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gloomy May
Monday, May 19 2008
The cool, cloudy weather continued today, and I found it was affecting my moods negatively. I love springtime, and May may well be my favorite month of all, but if it's going to be cloudy it should at least be warm. I was so miserable today, I was tempted to start a fire in the woodstove (something I would only do in this season if guests were visiting). I spent an absurd amount of time tearing apart those waterproof metal electric boxes I'd harvested yesterday. I might use one of them as an outdoor toolbox on the solar deck so as to avoid having to carry so much up and down the ladder. (I already have one such box up there holding a power strip, a USB hub, and a radio, and at one time I'd bought a mailbox for this purpose.) The task of cleaning all the existing electrical crap out of the boxes was complicated by the boxes' history on the Esopus floodplain. The lower of the boxes had been flooded at least once and contained a thick deposit of silt at the bottom. The screws holding things in were rusted tight and had to be drilled out in three or four instances.
Later I took a stab at building a flowmeter out of a ruined one inch ball valve (whose guts had been removed). I soldered in a hinged flap of copper to which I thought I might attach a strong magnet. I had the idea that perhaps I could monitor the magnet's position from outside as it rose and fell on the flap, which in turn would be responding to different rates of flow. But then at some point I realized that the magnet on the flap would be submerged in very hot water, and heat has a tendency to destroy a magnet's field over time. So I shelved the idea. I'm sure I'll be able to use that old ball valve housing for something some day.
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