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one hour beetle painting exercise
Wednesday, February 4 2015
I had a meeting with my Lightroom Webapp client at noon today and he surprised me with a four figure check, albeit the smallest four-figure check possible. He keeps coming up with impossibly-complex features that he hopes to have implemented in time for a mid-February release date. We'll see.
Once he was gone, I allotted myself an hour to paint a small painting of a beetle based on a photograph I'd found online. It was a painting exercise compelled by my desire to drink booze today. Under my rules, you see, I cannot drink alone unless I have created something singular and tangible, and tiny paintings on canvas count. I also have a new appreciation of the excercise of setting an immediate deadline so as to limit the time I put into such a painting. In this case, I considered the painting finished after only forty minutes. Here is the result:
My plan was to drive into town today to run a bunch of errands. I knew that the last time Gretchen had tried to start the Subaru, it proved dead, but I thought I could get it running with some jumper cables and another car battery (Gretchen and the Prius were down in New Paltz; she was getting a haircut and making at least one social call). But the car battery I had evidently wasn't charged enough because all it could do was make the Subaru's engine wimpily turn over.
When Gretchen returned, we tried jumping the Subaru using her car. Using a Prius as the source for a jump is not intuitive; there's no obvious 12 volt battery, Instead, hidden behind a somewhat hard-to-get-to panel cover, is a single positive terminal offered up from somewhere else. Perhaps there is no 12 volt battery, because there wouldn't need to be. A Prius contains hundreds of pounds of lithium batteries. (Indeed, when I discovered the existence of a 12 volt battery in a Honda Civic Hybrid, it struck me as lazy engineering.) For negative, you have no option except to hook the jumper cable to the car's chassis. I don't know how knowledge like this was disseminated before the internet.
Eventually we got the Subaru started, but it died every time I detached the jumper cables, suggesting the problem wasn't actually the battery but the alternator. With a dead battery, the only source for electricity is the alternator, and either it had died or it had become disconnected. I added "buy a new alternator" to the list of errands I had to run.
Driving the Prius, I started at Lowes, where I bought two gallons of boiler antifreeze and more half-inch black pipe fittings for my still-moribund wood rack project. At the Hudson Valley Mall, I swooped in like a vulture to pick at the bones of the Radio Shack there. There were still several Arduino project cases available, so I bought a couple of those as well as an always-useful five-volt double-USB-jack wall wart specifically to keep in the Prius. At the liquor store near the Baby Depot, I bought two half-gallons of booze (one of gin, the other of scotch) for the bottom-shelf liquor cabinet that I keep in the laboratory. Under my current booze rules, I have not had to restock it since early November.
At beer world, I bought a six pack of Ballast Point Sculpin in cans, which is supposedly the best way to buy it on the east coast. It cost more than $17, but I drink so little beer these days that I can afford to treat myself to the best. In this case, I wanted a good driving-around beer. Sculpin in cans is perfect for drinking and driving; from a distance its beige cans look like an esoteric soda. Also, there is no cloaking device as complete as white middle-aged skin inside a black Toyota Prius.
Next stop was a short ways south down Lucas Avenue to Maresa's house (that is Maresa the baker, of Mark and Maresa). She wasn't there, but her kid brother was, and I was there to pick up a large industrial-strength fruit evaporator. I later learned that Maresa's brother has recently become a policeman, so it was perhaps a good thing that I'd not yet busted into my first road Sculpin. West Coast IPAs manifest quickly on the breath.
My last two errands were in plaza near the Uptown Hannaford (or "Ghettoford" as we tend to call it). I got some high-temperature gasket adhesive and a Subaru alternator from Advance Auto Parts and then a bunch of canned food from Hannaford. I keep a backup stash of canned goods in the laboratory, and every time I need to borrow from it, it tells me that I need to buy two items of whatever the borrowed item was so I can put one in the kitchen cabinet and one in the stash. While I was in the plaza, I drove slowly past the Radio Shack there to see if, like the one at the mall, it was also being liquidated. But it looked to still be going strong.
It ended up being a fairly conventional booze night for me. I'd taken pseudoephedrine in the late morning and I started smoking pot in the evening, so there would have normally been a propensity to drink way too much (my current booze rules, after all, allow me to). But tomorrow we'd be on a road trip out to Western New York, and I didn't want to do that with a hangover. So I moderated myself, interspersing cups of Chamomile tea between glasses of scotch and at one point eating an entire box of rosemary & olive oil Triscuits.
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