Scattered Thoughts . . .

I had previously written that we had noticed a couple of problems with our clothes dryer in recent weeks.  The drum was making some squeaking and creaking as it tumbles and the clothes were not fully drying as they should.  Also, everything was coming out wrinkled so I knew that something was not right. Yesterday morning, I completely disassembled our dryer, cleaned it out completely (it wasn't bad at all, actually, but I figured I should do this while I was inside the dryer), and replaced the rollers for the drum as well as installed a new belt.  That job was a bit of a pain in the butt but it is done.   I think they must have used locktite on the bolts holding the drum rollers because removing them was extremely difficult and frustrating.  While I was inside the machine, I checked everything and tested the heating element.  The heating element tested as good so all I did with that is removed the little bit of lint and dust that was around the elemen...

T his past week started with my health crashing.  This happens once or twice a week, typically, but it never gets any easier.  Actually, it is more frustrating than anything else because, in some ways, I have normalized the frequency and severity of my health problems and what is more frustrating is how it messes up my schedule and puts me way behind in accomplishing things around the house.   I cannot remember being pain-free and able to do whatever I want so these health problems have become normalized.  Now, I need a few days each week of riding a couch and, even on the "good days", I still experience pain and I need to be careful not to overdo it.  I definitely had one of those lousy, painful days at the beginning of this week.  Back about two weeks ago, I noticed that our dryer is making noise when it is tumbling.  It sounds like a bearing on one or more of the guide wheels holding the tub in place as it tumbles so I ordered the parts I need ...

W e finally had a weekend of solid nice weather so I had no problems doing some electronics work out at our little garden railroad.  I expected this project to take an hour or so...  it took all day so I'm very glad I waited for solid nice weather.   I spent far too much time running in and out of the house retrieving tools.  Plus, I always forget how time consuming soldering tiny electronic parts can be for someone who rarely solders.  Needless to say, this phase of this project was far more time consuming than I anticipated.   I set up everything in the late afternoon including some photography gear.  This way, when it did get dark enough outside at around 8pm, I was ready.  I did get some photos and video clips during the day simply to show the new streetlamps installed in position on the bridge.   There is a short video after all these photos below. I captured a photo of my tablet as it was running the software that control...

T oday, Sheila and I walked more than five miles and my feet and legs are feeling it!   We finally have an appointment for Sheila's car after it broke down on our way to Long Island in June.  The car needs new front struts.  We'll see what else they say it needs sometime tomorrow.  Somehow I doubt getting new struts is the end of the story. We had to drop the car off in Duxbury and it was such a nice day that we decided to hike back to the house rather than get a ride from Sheila's dad.  In all, I think the hike was 5.3 miles and my watch indicated I did over 13,000 steps.  That may sound like a lot but I typically do between 10,000 and 13,000 steps when I mow the lawn every week.  Regardless, today's hike was a bit brutal due to the heat whenever we had to walk on blacktop.  The heat coming off the blacktop made it feel like we were walking through an oven.  Hiking on the grass and dirt, however, felt fine.  Fortunately, most of th...

I t rained all day yesterday (and I thought it was supposed to be a rainy day today too but the sun is shining at the moment...  but it is far too humid for me!) so I stayed indoors and did a little more work on the caboose for our garden railroad.   I cut some basswood to make small awnings for each of the windows on both sides of the caboose.  I carefully glued them in place.  I even painted them after gluing them in place.  It was an easy job but a little bit time consuming.   I feel this adds a bit of depth to the caboose.  It was looking quite flat before and lacking some sort of extra detail.  These awnings fit well.   It is a little easier to see in this photo, below, how I had roughed up the planking on the sides of the caboose the other day.  Before I had done this, the caboose was perfectly molded plastic on a perfectly flat plane.  Now the planking boards are a bit wonky making them look a bit worn which i...

B ack a few years ago, I custom-built a garden window over our kitchen sink.  This is perhaps the first year we have purchased any plants for this window though.  We do decorate this garden window during Christmas and one year we had some mint and some green onion in it but this is the first year that we purposely chose plants for this window.  And, it is looking good! I actually did some research this spring to figure out which plants would fare best in an east-facing garden window.  That was actually the easy part.  Finding some of these plants was far more difficult!  We managed to find a nice selection though... And, the view from outside looking in...

I 've been down for a couple of weeks due to significant spinal pain so I've been taking things slow and easy.  While I've been mostly sedentary, I've been working on a caboose kitbash I've had planned for a few years.   Unfortunately, I never thought about capturing a photo of my caboose before I started cutting away parts of the caboose so the photo below is someone else's photo of the same exact caboose.   This caboose is what is known as a bobber caboose and these cabooses have the distinct characteristics of being very short in length and having only two fixed axles.  The first thing I wanted to change was this fixed two axle configuration.  This caboose never rolled well and it sometimes would derail on our small garden railroad.  I wanted to remove this whole undercarriage and install two typical railroad trucks with two axles each under this little caboose. In these photos, below, you can see that I now have two trucks under the caboose....

A couple of days ago, I was lying on the couch trying to get some much needed sleep when some yelling and screaming disturbed me.  I was still in a lot of pain from my spinal injuries but, at this point in the overwhelmingly painful week, I was now able to get a bit of sleep for an hour or so at a time.  What awoke me wasn't the sound of screaming and yelling kids playing though. This was older people yelling like they were rodeo cowboys, yipping and hollering, and that is odd since we have no rodeo cowboys within hundreds of miles from here. After our encounter with a fox in our backyard a couple of weeks ago, I have a couple of my cameras already set up with longer telephoto lenses and ready to grab if something noteworthy happens again.  When I heard this commotion the other day, I got up and immediately grabbed the camera with the longest lens and stepped outside the front door.   It sounded like the yelling was coming from a couple of doors down from our h...

A fter a week of excruciating spinal pain, I recovered enough this weekend to make a few nice updates to our outdoor shower. First, I built, stained and installed a new shelf above this seating/dressing area shown in the photo below.  It is made from 1x1 strips that I ripped from a treated 2x4.  Now that the shelf was in place, I installed a spare bathroom mirror we had lying around waiting for our new indoor bathroom.   Another thing I did today (after these photos were captured), is replace the hoses that connect the valves on the back wall of the house to the plumbing for this outdoor shower.  I had originally custom-assembled three foot sections of garden hose but one of the hoses popped off the connector and we wasted a bunch of gallons of water.  Since then, we've been turning off those valves at the house whenever we finished using the shower.  This is incredibly inconvenient (and I often forget to turn off the valves after a shower) so I replac...