Critters

This post started its life as "Dang Meeces". If you don't get the reference it goes back to Pixie, Dixie and Mr. Jinks". Mr. Jinks the cat would pronounce "I hate meeces to pieces!" and so do I...

These are shooting patches, they're pieces of cloth you wrap around a lead ball before putting it down the barrel. They grip the ball and contact the rifling allowing the rifling to impart spin to the ball increasing its accuracy. These in particular are oiled, so they've been soaked in some kind of oil which both helps lubricate so they slide down the barrel better and softens the black powder fouling so it doesn't make loading difficult. The mice apparently like the oil so they eat into the package. They don't eat the cloth, they just steal the patches and hide them somewhere where they presumably lick the oil off. I've got other patches that are lubed with some kind of grease, they'll steal those too but seem to like the oiled ones better.

The white in this picture is styrofoam, the grey in the middle is lead, this is a box of bullets which are also lubricated, probably with bees wax. The mice ate through the styrofoam presumably to get at the wax although they don't seem to have eaten it...

This is my cleaning kit, right in the middle is a tube of "TC Bore Butter", they claim its a mix of bees wax, wintergreen and olive oil. The mice appear to really like this, they've eaten the end off the tube and if you look close they've nibbled the grease.

Every fall we have mice coming in out of the cold, this year it seemed to happen all at once. When I noticed the stuff above I put out some new Decon and a bunch of snap traps. After a month I realized none of the decon had been eaten and none of the traps snapped, well thats weird.
The one day Angie and I were sitting around the wood stove when she says "Whats that?" I looked around and didn't see anything, she says "It was a little white weasel." yeah right, she's imagining things. We looked around some more and she claimed to see it again, I never did see it. So the next day she went out and got a "Hav-a-heart" trap, put it in the basement baited with a chicken wing from the Chinese restaurant. For 2 days nothing happened, then one night we came home from game night to this:

This guy is a Stoat, an Ermine or a weasel, take your pick. He made the weirdest noises, little purrs and chirps. He also stank. Think of a skunk smell at 10% mixed with armpit sweat at 120%. I wrapped the trap in an old towel (that got thrown away), tossed it in the back of the truck (it stank way too bad to come inside) and we drove him out by an old junk yard where we let him go. Probably there are plenty of mice in the old junk cars for him to eat.
On the one hand I'm pretty sure he was keeping our mouse population under control, on the other hand he smelled terrible and I'm pretty sure he's the one that ate the bore butter. I'm not sure what I'll do if he comes back, it could be an interesting game to keep trapping him, alternately I like not having mice but I'm pretty sure I don't want to know what his poo looks like. He's little but his poo must be much bigger than mouse poo...

Another new toy: or "What spends the summer in your yard?"

I'm kind of embarrassed to admit I haven't told you about this, I've been harboring a secret:

Its a hard secret to hide, its 7 feet wide and weighs 9,000 pounds.

A few years ago I rejoined the Coldbrook Snowmobile Club which is a requirement of registering a snowmobile here in MA. I saw on their Facebook group that they needed people to help with grooming. These kind of clubs are all the same, the same people do all the work so I figured I'd help out. The first night I got to ride in the machine pictured, we call it "The ASV" since thats the manufacturer and we only have one. The idea is to pull a kind of cheese grater arrangement (the drag) over the trail to smooth it out, cut down the bumps, fill in the low spots and pack it all hard. This makes riding a lot more pleasant.

After that one night in the ASV I switched to riding in the bigger machine, a Pisten Bully PB200

and so things went for a couple years. Once or twice a week Ben and I would go out and groom the trails. I mostly sat in the right (passenger's) seat and opened gates or moved branches or whatever out of the trail. I got a little seat time too but mostly I just helped out.

Then last January on a bitterly cold (like 6F) day I got a call "Do you think you can get that ASV to start?" Remember the part where I had only been in the ASV once? I didn't even know HOW to start it, but what the heck, I've been driving diesel cars for years how different could it be?

Problem #1, the batteries have been replaced but not installed. I didn't take them apart and I've never seen them installed.

After a lot of head scratching I got everything installed and the engine cranking over but it didn't seem to excited with the idea of running. So I took my heat gun and stuck it in the air intake and heated it up until the canister was warm to the touch. When I hit the key it fired up like it was July. My grin was so big I thought the top of my head would fall off.

So thats the story of how I became the ASV operator. Theres more to it of course, those first couple trips were pretty scary, the time I'd spent running the Pisten Bully hard gotten me trained well enough to be terrible, now I'm learning a smaller machine thats actually more difficult to run. The problem is the lack of size and power. When running the Pisten Bully if you go into a turn overloaded you might run out of traction and sink in the snow, in the ASV you run out of power and can't make the turn. The problem is that the ASV is then more annoying to recover, so I spend a bunch of time backing up which leaves a big pile of snow from the drag that I have to deal with.

