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hoarded silicone beads
Tuesday, October 7 2025
I had a better day at work today and even managed to get a lot of work done in a way that showed up in the metrics, which is all that really matters it seems.
After Gretchen headed off to her pilates class, I took Charlotte (but, seemingly, not Neville) on a simple walk up the Farm Road and back through the scrubby forest on the highlands to its west. At the end of that walk, I saw Charlotte walking with purpose out to the end of the Farm Road and figured she was about to do what her tracker has shown her to do fairly regularly: cross the Dug Hill Road and sneak around back behind Roseanne's house. (Roseanne is the woman with a long history of calling animal control on our various dogs.) So a little later I went to the end of the Farm Road myself to see if this was what Charlotte had done. Sure enough, I saw her back there. But when I called her, she came right back, acting a little sheepish for her misbehavior.
I then brought the dogs with me for a rare (these days) drive out to 9W, as I needed to get a sixteen foot treated six-by-five-quarter plank to replace one that has rotted through on the east deck. To keep Gretchen happy, I opted to go to Lowes, which is supposedly Black-owned (unlike fascist-owned Home Depot). I also needed bottom-shelf liquor for the laboratory, and the nearest liquor store to Lowes is Fitz's Liquor Store in the same shopping area as Staple's. (I used to go to that liquor store all the time, but hadn't been there in years.) There I bought a cheap half gallon of gin (which is impossible to get on my drive home from work) and an unknown brand of Kentucky bourbon that is, it turns out, 100 proof. (I wonder if Kentucky bourbon is being sold for cheap now that Canadians are boycotting it due to Kentucky's role in giving us dictator with ambitions of, well, invading Canada.)
When I went to get my 16 foot plank in Lowes' lumber aisle, all I could find was a few crappy pieces. The good ones were all strapped together on a higher shelf. So I went and got some tin snips to cut the straps. As I cut them, they released with a loud gun-shot-like pop, frightening the middle-aged woman who was being entirely too picky about her eight foot deck planks only ten feet away. I kept hoping for her to leave, but she was going to be there for awhile. So I kept at it. As I was cutting through the last strap, an employee showed up and chided me that what I was doing was unsafe. "I know," I agreed. After the picky lady found all the planks she needed, the aisle was closed down and a fork lift was used to lower the planks to a more accessible level and the last strap was cut.
While I was at work today, I'd had my drenched Nikon Coolpix camera on the dashboard of the Bolt, hoping the sun would drive out the last of the moisture. But the lens was still fogged up after a whole day of that, so I asked ChatGPT for ideas. It suggested I seal it up with silicone desiccant. Since I am something of a hoarder, I had dozens of packs of old desiccant on hand. But it was probably all saturated with water. So while I was off getting lumber, I'd been baking a bunch of it in the oven. (It turned out there were also packets of oxygen absorber from jars of kimchi among the packets of silicone beads, and when I accidentally added some of that to my unbagged silicone, it was easily removed with a magnet in a bag, since it was just iron filings.) When I got back with my lumber, I sealed up the still-hot silicone with my camera in a plastic container normally used for salad and cupcakes.
Later I put considerable effort into replicating the Meshtastic bridge setup from the cabin in my laboratory. The stupid Meshtastic app was behaving extremely unreliably, causing me much frustration. But I eventually got a Meshtastic node working with a Raspberry Pi Zero W, and it even successfully logged some GPS data from the tracker.
I also have a Lilygo T-deck that would be useful for sending text messages from the dock once my Meshtastic mesh is set up (using the same mesh that tracks Charlotte's position). I managed to install a Meshtastic firmware on it, but then getting it to join the mesh proved problematic, and I can't stay up late working on such things on a Tuesday night. So at some point I called it quits.
One other thing I managed to do this evening was make another adjustment to one of the shower handles in the upstairs bathroom. It has always produced a slow dripping, and I've tried soldering a little shim onto a brass piece to get the handle to stop a little short of where it wants to, since that seems to be the true location of "off." I'd done this some weeks ago and thought I was making it stop too short, but it's since proved to be the case that I hadn't had it stopping short enough.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?251007 feedback
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