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careful with that Japanese pull saw
Monday, August 27 2018
Early this afternoon, I made a run to the Hurley dump to get rid of more crap from the garage. A fair amount of what was gotten rid of consisted of pieces of the old Honda Civic wrecked in 2008, though there was also a lot of styrofoam, an old broken plastic composter that had come with the house (most of which I had to strap to the Subaru's roof), and a lot of cardboard used to pack roofing materials.
On the way back home, I stopped at the Tibetan Center thrift store to see if they had anything I would want. They had a lot of old WiFi routers, some of which I might've been interested in back when I didn't have a bunch that could be reflashed with an open source firmware. But other than that, the pickings were thin. I suspect that all the stuff I would actually buy is snapped up by other people with a similar mindset to mine, and this is why nothing great accumulates there between my now-infrequent visits.
This evening I installed the last of the strips of wood that need to go around the outside of screens that I'd stapled to the structure of the screened-in porch. Most of these strips went into the large flat triangle under the roof at the south edge of the porch, though I also had to put strips around the screen covering the transom above the door and use a few small pieces to complete the large flat triangle under the roof's north end. Since I didn't want to have to take all the pieces up to the garage to make the necessary cuts, I used a Japanese pull saw to make some of the cuts on-site. This worked great, though on the very first cut, after it was finished the saw fell through the cut and, when I reflexively jerked it upwards, it impacted my left middle finger between the last joint and the nail. I don't think it actually sawed at that location, but the teeth definitely cut into my flesh, and the bleeding was instantaneous (I'm more familiar with a lag between injury and blood). Fortunately, I managed to stop the bleeding within only a minute or so, though I think the injury was more severe than the bleeding indicated. There was some loss of sensation near the wound, suggesting the saw had severed a nerve. And whenever I touched the injury, it hurt a lot more than one would normally expect an injured site to hurt. This also suggested there were weirdnesses associated with an injured nerve.
Another thing I did today was install Ubuntu Linux on the G4 iMac Ray gave me years ago that I never use. It's pretty much useless running OSX as intended, since it can't even play YouTube videos. Based on what people were saying on various messageboards, I thought Ubuntu might give it a new lease on life. Initially I couldn't get the computer to boot from the Ubuntu CD I'd prepared, but it turned out all I had to do was press the C key while it was booting up. There's a lot of random crap about the various Macintosh operating systems that I hate, and such arbitrary ways of doing things is part of it. I couldn't even get the DVD drive to open to allow me to insert the Ubuntu boot disk until I went and got a proper Macintosh keyboard (which has an eject button on it), and, for me, that was another strike against the Apple. Would it've killed them to provide a discoverable menu item allowing me to open the DVD drive? I'm old school: I expect everything I need to do to be discoverable in menus. This is something Macintosh trained me to expect back in the days of OSes 6.X and 7.X. Now, though, menus are treated as some sort of backwater anachronism. They shouldn't be; they're the most obvious way of exposing functionality.
Later tonight, I took enough kanna to have a momentary rush that made me regret taking so much. Eventually, though, the 100 mg of diphenhydramine I'd also taken kicked in, and I was sound asleep by the time Gretchen came back from what she'd been doing. She'd been in New Paltz with Nancy and perhaps Sarah the Vegan watching the horror classic The Shining projected on a large outdoor wall. There had even been vegan hotdogs available at the concession stand.
In other news, today for the first time I saw a hitherto-unknown species of mosquito. It was large, the size of house fly, striped like a tiger, and definitely trying to suck my blood (in other words, it was not a crane fly). I smashed the one on my arm and one I saw above the stairway down from the house's top floor. The huge smashed mosquito is still there on the wall. I might photograph it eventually (next to a dime) to prove it is a thing.
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