Still its a hoot, I drive around the snowmobile trails at 6mph turning a rutted out goat trail into a smooth 7foot wide highway through the woods. People riding by give us the thumbs up and thank us for our hard work.

Which finally brings us to the picture at the top of this post where the ASV is living in my front yard for the summer. At the end of last season we went out for our (Mike goes with me, we don't like to have an operator out alone) last run and I'd just gotten the machine warmed up and the drag full and grooming good when all of a sudden we're enveloped in steam. Turns out a heater hose has broken under the cab. We limp to the beach where we'll be holding a bbq later that day.

Turns out the same thing had happened the year before and they had spliced the break so I used that splice to hook the two heater hoses together which let me limp it back to the barn. A couple months ago I finally got a chance to fix it. I bought 18' of 3/4" heater hose and had 6" left over afterward. The heater core sits right at the very front o the machine, the engine is in the rear so the hoses are very long.

These are the failed hoses, you can see I had to cut them in half to get them out, the cab of the machine tilts to allow access to the underside but it was still pretty tight access. All things considered its not that bad of a job, I spent maybe 3 hours for the whole deal including adding a couple gallons of coolant. I had to add almost another whole gallon once I got the engine to warm up fully and I expect I'll have to add more the first time we go out, its a challenge to get the heater core to fill, its high above the engine and way in front...

Anyway heres hoping we get some snow this winter so the might ASV and I can cruise the trails again "making the white ribbon".

ICCC Convention 2018

You might remember that in 2017 Angie and I hosted the ICCC Convention. This year we traveled to Huntsville, Alabama to the 2018 convention.

It was half price to fly into Nashville instead of Huntsville, about a $500 difference. Since we would have rented a car anyway all we had to do was pay gas, its about a 2 hour drive so why not. We actually decided to add a couple days to the trip and spend some time in Nashville. I'd last been in Nashville on a work trip in 2001 and really liked it.

Our first stop was "Biscuit Love" restaurant but sadly I didn't get any pictures. If you're in Nashville I'd suggest you check it out.

Second stop was the Johnny Cash museum, and I'm so glad we went, this place is amazing. I thought I knew a thing or two about Johnny Cash although most of his activity predates me. The museum isn't very big but is just packed with great stuff. We spent about 2 hours there and could easily have stayed another hour.

Our chariot was this sweet Dodge Challenger, it rode nice and did okay on gas considering we thrashed it pretty hard.

Did you know that Antique Archeology (The Pickers from the History Channel) had a store in Nashville? Angie's mom is a big fan so we stopped in. There were no antiques we were really into but we did buy some swag.

I'm embarrassed that I didn't get a picture of the hotel, we stayed at The Kimpton Aertson which is right by Vanderbilt University. Great hotel, best hotel coffee I've ever had by far. Best part is it was free on points earned from corporate travel...

We spent the afternoon on a Segway tour through a terrible rainstorm. I thought I had video of the rain but can't find it. The rain was amazing, it pounded down for about 15 minutes, then stopped like somebody had flipped a switch, by dinner the roads were dry. We did have to detour slightly around some big puddles that would have drowned our Segways.

This was our second Segway tour, the first was in Chicago in 2016, don't hesitate to try them out, yes you'll look like an idiot but everybody does and if thats the worst thing that happens to you thats pretty okay...

Dinner was at Martins BBQ which is definitely one of the 5 best BBQ places I've ever been to. This area of the country is known for its "spicy mayo" sauce which is odd but not bad. We arrived pretty late and got the list of what we could have. I like that, it means what you can have is what they still have, which means they're not cooking extra batches during the day which means what you get is quality. It was too, so good...

Huntsville was great, the convention was great, I forgot to take pictures. The convention was held in an Embassy Suites which worked out really nicely. I now understand better the draw of a hotel convention. I was disappointed we didn't get to camp but at one point we were in the indoor pool when I really big storm moved through. I was glad I was sitting in the pool watching it rather than huddled in my tent...

Huntsville is the "Rocket City" and home to the US Space & Rocket center so of course we had to check that out. Pictured above is the return craft from (IIRC) Apollo 16. Its an amazing place and I strongly recommend taking a whole day, I think we were there for 4 hours and could have spent another 4 easily. We didn't find the Apollo room until late and sadly had to rush it.

The light-up was really nice, the hotel is on a canal which made for a great venue. I wish we had brought something to light but it was hard with the flight...

Since we flew I hadn't planned to buy much, then Angie won this sweet cooler as a door price at the banquet. I'd gotten roped into helping draw door prize numbers. Somehow I always get roped into something. ;)

Anyway since I would be shipping the cooler back anyway I took the opportunity to buy a glass shade from Craig Seabrook. I paid extra for the nickel band which I think really dresses up the shade. I put it on a CQ I've had for years which has a place in our living room.

Finally on our way home we took another half day in Nashville. We "visited" the Grand Ole Oprey but only went in as far as the gift shop. Neither of us is particularly into country music. We stayed at a Holiday Inn Express near the airport, if you have the opportunity don't hesitate to skip that place, if we'd paid for it I'd be upset. On the positive side we had a nice dinner at Flyte.

