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repairs to a 30 year old guitar amp
Sunday, May 14 2017
This morning Gretchen was about to leave for yet another shift at the bookstore in Woodstock, but she wanted to take Neville the Dog, who was still off in the woods. Last she'd seen him, she'd just managed to get him away from a box turtle she'd been harassing at the abandoned go-cart track. (Box turtles are rare up here on the plateau; they're an indication of good soil and easy vegetarianism, which is more characteristic of the Esopus Valley bottom.) So I got on a bike and quickly rode out to the go-cart track. I didn't see Neville, but I did run across Georges, the guy whose farm is at the end of the farm road. He was with his young son, now a toddler, doing chores near his barn. He asked what sort of internet we have, a question I'm pretty sure he's asked before. I told him "DSL," but that it was unlikely to work at his house, given the extra half mile of line length. He also asked what I did about ticks. "Nothing, really," I said, adding, "it's not like I'm going to stop going in the woods." I went on to mention by my most recent battle with the Lyme disease spirochætes.
By the time I made it back home, Neville had beat me there and Gretchen and he had left for the bookstore. I spent much of the day doing various long-procrastinated chores. One of these was to install the last of the replacement potentiometers in my old guitar amp, which I'd gotten (along with an electric guitar) for my 19th birthday in 1987. That would make the amp thirty years old. Looking at its insides, it looks like I fixed something a long time ago (probably in the mid-90s); this involved strapping a piece of styrofoam onto a large component to keep it from moving around and wiggling loose. Other than that, it's been a pretty reliable piece of equipment. Potentiometers always wear out eventually, particularly the ones controlling volume and distortion that get the most use. First they become noisy and then they become unreliable. I'd already replaced the volume and distortion potentiometers, but today I also replaced the one controlling treble, which was a 50 kilohm unit that I'd had to order separately from the more common 10 kilohmn parts.
Another set of chores were garden-related. I dug a trench in the "cabbage-patch" part of the garden and dumped a bunch of fowl brownish liquid from one of the kitchen composters. As always, it had gone anærobic and smelled as bad a humanure. I could tell it smelled bad because it attracted the interest of Neville the dog later when he and Gretchen came home. I also buried some actual humanure in the main garden patch. But it had been composting so long that it was completely inoffensive and I though nothing of picking up stray bits with my bare hands. I had another bucket of human shit that was much more disgusting; it was the one I'd removed from the brownhouse in early March. In recent weeks, I'd made the mistake of leaving it uncovered, and it had collected a fair amount of rain water. The resulting soup was never going to compost unless I added a bunch of dry bulk to it. So today I added 15 gallons of dry pine needles to the soup. As always, I used a stick to poke them down into the yellowish-brown mire as flies circled and landed.
Another boring (and probably unnecessary chore) was the installation of operating system patches on two of the household's Windows 7 machines. This was to correct the vulnerability to the Wanna Cry ransomware attack now spreading on the internet. I suspected that our computers would be safe behind the house's router, but I couldn't be certain; this particular ransomware uses an exploit previously known only to the NSA (and might've even been engineered by them). Normally I do not patch our computers under any circumstances and do not let them update their own software. (I don't want the unpredictability this would cause.) I also do not run any antivirus software (although I do use ClamWin Free, a free virus scanner, to scan executable files downloaded via Bittorrent). Generally if you're behind a router and have the sense not to open unknown files, nothing that bad ever happens.
I took a bath in the late afternoon, and as I soaked in the water, I realized (to my dismay) that I have developed a second patch of numbness (the first being on my right thigh). The new patch is about the size of a dime and is on the thumb side of my right forefinger between the first and second joint (counting from the finger tip). Earlier I'd thought I'd had a splinter stuck in this location, but I hadn't been able to find it. I also think I was deeply clawed by a frisky Charles the Cat near that site soon after he arrived (in early April), and it's possible his talon did some nerve damage. That's what I'm hoping for. What would be bad would be if this numbness had any relationship to the patch of numbness on my thigh.
Later I made myself a quick pan full of bean glurp, which enabled me to eat burritos for dinner. Meanwhile Gretchen was off dining at the The Garden Café
This male house finch was worked up about all the cats in the driveway this evening. I think the babies he and his wife raised in the upside down bucket protecting electronics up above the solar deck might've fledged. (Click to enlarge.)
Here's his wife. (Click to enlarge.)
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