC/60Hz or sometimes 120VAC.  A forced-air furnace thermostat line voltage is 24VDC, I think, and does not handle any significant load – just a basic on-off thing to trigger a relay switch in the furnace.

So now I have a garage that will not freeze and will be nice enough to work in during the bitter, cold months.