My first computer

Some time ago one of the younger folks (I think he was 17 at the time) at our game night said something like "Oh that reminds me of an old computer game."
I replied "I think your idea of an old computer game and my idea of an old computer game are not on the same scale."

To which he replied that the game in question was about 10 years old. I fired back "Oh, okay, well my first computer had 16 kilobytes of RAM and we saved programs to an audio tape drive..."

At that point one of the 20somethings in the group decided to chime in "I'm going to call shenanigans on that one." but here it is, my TI99/4A

The conversation left me thinking about my good old TI, this was my first computer, we got it around 1982, I'd have been about 6. This was a time when having a computer was kind of a big deal. The TI was already on borrowed time, it was discontinued in 1984, and as we didn't have a whole lot of money we didn't have a ton of accessories for it but it still holds a place in my heart. The TI was a big force in my life, it helped me to learn to read and do math, to learn how to type and a lot about how computers worked. When he brought it home my dad declared "This will take the boy through college." Actually it didn't even get the boy into high school. In junior high we got an Atari 130XE, an Atari mostly because my friend Nate had one. That computer was on borrowed time too but thats a story for another day.

Anyhow my favorite game of all time is "Tunnels of Doom: Quest for the King" which was basically the first RPG, a party of up to 4 adventurers descends into a dungeon to save the king and his orb of power. Actually what I didn't know at the time was that while the basic game came with "Quest for the King" and "Pennies and Prizes" there were other adventures that could be played with that one cartridge. The game actually came in 2 parts, the cartridge and, in our case, a cassette, that had the adventures. There was a disk based version too but we didn't have a disk drive to use that. I remember vividly the 200 seconds it took the load the cassette, forever at the time, even as an adult waiting for the cassette to do its thing is agonizing, there was to be a better way.

Well there is, look at the picture of the TI again, notice the thing on top? Thats a Raspberry PI, if you're not familiar the Raspberry PI is a credit card sized computer originally intended to get kids interested in computers, this one is connected to:

The conflagration hanging off the side of the computer is commonly called a sidecar, TI used this mostly for the speech synthesizer, in this particular sidecar is a 32K RAM expander (more than twice the original RAM) and a TIPI. The TIPI (pronounced tip-ee) is really more like a TI-PI and connects the TI to the Raspberry PI. This allows for all sorts of new things but mostly I bought it to have the PI act like a disk drive for the TI allowing me to load Tunnels Of Doom nearly instantly and easily save my games in progress, a 10 level dungeon takes many hours of play.

Overall this project has been tremendously fun although its also quite frustrating, I'm not a computer developer by any stretch of the imagination and the TIPI has stretched my skills to the limit, often I've told people "I'm not really sure I'm smart enough to have this thing..." which isn't far from the truth. I've really just scratched the surface of what its capable of but I'm having fun.


Oh and as a side note I've probably paid more for the TIPI, 32K RAM expansion and PI than my dad did for the computer in the first place...

Catchin up

Dear readers,

I know its been a long time since I've posted anything and I'm super sorry about that. Its not that I haven't been doing anything, quite the opposite, I've been doing tons of things which is why I haven't written.

Anyway prepare yourself for a bunch of updates as I try to post every day this week, lets see how that goes.

Grill day

We've had the same Vermont Castings gas grill for about 8 years now, its played a support role in many of my videos. Recently I noticed a random blast of flame coming from a strange spot. Initially I thought it was due to a piece of crud covering a gas jet but it turns out the burner had holes rusted in it.

 

I suspect I could have welded in patches to save the old burner but it wouldn't be pretty and wouldn't last. That was the "cheap" burner which lasted 8 years, this time I opted for the "premium stainless steel burner". If it lasts another 8 years I'll be happy.

New burner, new briquette tray: 

New ceramic briquettes, new porcelain coated grill grates: 

Total cost about $150 shipped. $150 doesn't buy much in a grill...

To save wear and tear on the grill grates Angie bought some copper/silicone mats that go over the grates and prevent crud from cooking onto them, seems to work good and because they're thin you still get lines on the food.

Whoops!

In my previous post I commented on how much I like Trader Joe's dried baby bananas, and I do, thats not what this post is about.
At the end of that post I put an Amazon affiliate link for said bananas with the comment that it was cheaper to buy the 2 pack than the three pack. I should note here that I rarely go to Trader Joes since there isn't one handy (or anywhere near actually) where I live. The other day I happened by a Trader Joes and bought two more bags of baby dried bananas and realized that the cheapest place to get them is Trader Joe's.

I know, duh right? What I hadn't realized was the price difference, the link I gave you is nearly $12 for two bags, in the store they're $2 each!

So don't use my link, I get a small amount of money if you do but really just buy two bags for $4 and give me $8, heck get a third bag and give me $6 ;)