|
|
|
90 mg of pseudoephedrine
Sunday, November 23 2025
Neither of us had coffee this morning (I was kind of sick of it and Gretchen doesn't like her particular bag of decaf), though we did all the other hygge things as the woodstove blazed away. I hadn't gathered much firewood in over a year, and our sudden use of it motivated me in the late morning to go out with the big Kobalt 80v saw to gather some. One great thing about salvaging firewood after a long hiatus is that plenty more has fallen nearby, meaning all I have to do is cut it up and bring it home. There was a nice (though not very thick) dry sugar maple that had fallen near where the Woodshed Path meets the Stick Trail (less than 200 feet south of the house), and there was also that big tree that had fallen just north of the gap for the Stick Trail through the Chamomile Wall (though I think that might've been some kind of junk wood like big-tooth aspen). But I wasn't cutting for more than a few seconds (with a brand new blade chain!) when the saw started beeping and turned off. Some sort of error had been thrown, perhaps from heat or some sort of electrical issue. Since I'd only been using it for seconds, I was thinking it was probably an electrical issue. Or perhaps a sensor had, as it aged, become overly sensitive. I'd been noticing the saw getting worse and worse about this issue the last few times I'd used it, but I thought maybe the blade was too dull, causing the motor to be overworked. But with a brand new chain and a very light touch, it was still behaving this way. Initially I thought the saw itself was to blame, but when I put this information into ChatGPT, it was convinced that the problem was in the battery, that over time it had developed excessive resistance in its cells and this was causing the voltage to sag when even modest resistance was placed on the motor. [This later proved to be true, because when I tried another battery, the saw didn't exhibit this behavior.] That would be good news, since the battery would be cheaper to replace than the saw. Despite these problems, I was able to cut up enough wood for a modest backpack load, the kind I carry at the beginning of the firewood-gathering season before my muscles and tendons have been conditioned.
A week ago, as you may recall, I had a little problem after taking 150 mg of pseudoephedrine. I wanted to take it again (since pseudoephedrine is good for me to take as a kind of ghetto anti-ADD medication), but I didn't want to risk making myself sick. So instead of 150 mg, I took 90. This produced a useful (but not excessive) buzz, one without any anxiety and only a modest amount of acid reflux.
Later this evening, I finally got around to moving (with the help of a hand truck) the unprocessed logs that had been lying in front of the garage for months. (Gretchen had given me the directive to clean up the yard before her parents arrive for Thanksgiving.) One of the few chores we'd managed to get my brother Don to perform back when he was visiting in August was to move some of these, but he'd stopped after moving fewer than a quarter of them. (He'd wanted to do it only because it provided an opportunity to "lift weights," and had done it in a way that maximized stress on his body instead of maximizing the amount of material moved.)
This evening Gretchen and I watched the third episode of Devs, which is starting to develop enough intrigue to keep Gretchen interested.
Remember back in early October when I went down to the lake to look for Gretchen, didn't see her, and, slightly panicked that she might've drowned, I fell off the paddleboard with a camera around my neck? The worst thing that happened from that whole incident was that the camera never worked again. I dried it out for weeks using beads of activated silica gel, and eventually the water inside the lenses disappeared, replaced with a dappling of light watermarks. But when I turned the camera on, it booted up fine but never was able to produce a picture from its image sensor. Today I decided I'd try to at least salvage the zoom lens mechanism, which has an amazing 40x capability. I removed all the little screws I could find, including those revealed when parts started to come loose, and eventually was able to remove the entire back of the camera. This exposed the back of the image sensor, which was held on by four screws. I removed those screws and folded it out of the way and then wanted to see what the zoom lens would do to images projected onto my right retina. Initially, though, no light was coming through. But then something about the camera changed, perhaps just from it being so opend up, and a shudder in the lightpath slid out of the way, letting light through. Hmm, I thought, maybe that stuck shutter was why the camera hadn't been able to take a picture. So I put the image sensor back in place, but the battery back in, and turned it on. Amazingly, it was producing pictures again. They probably won't be quite as good as the photos it used to take back before water flooded its lens mechanism, but they'll be better than from the aging Nikon Coolpix I bought back in 2007, which can no longer focus on images at maximum zoom. Since I hadn't actually gotten the camera all that disassembled, it should be easy to put it back together again.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?251123 feedback
previous | next |
