Month: November 2022

Cool and raining?  Certainly cool.   Rain started in the evening, just when I had stuff in the back of the truck.  Only fairly light drizzle, but still rain.   I’m hoping we don’t get any today.   I need to do some stuff before we head up to the BOL.

Wife is in Vegas for work but should be home later today.  We’ll have to decide if we are heading out today or tomorrow.  It will probably depend on how bad her flights were and how heavy traffic on the show floor turned out to be.   I have no interest in packing the pickup truck if it’s raining.  Telescopes and rain don’t mix.

I did a couple of pickups yesterday.  One was a little cast iron wood stove.   It’s cute.   There are some chips in the casting along the back edge of the top that you don’t even notice in real life.   Other than that, it’s new in box.  I don’t know if I’ll end up keeping it or trying to flip it up by the BOL.  For $90 and local pickup, I couldn’t say no.

I filled two more propane bottles.   The third was rusty and too heavily pitted on the bottom.   Even my ghetto propane guy wouldn’t fill it.    $11 per bottle, which is back down to what it was a couple years ago.  These two bottles will be headed to the BOL.  I’ve got a lot of bottles.   I pick them up whenever they are cheap, like at garage or estate sales.  And I’ve got a lot of stuff that uses propane.   Patio heaters, turkey fryers, grills, smokers, a gennie, hot water heater, Mr Heater heaters,  maybe something I’m forgetting…  In any case, I recommend having a bunch of them.  If I had to make a specific number, I’d say two for each use.   That way you don’t have to keep moving them around.  Minimum would be one for each use, and only install the ones you are using, keeping the rest for spares.  Oh yeah, get the refill kit for the one pound bottles too.  I’ve got lots of them floating around, and stoves, heaters, and lanterns that use them.

I like propane and propane accessories.   It’s a lot easier to store than the equivalent in gasoline (although I store a bunch of that too.)

Today’s plan is to get more stuff put away, get some stuff from Lowe’s for the BOL, pack and do laundry for a week away, and decide when we’re headed out.   Wrangle the kids, and welcome the wife home fit in there somewhere too.

Bit of a busy day….

Stack stuff!

n

Cool and clear, warming later.  Small chance of rain.  No chance of snow.  ‘cuz that would be cray-cray…  It was nice most of yesterday, once it warmed a bit.   Long pants and layered tops, but the jacket came off in the early morning.

Did my pickup.  Did a drop off at my auctioneer.   Got 5 or six bins of stuff out of the house.  Got some stuff for the BOL.  No not another freezer!  🙂  Prices are going up even in the secondary market.  I’m losing bids for stuff I would have won last year.

Fortunately, there is very little that I actually need to meet my goals.   I feel like the minimums are pretty well covered, and I’m just building out at this point.   Not that I feel READY for whatever is coming, but I don’t feel doomed.  Which probably just means I’m kidding myself or massively underestimating the bad thing.  I am trying to not bid on stuff I’d like or that I want, just because it’s available.  7 or 8 auctions closed last night and I didn’t win anything.  Didn’t even bid in most of them.

What I did win, I got for an accessory included with the antennas.   That mesh network crypto mining thing I asked about last a week or more ago must really be busted, there are a bunch of antennas in several different auctions.   I don’t need a bunch of 900mhz antennas, but the lightning arrestors might be handy.   They are certainly cheap enough to just grab.  And we will be having our local hamfest in March, so I have a place to easily sell them.  The 900mhz antennas might even sell there, hams have allocations in the band.  Easy to store some meter long sticks.

Today I’ve got to get out to my client’s house.   I wasn’t able to connect remotely.    I watched the video again, but don’t see what I missed so I’ll have to go through it step by step.  Fortunately, now we have the bandwidth on site to watch the video while I’m at the rack, logged into the machine.  That’s to get the VPN running.   The port forwarding is straight forward.  I just have to check my notes and do it.

Be open to opportunities outside your normal range.   Look for alternatives to your normal purchases.  Look for alternative ways to uses what might be available.  And keep stacking what you know you will need.

nick

Cold and then slightly warmer.   Sure to be damp too.   Ah, Houston as we move into winter….

It never really got warm at the BOL, but the sun heated you right up if you were in it, and sheltered from the wind.  Fishing from the shade – chilly.  Fishing in the sun – shirtsleeves.   (fixed and baited 3 or 4 poles with different styles of lure so I can easily try different strategies… so I had to test them, right?)

I did get a few things done, and one new (or extended) plumbing project started.    It makes sense to do at least one of the hosebibs and convert to pex.  I can get to it from the master bath, which has open walls anyway, so one more won’t make much difference.  I found the stud cavity had a faint mildew/mold smell, so I pulled the insulation and sprayed everything.   There is evidence of previous repairs to that pipe too.   Turns out there was no insulation/caulk/sealant around the hose bib and pipe, so cold air would just come in through the hole in the brick and condense in the wall… or the cold water in the pipe would condense water out of the moist outdoor air… either way, there was too much moisture in that stud cavity.  I’m sure the other hose bibs are similar.  And fwiw, there isn’t a good retrofit pex hose bib, that I’ve found yet anyway.

I had a nice fire Saturday night.   Shortwave had Radio Miami International airing some good music, but the ham bands were very crowded and it was hard to listen to anyone.   The tabletop shortwave radio I’m currently using does a great job on shortwave, but SSB ham listening is a bit harder.   The knob to adjust the beat frequency oscillator is small and the tiniest movements matter A LOT, but once you get it dialed in, you can just move up and down frequency with the push buttons.   You’ll hear a lot of guys though, because the receiver doesn’t have a good narrow filter, and isn’t very discriminating.   I do like two things about it – continuous tuning, and the volume on SSB.   Unlike most smaller shortwave radios, you can start at 2.500 mhz and just spin the dial, all the way to 30.000 mhz.  You don’t have to touch a band switch or skip from band to band, or service to service.  The other thing is that most smaller radios lose half the volume when you tune ham bands upper or lower sideband.   This radio keeps the level the same as when listening to AM.    It’s pretty close to breaking the adage “if you want to listen to shortwave, get a shortwave radio, if you want to listen to hams, get a ham radio.”    After all that, I can’t even give you a model number, but it’s an 80s or 90s Realistic from Radio Shack.   I’ll update later if I can figure it out.

Get a decent (but inexpensive) older shortwave radio and a long piece of wire, and spend some nights spinning the dial.  Like everything, there is a bit of learning curve, and you do need to practice at least a little.   At a minimum it will give you some idea of band conditions and whether it’s worth firing up the ham rig.

Today I’ve got home and auction stuff to do.   Lots of it if the weather stays clear.  So I might be away from the keyboard later in the day.

If you can’t stack, watch some repair videos, or some butchering videos, or organize your downloaded prepper resouces, or sort your stacks.   All that counts as stacking too.  And it’s worth doing.

nick

*gotta love 80s movies, no “Long Duk Dong” in anything today.