markc1957

It has been 2 years since I last posted. Yikes! Time flies. Still working at the same company. Had a 6 zone mini-split system put in the house in Yuba City. Talking with A/C contractors in the area, bringing the old system up to snuff would have cost more than the new mini-split. Quiet, efficient, operation is mostly covered by the solar array and keeps the house down to around 75 when the temp outside is 107. Health scare for me toward the end of 2022. Around Thanksgiving, I got bit by something, probably a spider, when I was in Yuba City. Cellulitis on the right arm set in, was a little dehydrated, and I finally went to the hospital in Sacramento. 4 days of IV Vancomycin, and 10 days of oral antibiotics at home afterward. Thought I was out of the woods, but it came back around Christmas. Another 4 days in the hospital in San Leandro. IV antibiotics, and then 2 weeks at home with a PIC line, administering antibiotic every 8 hours with the assistance of my wife. Just started playing a game called Prosperous Universe. An economic simulator of colonization and resource extraction and management that is far from fast paced. Intriguing enough to keep my interest. Just finished reading the latest series from Nathan Lowell. Looking into vanadium redox flow batteries for backup storage. Still researching.

Real life has been busy. Still moving stuff to the house in Yuba City. Still finding little things wrong that need to be fixed. Company will be shut down during Christmas week, so I'll be taking care of the little things I know about and getting a quote for a new fence. Have to see about putting some different ductwork up in the attic. The flexible stuff up there now just doesn't give good airflow to some of the rooms in the house. So many little things that need to be done that my to-do list is getting as long as a CVS receipt. It would be nice if I could spend more time there and start extending the to-done list. Oh well, as the old saying goes; "If wishes were fishes, we'd all cast nets". Time for me to go and take care of the stuff I'm being paid to do. Best wishes to everyone.

Here we are in 2019. So many resolutions that I probably won't accomplish. Top of the list is finding a job in or near Yuba City. Moving all of our stuff we want to keep from Hayward to there. So much stuff that just needs to be gotten rid of. Get this all done so we can put a fresh coat of paint on the house and get it presentable for sale before the bottom drops out of the market again. A lot of things to think about.

The fire in Butte County has had me more than a little bit nervous. All the smoke has made things miserable for almost everyone I know, and the area isn't all that far north of Yuba City. The smoke has made things very unpleasant in Hayward and the rest of the Bay Area, unless you just love the smell of woodsmoke. I am very glad that over the weekend I cleaned out the electrostatic scrubber type air cleaners we have scattered around the house in Hayward. I'll probably have to do it again this weekend, as cleaning them out cleared a lot of brownish crud out of the Newton cells. They make a big difference, since the air inside doesn't stink of smoke. Only drawback is when I go out in the morning, the outside smell hits full force for about half an hour before I go noseblind to it. Hopefully, the weather patterns will change soon and we'll get some rain to help out the firefighters. Classic good news, bad news scene there. The rain has helped by wetting down the fuel load, the bad news, everybody's vehicle is covered with sludge washed out of the air. Ahhh, we can only hope for such a scene, considering the current forecast. Until next time, take care everyone.

Finally seeing light at the end of the tunnel. Installation of the security screen door on the house in Yuba City is almost complete. All that remains now is to remove a piece of brickmold trim at the left side of the main house door assembly, build that out with a piece of 1x2 to match the rest of the door surround, and put new brickmold up. The router table is going to be making a lot of noise in a couple of weeks. Taking this weekend off...sort of. Things to do around the house in Hayward. Finish removing the bamboo in the back yard. Hope that I don't injure myself while doing that. This getting older business sucks, but it beats the alternative. These days, if I didn't feel some pain when I wake up, I'd think I was dead! So many things to do, and never enough time to do them. I'll have to figure out where to put a shed big enough to hold my ShopSmith and certain other specialty tools. Then figure out where and how to run enough power to it to run a small air conditioner, the dust collector, and the ShopSmith. Time to check what the building code in Yuba City requires for powering an outbuilding.

