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dipshit woodpecker hole
Monday, June 12 2017
It was a second day of seeing something dead (or seemingly so) in the driveway. This morning it was a bird that looked a little like maybe a catbird, though it had red rings around its eyes. Its body was mostly intact save for some head trauma, though there were feathers in various places in the parking area, suggesting it had been killed by one or more cats. I later looked up birds with red eye rings, and the only species that matched its characteristics is the black-billed cuckoo. I've heard cuckoos in the trees but never identified one by sight, at least not here. Cuckoos apparently thrive when there are caterpillar infestations, and this is the third or fourth year of an ongoing plague of gypsy moths.
While I was in a series of three different meetings (and helping, as I often do, with troublesome data imports) in the remote workplace, Gretchen was off at the place where we get our cars inspected to have the Subaru inspected. We know Joe, the guy who runs the place, and he usually doesn't give us a hard time with our cars. But our Subarus tend to be marginal, including the present one. You've heard me mention how I've been improvising a fix to the exhaust leaks upstream from the muffler. But there's also the issue of the perennially-on check-engine light. Yesterday I'd used my OBD2 Reader to clear the two codes (a 0420 and a 0420pd code). Hopefully they'd stay cleared. But we had bad luck today, and the check engine light came on while it was being inspected. Joe took pity on Gretchen and had her drive it almost all the way home in back in hopes it would clear at least one code. And it did, but then the check engine light came back on. He ended up giving the car a 10 day temporary inspection, giving me time to come up with some workaround. Still, those are two or three hours of Gretchen's life (and a third of a tank of gasoline) we're never getting back.
Meanwhile, some dipshit woodpecker had pecked an almost perfectly-round circular hole in the top east corner of my homemade (wooden) solar panel. I went up there to close the hole with spray foam, and of course the wind caught some of the foam and threw it onto my brand new "IT'S MUELLER TIME!" teeshirt (which Sandor had bought for me after Tricia had posted a link about it on my Facebook page and I'd responded simply "need"). So then I spent the next half hour with paint thinner and a dental tool doing my best to make the shirt look like it hadn't been jizzed on.
Late this afternoon, I rigged up an analog hack to make the downstream oxygen sensor on the Subaru produce the sort of reading that suggests everything is in working order (thereby not producing error codes despite catalytic converter or oxygen sensor failure). This was a simplified version of the circuit described in my entry for March 14th, 2009. The new circuit was identical except that it lacked the 1.5 kilohm resistor between signal and ground, since I knew from past experience that there is already a functioning resistor on that leg. I managed to package it all so tiny that I could conceal the whole thing within the oxygen sensor's cable. I figure in the pro-growth anti-outdoors climate of the Trump administration, Scott Pruitt won't be sending his jackbooted enviro-goons after me any time soon.
Tomorrow I'd be flying out to Columbia, South Carolina for the ConvergeSE conference, sponsored by my employer, The Organization, and I realized I didn't have any booze for the plane. So I drove to the Uptown plaza with the Ghettoford Hannaford and the liquor store. In addition to three pints of vegan Ben & Jerry's icecream, vegan tempeh "bacon," and lots of beans, I bought a half gallon of cheap gin and the cheapest 750 mL bottle of Speyside single-malt scotch for sale, McClelland's. When I was coming out of the Hannaford, there was a guy waiting for a bus at the nearby bus-stop/nonstop-freakshow and he was in an epic rage, yelling at the top of his lungs into his cellphone. From far across the parking lot, people looked at him with mild concern and then, realizing there was no danger, at one another. Then they continued with their business. It's understood that such things are within the realm of the possible when you're shopping at the Kingston Ghettoford.
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