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the hell of a dull hacksaw
Thursday, January 29 2026
Ray had been trying to install a battery in an old Macbook he'd recently purchased for cheap but discovered he didn't have a sufficiently tiny screwdriver, so he'd asked if he could come over here and work on it. So this morning at 10:00am he arrived with Jack, sending Diane the Cat scurrying up the stairs to get away. The screwdriver Ray needed was actually a tiny torx driver, and though I had it, it wasn't in my usual security torx set. As I was making a french press of coffee, Ray offered me a psilocybe mushroom gummy, with the implication that I should take it there and then. He insisted it wouldn't do all that much. But I wasn't so sure I should; I'd just taken a recreational 120 mg dose of pseudoephedrine and I needed to be driving later. But the peers I hang out with are the sort I will accept pressure from, so I ate it. (The buzz it ultimately produced was indeed mild and difficult to distinguish from the buzz I was also getting from coffee and pseudoephedrine.)
Ray followed along with a YouTube video playing on his phone as he installed the new battery. But I was puzzled by why he needed to remove additional screws from the laptop's motherboard to install the new battery that he hadn't needed to remove when removing the old battery. Then, though, as he tried to wrangle a flat set of conductors printed on a narrow plastic sheet, I saw that it had already broken, tearing through the conductors. How had that happened so easily? Such things are very demoralizing for me, but Ray just sort of shrugged and acted like he should install the battery anyway, even though there was no way it could work now. I suggested he instead just cobble the laptop back together again and order a new battery, since they only cost about $30. But then when Ray found the laptop no longer even powered up (probably because it requires the presence of some sort of battery to do so), he said I could have it. He said he had a stack of similar MacBooks, and he'd maybe try to get a MacBook Air working instead.
Meanwhile, Gretchen had taken Jack and Charlotte on a walk up the freshly-plowed Farm Road and back.
By this point it was nearing time for me to take Neville to a claw-grinding appointment at Pretty Pet Parlor, but now suddenly I had another thing to do while in town. The refrigerator at our Wall Street house had died and was being replaced, and, because it had a water feed for an ice maker, the water needed to be shut off. But the tenants didn't know how to do that. So I loaded up Neville and made haste for Wall Street.
A couple guys from Lowes were just finishing up the delivery of the refrigerator. But, due to a bit of molding and the orientation of the outlet in the back, the installers hadn't been able to fit the refrigerator in a way that wasn't partially obstructing the hallway in front of it. Meanwhile, one of the tenants had figured out how to turn off the water, but then it turned out that the remains of the ice maker plumbing was producing a slow drip no matter how tightly I closed the saddle valve. I was going to have to remove the saddle valve and use solder to plug that hole it had made in the side of a 3/4 inch copper pipe. That would have to wait, though, because Neville needed to go get his nails done.
On the way, I got stuck in traffic as I passed Keegan Ales on St. James Street; something had happened at the new Albany Avenue traffic circle nearby and there were police. But I managed to get to Pretty Pet Parlor only about eight minutes late. While Neville was back there being worked on, I heard him let out one of his squeals, though I don't know why. (He's tender in ways that can be a little unpredictable and can be triggered by just trying to get him off the top of the blankets.)
Before going back home, I hoped to buy some cheap PEX tools at the nearby Harbor Freight. But after walking every aisle, I hadn't find any plumbing tools at all.
Back home on Hurley Mountain, I ate a bowl of leftover vegetable soup, mustered my supplies, and set out again. By then, the tenant who had figured out how to turn off the water had also figured out how to remove the molding that was causing problems with the placement of the refrigerator. All that was left was the slow dripping from a plastic hose attached to the saddle valve in the basement. I'd already prepared a piece of copper pipe that I'd cut lengthwise so it was a single topological rectangle. The plan was to open it up to get it around the pipe, clamp it in place over the hole with vise-grips, and then solder it. To do that, I had to first drain the pipe, something that took a long time since it all had to go through that one small hole punched by the saddle valve. Once the dripping slowed to near-nothing, I thought I could solder it. But once it got hot, water started coming out of the hole at a much faster rate. This suggested that was still a long narrow puddle of water in the pipe that was being forced out under pressure as I heated it. Clearly the pipe needed more draining, and the only way to do that was to cut through it. And if I did that, I'd need a proper coupling, which I didn't have.
This caused me to make a run to Herzogs, where I also got supplies for the upcoming pexification project back home, where I will replace some long runs of inch copper pipe with half-inch pex in the hopes that it will cause hot water to reach distant faucets more rapidly.
When I returned to the Wall Street house, I suddenly realized I hadn't brought a pipe cutter. So how was I going to cut the pipe to fully drain it? Fortunately, the cars all have toolkits in them, and those kits usually include a hacksaw. But the blade in the hacksaw I found was perhaps the dullest I have ever tried to use. The teeth in the middle of the blade barely did anything, so I was forced to use the teeth nearer the ends of the blades. But they only cut when subject to strong forces. After much effort, I had cut through the pipe enough to break through the last half inch or so using metal fatigue. Fortunately, once I'd drained the pipe, the soldering seemed to go well and it didn't leak when I repressurized it.
On the way home, I opted to celebrate with a road beer from a four pack I purchased at Beer Universe. The road beer in question was a Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Milk Stout, which is as alcoholic as wine.
Gretchen spent most of the late afternoon at pilates and eating at the Garden Café with Lynn, so I did what I tend to like to do when she is away: I took a hot bath and then drank various boozy drinks while watching YouTube clips from the laboratory bean bag. Sadly, my plans to direct pseudoephedrine neural activity at the I2C bootloader project were thwarted by the comfort of alcohol and passive entertainment.
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