More 'entertainment' with changes to the house in Yuba City. Wife wants a secure screen door at the front of the house, and that has been an exercise in frustration. I had expected to be able to secure it to framing around the front door, but it seems that the front door frame and glass to the left of the door were a prefabricated unit with some peculiar/irritating framing on the side with the glass. Where I expected to find solid wood to run the one-way lag screws through the metal frame to secure the door, I'm finding a boatload of air. Trim board covers a 3 inch wide gap with 2x3 cross pieces at odd intervals all the way down the height of the door. I have to put some real wood blocks in there with good, flat sides so I can glue them into place. Time to struggle with getting the ShopSmith loaded in my pickup truck and hauling it up there so that I've got all the tools I need to get this stuff done in a timely manner. Trying to do it with a circular saw, the sonicrafter, and a jigsaw just isn't doing the job. I need the jointer on the ShopSmith to make the framing 2x4 stock from the lumberyard flat on the wide side. Every piece is straight enough, but has just enough cup to make for a very bad glue joint. Other fun is that the brickmold around the door is a profile that is apparently no longer manufactured. I may have a router bit in a set that is close enough to that profile to make all new brickmold for this one project in amongst my tool goodies, but I need to dig those out from wherever in the garage I put them last. So much fun. I hope to be able to finish that project up and be done with it, and get back to simpler things inside the house, like light fixtures and drywall repair. Until next time, stay safe, everyone.

Finally finished making the cable run to the master bedroom. Not precisely the way I wanted to do it, but it works. The notion of using an existing cable as a fish tape fell by the wayside, because the existing cables are secured inside the wall with what is best described as an exuberance of staples. I've gotten pretty good at putting on the compression type F connectors, and they work as they should. Had to go to the Comcast office in Yuba City to get a replacement box, since they appear to have been having these things manufactured by the very lowest bidder, and the failure rate on them is astounding. I took it in, they asked what the problem was, I simply said that the box doesn't work, and they exchanged it with no questions beyond what they needed to retrieve the account information. That kind of tells me that they are very aware that they have junk as product. Mowed the back lawn, completely filled the green waste container and a 30 gallon trash can with lawn clippings. Mowing that is a bit of a pain, because I have to stop after a pass along two sides, to empty the bin on the lawnmower. Found that I get to go digging in the front yard to repair the sprinkler system, since it appears to be leaking substantially under one of the trees, and has low pressure at all the other sprinkler heads. Have to replace some of the sprinkler heads with ones more suitable for their location and application than what are currently there. Put in a through the wall dog door, and the dog is being stubborn/stupid about using it. He knows how to use a dog door, because we have one in the house in Hayward, but this one is different, and apparently confuses him. Put up a new light fixture in the breakfast nook, which is much brighter than the one that was there, and is no longer a head-bashing hazard. A far cleaner look, which has SWMBO wanting the identical fixture put up in the dining area and the front entryway. Fortunately, those are on the lower priority list. More wall patching and ceiling repair next time. Possibly get the Cat5e cable run from the router to the home office. Thankful for ibuprofen and potassium gluconate.

Heading back up to Yuba City on Saturday, March 31st. Didn't get much done as far as yardwork in Hayward goes, because the ground was too wet to consider rolling a mower around on. New mower purchase for Yuba City house scheduled for Saturday. More silliness I have to look into. I have to find out who is on our neighborhood 'Architectural Compliance Committee' to get permission to put up new fencing and a storage shed for all the gardening tools. Aggravating, but, it's all buried in the paperwork we signed when we bought the house. Enough legalistic bandiflage that, considering all of the houses in the neighborhood no longer conform to the provisions of the covenant, I seriously doubt there is a committee in place. Bandiflage is a word I encountered in Nathan Lowell's Solar Clipper series, and taken in context, appears to be a word he coined to describe obfuscatory verbiage. At any rate, going to be hauling some tools and other items up this weekend so I can get stuff done without having to run to Home Depot or Lowe's 2 or 3 times during the weekend. The to-do list just keeps getting longer. It seems like the moment I get something on the to-done list, 2 more things turn up. Probably just my perception of things.

Weather was good enough to mow the front and back lawns at the house in Yuba City. A neighbor complained the front was looking a bit unkempt. Mowed that and raked up all the clippings. The back yard is big enough that I'm seriously considering acquiring a self-propelled mower with a bigger output chute. The grass was just wet enough that it kept clogging the chute, which led to there being mower droppings all over the place. Due to the weather forecast for this week, I seriously doubt I'll be doing any yardwork to speak of next weekend. Probably wind up finishing other projects that involve going up into the attic. Time to buy some cat5e or cat6 cable. So much fun.

Little things done this weekend at the new house. The light switches at the front door were backwards according to SWMBO, so I swapped them so that the switch closer to the door turns on the outside lights, and the switch closer to the inside of the house turns on the foyer light. Found that if I'm going to do anything in the attic space, I have to get it done before 2pm, which is when it turns into a sauna. Put some pieces of plywood up that I can move around so that I won't slip on the joists again. More chasing of cable and packing my knee pads for next time.