Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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Like my brownhouse:
   flangeless alcove tub
Saturday, January 29 2022
Normally I'd be at the cabin in the Adirondacks on a Saturday morning, but not this weekend. So Gretchen and I had a classic Saturday morning in the living room, complete with a raging fire in the woodstove and a New York Times Spelling Bee drawn with a pen (in this case, on an actual white board). It was a tough one today (with a panagram of "extinction") and even with both of us working, we never quite got to "genius."

Meanwhile in the labororatory, over the past few day's I've been trying to take a VMWare image and turn it into a bootable drive for a non-virtual computer. I'm trying to take a virtual machine and make it real. Initially I couldn't see how to do this with VMWare itself, but then I learned you could get a virtual machine to "power on to BIOS," where one could then choose which volume to boot. If one set up a VMWare to control certain drives directly (that is, not with intermediate images), one could then boot up a USB stick containing CloneZilla and use it to copy the contents of its virtual hard drive to an actual hard drive. This had completed by this morning, but when I went to boot this hard drive on a random computer (in this case, a Compaq Elitebook 2740p), it only made it a little ways into the boot process before throwing a blue screen of death. Evidently there are drivers in there for the virtual environment that spell death for a live environment. But perhaps this can be fixed too. (All of this is an effort to revive the only computer belonging to my workplace that can compile an old version of some legacy property assessment software.)

This afternoon, I went over to the brick mansion on Downs Street to recaulk the tub in the second floor apartment, which I'd last done a couple years ago to stop a leak in from the ceiling in the apartment underneath. That had worked, but evidently for only two years, because the leaking had started up again. I was met at the door by R, the affable young gentleman who has been afflicted by a rare cancer for the last several years. He offered me some spray foam, which I initially didn't think I needed, but then decided to try once I discovered the underlying issue. Like the tub I'd recently installed in the upstairs bathroom at the cabin, this one (also an alcove tub, but made of actual porcelain) had been mounted directly against the studs. But unlike that tub, this one had no flange for the tiled wall to be built over, and so any water running down the tiles could wick into the wall if there were any problems in the caulking (which, in this case, had begun to crack). I tore out the old caulk and even some of the grout to reveal an absence of flange and a void into which I could push the blade of a drywall taping knife all the way to the hilt. So I thought some spray foam might work as a backing material for the caulk. This, of course, meant I couldn't actually do any caulking today because it would take an hour or two for the foam to stop expanding. The spray foam was old and didn't want to come out of the spray bottle, but it mostly did what I wanted it to. While I was doing all this, R was telling me about the cat who had adopted his parents down somewhere in southwestern Virginia.
After I was doing that stuff, I drove across the river to the office in Red Hook to pack up my desk. On Monday, all of us working in that office will be turning in our keys and the office will be closing down, but my desk had so much stuff on it that I thought it would be better to clear it out ahead of time without the distraction of dealing with other people. The things I recovered today included a large dog bed, several Arduino-compatible controllers, a large USB-3 hub, a plastic skeleton of a chameleion, several small hard drive platters, many cables, and a few computer mice.
I went by the Tibetan Center thrift store on the way back home, but it was after 4:00pm and they appeared to be closed.

This evening Gretchen prepared tacos made with a "meat" of soy curls marinaded in some sort of spicy sauce. They were tastier than I expected.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?220129

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