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WEEK 46 2018

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Saturday 17 November 2018

Saturday - A nice enough day.

My neighbor was refilling his propane, so I went along to help. Two 100# bottles and six 20# bottles. We lucked out and arrived at CostCo as the first customers - a lot of people showed up right after us and had to wait. There had been a RV filling up just before us, I didn't realized they had a separate fill station for them.

Afterwards we went over to Lowe's to get a tool. While I was sitting in the truck, waiting for my friend to do his business, "watching" the fuel purchases, someone rear ended the truck! Eight bottles of propane and a newly filled tank of 23 gallons of gas went up in a horrendous fireball, leaving a smoking crater....

Well, no. It's an early 70's F-250 and you couldn't tell the bumper had even been tapped. The tappee, an old Mexican gentleman, was apologetic (in Spanish. I suppose he could be a polite swearer, I don't speak it well). From the state of his front bumper I guess we aren't the first, or even fifth, to be hit. Oh well, no harm done.

Doing bills. I just realized that the property tax was due, officially, on November 1st. It's not late until December 1st, fortunately. And naturally the auto insurance invoice showed up at the same time.

On the bright side my electric bill for October was a grand total of $25....

Then I napped, completely worn out.

Friday 16 November 2018 Friday - A nice day, temps around 70F. But the forecast shows low 60's coming up. I guess fall couldn't stay forever.

Working away on this and that, not much to say. I read the directions on the paint spray gun, but I don't know if we're going to get warm windless temperatures to use it in until spring sometime.

We've been watching "Lost" in the evenings, from a friend's box set of discs.

It occurs to me that if people would (1) Not run off alone into a jungle known to be full of deadly animals and kidnappers, and (2) Not be such drama queens....well, there wouldn't be a show.

Thursday 15 November 2018 Thursday - A nice-ish day. A bit of high clouds.

It was a work on computers day. I did various things, an attempted to upgrade the MacBook to OSX Mojave. It just hung, but thankfully no harm was done, despite it not installing. Scary stuff though. I had backups for most things, but I've gotten lazy and trusting - I need to thoroughly back up before I try again.

My sister sent me a few texts. I guess the air quality in the SF bay area is terrible because of the fires in the foothills that burned Paradise, I didn't realize that it (and the SoCal fires) were still burning!

TD texted that no-one had bid on the underground inspection job. What the heck? Glad I'm not depending on it for income.

Wednesday 14 November 2018

Wednesday - A nice day.

Working on upgrading the Mac. Downloaded new versions of Xcode, and stuff like that. It all seemed to install OK, though weirdly the new OS version, Mojave, wasn't installed.

Cleaned the east room up while that was all going on. It had gotten pretty bad - mostly just a path to the desk and window. I even made a temporary bookshelf - I have lots, but they are deeply buried in the shipping container out back right now.

In the afternoon I bummed a haircut off of SH.

S needs a new laptop - the old one had taken a dive at some point and was literally falling apart. Even on Ebay a used case is $150 or so, and since she wants to edit video she needs a modern machine anyway. She sort of likes the Dell XPS 15 reviews, so I'll take a look at a real review site - Toms Hardware or Ars Technica.

Apparently she can tell when "my attention wandered" whilst taking the video yesterday. Ooops.

After that it was my trip to the dentist, then home and crashing on the couch, worn out.

I'm getting old.

Tuesday 13 November 2018

Tuesday - A pleasant winter day.

Took AH's boy, P, to school, as he was awaiting a delivery and couldn't take him. Went by and helped SH make a video of a client. Interesting.

Afterwards I tried, and failed, to do some shopping in town. At Home Depot they had closed off both aisle's that I wanted to use - for plywood and for window weather stripping, and they didn't have any propane heads for a little garage heater. Paint person, to buy 5 gallons of primer, wasn't available.

So I went to Walmart. No propane head. No transmission fluid of the sort I wanted. I thought I'd buy another throw rug, but they weren't priced and the price checker wasn't working to read the bar code. I finally gave up and went home, annoyed. I can get most of that stuff on line.

On the way home someone passed me on the right, then ran the red light in front of me. It actually cheered me up - it proves that drivers in Lancaster really are crazed jerks and I'm not just an old fuddy-duddy. Though I suppose both could be true.

Monday 12 November 2018

Monday - Veteran's Day, observed.

Warm and reasonably calm.

G came over (no school) and we painted the front fascia trim, and around the windows again. The wind was from the east, and picking up, so we couldn't do the other three sides. I'd forgotten to take my ibuprofen and didn't dare do much work myself.

Sunday 11 November 2018

Sunday - Veteran's Day.

Cool in the morning - nice in the afternoon.

I had car trouble, so no shopping in the morning.

AH and I fooled around with the Explorer for a few hours. When cold the transmission showed low fluid - weird, because it seemed OK when it was warm (There are guides ./for checking in both the warm and hot conditions). In any case we added some Trans-X that Aaron had, and that seemed to help. We drove over to Rosamond and back, taking the opportunity for me to buy him another pint of Trans-X, to replace that fluid that I'd used.

He also cleared the check engine light that had come on, and we added just a little oil and coolant. Hopefully things will be OK from here on. I guess no long trips from here on out.

I mentioned my personal $1000 estimate for transmission work and he just laughed. OK, I admit that it was 20 years + ago that I last had a big transmission repair....

I was going to have G come by and help with painting the fascia with a second coat, but by the time we were done with the car the wind had come up. Perhaps tomorrow. When there is a warm windless day - rare in winter in the Antelope Valley - I'll paint the soffits.

Not too much going on, I just did some chores in the late afternoon.

In the evening I watched the Sergeant York movie, with Gary Cooper. I'd never seen it in full, in a restored version, very interesting.

Picture of the Week

jim and suzy napping

Jim and Suzy helping me in the office with FreeCad, 2018.

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