|
|
|
for the bottle
Wednesday, January 6 2010
There were still some mopping-up things left to do with the woodstove install this morning, including the attachment of the third of the three cables supporting the top of the exhaust stack and the installation of an electric blower that pushes hot air out of a void in the new woodstove's body.
I'd run out of U-bolt cable fasteners and had to go to Herzog's for more so I could finish the exhaust stack hanging project. This was such a small errand that I decided to also take a load of cans and bottles to Hannaford to get deposit money back. The Uptown Kingston Hannaford has a particularly nasty bottle and can return area, and I had a whole shopping car to feed through the machine (though many of my cans would be rejected because of bad barcode matches). I wasn't looking too different from the other rough people who patronize the bottle return area; I hadn't bathed or shaved in a week and my jacket was heavily-flecked with cat fur, sawdust, and other firewood detritus. While I was feeding bottles into the nearby bottle crushing machine, the can crushing machine I'd been using timed-out and spit out a credit ticket worth more than a dollar in compensation for all the cans I'd fed it. I was busy, so I just left the ticket there until some guy tried to elbow past me to my can-crushing machine, a machine I was clearly still using. He was the desperate type, with a jar full of pennies sidetracked on his excursion to the coin processing machine. I snatched the credit ticket from the machine as he forged his already-useless excuse, that he wanted to know how the machine worked. Then he immediately changed his story, saying he'd thought it was the coin processing machine. But he couldn't fool me. I should have just let him take that credit ticket; he clearly needed it more than I did. But I was doing a dirty job and my hands were sticky from several-month-old beer, so I was going to get my couple dollars of money for it.
I find that the smaller the production run of a product is, the lousier the instructions printed to accompany it. The Lopi Liberty has to be a small production-run stove, since it is larger than most people would need in a typical house. Sure enough, the instruction telling how to attach the temperature sensor were vague enough that I didn't know whether or not the sensor should actually contact the hot side-surface of the stove. It turned out, though, that the sensor never detects enough heat unless it does so. Even so, the way the sensor attaches to the stove seems like the sort of offhand makeshift thing I'd do if I just wanted to "get'er done." I ended up having to use a little SuperGlue to get a wire support to support stay in place.
This evening it was my night to drink wine by myself. I need a gallon glass bottle for my distilling projects, so I'd bought a gallon of Paul Masson Chablis that only cost $13. I've been drinking it for a couple of days now and it's not even all that bad. As I did so I watched a crappy high-production prequel from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise. Still, it was actually sort of satisfying to watch the well-scrubbed-but-incompetent teenage heroes fail what looked to me like a fairly easy Darwin test.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?100106 feedback
previous | next |
