| |
|
WEEK 35 2021
Last Week- Sun- Mon- Tue- Wed- Thur- Fri- Sat- Next Week
Saturday -Hot. About 108 eventually, despite a prediction of initially 104F, then 106F. Bah. the tree are suffering, so I may go back to the daily watering schedule again.
R&S called, they found a guy selling off his shop, so I went and picked up a few small items - buckets of screws and bolts, a magnetic pickup, some wooden shelves. They had a mixer for $100 and I was very tempted, but eventually passed. I need one, but not immediately.
I asked, and as with almost everyone, he is moving out of state, in his case to Sparks, Nv.
Then we all went for lunch, my treat, at "Sammy's" over on Sierra Highway. This wasn't quite a dive, but it was empty unlike the first two places we went to. S had been there before and said their shrimp cocktail was great. She had that, I had the recommended "Carlos" burrito, which was amazing.
R had the Chile Rejeno plate, and was disappointed.
Then home, unloaded, and napped for the rest of the afternoon.
In the late afternoon/evening I had a terrible headache, worst in years. Just sat with my eyes closed until it was time for bed.
Friday - Warm again.
I kept busy, with the usual.
In the evening I went out for a couple of hours of planet gazing. This was fun, the seeing was decent, though not enough to get the star tracking working on the 5se.
I took the cheapo Celestron 70mm refractor and the 125mm 5se out. The refractor beat the SCT, hands down. I've never been too happy with the 5se (which is why you don't see too many mentions of it here), now I have side by side proof that it is not performing! I'll try recollimating, but in the meantime I've bought a smaller APO scope online, that has good reviews, and when it shows up I'll put it on the SCT mount, or the Super Polaris, and we'll see how things go.
Thursday - Hot again, a bit above 100F for a few hours.
I did various household chores in the morning, and cut and painted some molding to complete the bezel around the a/c in the west office. It doesn't look all that good close up but it's enough (along with some backer rod) to keep some of the dust from coming in. By late afternoon it was dry enough to screw back on.
I still need to do the front room, and the master bedroom.
I worked in the office on "Name" for most of the day, slogging through various things. S sent me some mock-ups, but I had to reboot the Mac to get Google Drive to re-sync. Hmmm.
The cats were being particularly pesty for some reason.
I wanted to go out and do some observations, but I was too tired after last night and a day of work.
Last night (Wednesday) I went out viewing with the C8 from about 9:30pm to 12:00. Basically I just wanted to test the new star diagonal, so I only brought the scope out to the back door step. To my astonishment, despite obvious haze, the observations were great, and I had good views of Jupiter and Saturn at 150x! I actually started seeing texture in the belts of Jupiter, and realized that what appeared to be poor focus was really an artifact of almost resolving the moons. In addition there were some signs of the Cassini Division on Saturn, the outer part of the ring being distinctly darker than the inner part.
This was despite not having a cool down period for the scope, and being too close to the house.
I'd like to check the collimation of the C8, but with the weather and haze it just can't happen.
Wednesday - Mild temps to probably the mid 90s, just a little windy, high clouds, some smoke haze.
No tree watering, which seems wrong!
I had an uneasy sleep Tuesday night, it turns out that it did not cool off much during the night outside, so shutting off the a/c when I went to bed meant it was probably in the high 70s indoors all night. I was too sleepy to realize the issue. I noted that when I went to be it was smazey with high clouds, and that tends to keep it warm.
It'd be nice to open windows at night, but the noise of barking dogs to the west is too much for me.
The morning chores were a few more boxes cleaned up inside the garage, and fixing the exterior molding around the window a/c in the west bedroom. A lot of dirt and dust has been sifting in, so this and some backer rod should help a lot. I am a terrible finish carpenter so it took me much longer than it should have, with a lot more waste then there should have been (painful at $1/ft for molding). I still need to paint it, but it was nearly noon and the winds and dust were kicking up, so tomorrow for that.
I also knocked down a bunch of cardboard boxes from yesterday, and put them in the trash by the curb, and a few tumbleweeds as well, just to fill the bin.
I talked to the new driver, asked him not to turn around in front of the house, he understood and was cool about it. Apparently the previous driver has hurt himself picking something up. The new guy says that WM is not going to pick up bags any more, you'll have to call in (and pay) for special pickups. Ugh.
Worked on the app in the afternoon. I was a bit distracted by checking out a friends nice 27" monitor that wasn't turning on.Turned out to be an easy fix, but led to other stuff.
Basically I'd hooked it to the old Linux box to test, and my Mint 20 partition couldn't find the USB WiFi dongle, and couldn't update. I think I'm done with Mint, it's always something. I looked around for my old D-link dongle, but couldn't find it. But I'm pretty sure the thinkPenguin dongle was working back in June or whenever.
I then booted from the Devuan partition on the same machine, and it worked fine. No issues. In fact I let it do a system update, via Synaptic, and that went well too. I kind of assumed it would forget about the wifi dongle when i did that (it was such a PITA to install originally), but no problem. Strange. Maybe I can use the other partition for Devuan? I don't know if there is the equivalent of Partition Magic for Linux.
I also booted the Windows laptop for the first time in a while, then let it go to sleep. I assume it will update overnight. I'm not thrilled with what I hear about the updates, but I don't really use it much any more anyways.
Talked to S at length about the new app, she's working hard with some paper mock-ups, and has already eliminated some of the prospective levels and tasks as being too difficult for our target audience.
I, on the other hand, am still screwing around with the basics of SwiftUI. Bah.
Tuesday - Warm and windy and smoky.
I did some basic chores in the yard, but it was mostly a clean up the garage day. It's been getting more and more cluttered, and when it's super cluttered it takes forever to find tools and get anything done and progress slows on the house. So it was four or five hours well spent.
I also did a couple more loads of laundry.
Cleaned up the back office, then Paul H. from next door came by and we moved the armoire into the room, and added a missing felt pad to one foot as we did so. That helped with the garage clutter as well, as well as the clutter in the office.
I was looking for the collimator for the telescope that I bought a couple of weeks ago, and couldn't find it, which is one of the reasons I'm on the war path cleaning and de-cluttering.
I still haven't found that, but I started rounding up astronomy gear and putting it into the armoire.
Worked on the new app a bit, but got side tracked with some other computer issues. Bah.
I guess the Afghanistan disaster keeps getting worse and worse.
Word on the street is that it was all precipitated by the President wanting to give a speech on September 11, 2021 (which is, of course, the 9/11/2001 twenty year anniversary), saying that we were "done". So a country is lost, our reputation with our allies is shot, and thousands will die...because of one man's desire for a photo op.
Monday - Warm and windy.
Also smokey all day - the sun was barely visible in the late afternoon.
I took the opportunity to clean Budd's cage - bleach and scrubbing and hot water for the pen, litter pan, and pan, and also washing all his and the other cats linens. It was past time for that, but was feeling not-so-good until now.
Sunday - Hot, but not as bad as Saturday.
I didn't go shopping with S in the morning, I am pretty well stocked, except for fruit, and I'm good until Wednesday with that.
I picked up about 3 weeks worth of canned cat food last week, and some of it is not very palatable to the cats despite being the same flavor (on the can). Not much I can do about that.
Did some laundry, watched some TV, tried to take it easy.
The anime on Crunchyroll is pretty awful this season, btw.
I am cutting back on watering the tree's. If it's under 100F then it'll be every other day for a month or so, then back to once every 3rd or 4th day. Weekly would be normal, but most places don't do the environmental "hat trick": i.e. triple-digit temperatures, double-digit winds, single digit-humidity, all at the same time!
