|
|
a surface having a temperature of 98.6 Tuesday, August 11 2020
location: Dug Hill Road, rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
Today I was back in my remote workplace, and it was another relatively easy day. This job is a goose that lays golden eggs in the form of regular paychecks, something not everyone has as America succumbs to a global pandemic. This is why I am reluctant to do what Gretchen keeps wanting me to do: demand a raise. If I got a raise, I might have to work harder. And I like working the way I have been.
It was a hot and muggy day, something I'd been in the Adirondacks a little too long to adjust to easily. For a time I even ran the air conditioning in the laboratory. Oscar the Cat has been so delighted by my return that he keeps wanting to climb into my lap, even when I'm not running the air conditioning. He's a fluffy cat who should be miserable at this time of year, and yet his love is do strong that he wants to lie on a surface having a temperature of 98.6 degrees.
One of the things distracting me from my work today was one of my old Linksys WRT-54G routers. Those were the first routers to accept open-source firmwares, and I have five of them. Before leaving for the Adirondacks, I'd tried powering up my oldest WRT-54Gs (in hopes of using it as a network hub for my Raspberry Pi spycam and laptop). I couldn't immediately tell what sort of wall-wart it required, but some internet research told me "12 volts." It hadn't worked since hooking up such a wall wart, and today I found out why: this particular WRT-54G requires a 5 volt wall wart, and the 12 volts had probably killed it. I couldn't find any reference on the web to WRT-54Gs using 5 volts, but on the actual router, in an extremely small font that I'd overlooked when actively searching for it, I found the words "5 volt DC." Thanks, Linksys! In recent years I've taken to writing the most important info about a product on it in large letters with a Sharpie. For epoxy, that's the cure time in minutes. For hard drives, it's the capacity (usually in gigabytes). For wall warts, it's the voltage and whether it's AC or DC. For Linksys routers, it seems, it's not just the IP address I've set it to, it's also the voltage it requires from a power supply.
This evening I did some more work on the upstairs tub installation project, adding yet another layer of chainsaw-feathered plywood to what would otherwise be a low spot southeast of the tub. I then disconnected the drain pipe and dragged the tub out so I could take measurements for a narrow slip of wall that will fit between the tub's drain end and a low wall separating the tub from the toilet. I did this by standing a level at the same level of plumb as that wall (it's not perfectly plumb) at the drain end of the tub and then taking a series of measurements of the width of the space between the tub and the standing level at various heights above the floor. I didn't actually cut that piece, however. It was dinner time, and Powerful had made a frying pan of broccoli with chickpeas, mushrooms, and gravy and another dish containing a somewhat-disgusting mix of homebrewed vegan macaroni-and-cheese with corn. During dinner, I brought up the fact that in the past I have often found myself pissing in a bottle on solo drives to Twenty Ninth Pond, and this reminded Gretchen of the time (circa July 13th, 2001) when I pissed in an empty bottle that had once contained Spicy V8 Juice. Nobody had to say that this caused discomfort at the tip of my penis; this was implied.
For linking purposes this article's URL is: http://asecular.com/blog.php?200811 feedback previous | next |