Month: May 2023

Spent about an hour last night working on my 17 year old Briggs & Stratton Lawn Mower. Washed it, drained the used engine oil, drained the old gasoline, and sharpened the blades. It took longer to scrape the dried grass off the bottom of the casing than it did to do anything else. Still a heavy sob to lift up onto my bench. But, this time around I didn’t have to fight with the nut holding the blade on, I used my Ryobi impact wrench to do the heavy lifting there. I braced the blade with a sturdy rubber mallet, and zap! Came right out. No cursing, banging, or reefing on the socket to get it to budge. A lovely bit of kit that is. I’ve used it three times since I bought it in September, and it has gone wonderfully each time, saved me busted knuckles and a bunch of time.

I was smart enough to disconnect the spark plug this time around. Had lots of mower engine oil on hand, so no worries there. This was the first year I hadn’t drained the fuel by running it dry. Not too certain what to do with this jug of water logged fuel. Perhaps I’ll soak some junk logs with it, and then burn them over the weekend after it has off gassed for a few days. Not sure. I do need to go buy more new gas for the mower, trimmer & generator to be prepared for this summer season.

Made it to Friday, and the sun has started to peak through the clouds. Blue sky is visible! Good gravy that is nice to see after 7-10 days of grey rainy mess. I for one am pumped up about it!

I do need to find some new bolts to keep the cowl/cover on my mower. Over the 17 years I’ve had it, it has mysteriously been dropping these quarter twenty look alike hex head bolts out of it randomly. I have never stood on one, or come a cross any of the missing ones in all the years I’ve cut our grass here. And we moved here in 2009. I only cut grass here with my stuff. You’d think I could stumble across at least one of my lost bolts at some point! I did manage to locate the 10mm socket I dropped in September when repairing our broken dryer vent. That was just sitting on top of the leaves beside the garage door. I was over the moon excited when I rediscovered it. My set of sockets was once again complete! I did buy a replacement and a deep version off of amazon, but I can’t have too many 10mm sockets laying around. I need them to have one flat side so they don’t roll off of everything and disappear into the ether. Poof! Gone. I have an Allen key that did the same trick a few years ago while I was working on my lathe. After all this time, several years now, I have never stumbled upon it. My garage isn’t exactly cavernous, nor is it chock a block full of stuff (anymore). My clear out, tear down, and reorganizing has opened up a fair amount of floor space. But no random Allen keys have been located. Weird. The interdimensional vortex known as a garage floor when working with small parts. It’s a conspiracy I tell you! Gotta be gremlins or something. Off the table top, and… it’s gone.

With that bomb shell, I bid you adieu. Ciao Bella!

They plagued us for years and so I built a wooden covered box to house our garbage cans and recycling bins, and the coveted green food waste bin, because the damned trash pandas were scattering food scraps and garbage all over our stoop and front lawn. The bin worked really well for three or four years, that was, until last night, where a fat little fucker chewed into the lid, and snapped off a strip of cedar and then proceeded to pull as much trash out of the bin as was possible. Little fucking menace. I’m going to have to glue, screw, and pin nail a bunch of new strips together to thwart this dirty little shit head. Fuck! Four years with no problems, so why now? I throw all of our food scraps into the compost pile in the back yard. There’s no reason to into the bin. We don’t use the green food waste bin anymore, it all goes to the bottom of the yard into the compost pile. You want a snack, go there you idiot fuck. In case you haven’t noticed I’m annoyed at the mess, and the destruction of my cedar bin box. Rat bastards, the lot of them.

I think it’s Thursday today. Still raining and cool. Looking for the weather to break tomorrow, and we should get a few days of clouded over sunshine. I’ll need to prep the lawn mower to begin a new season of lawn maintenance. Oil change, new gas, blade sharpening, and a cleaning. Loads of dirty fun to be had. Ciao Bella.

Will not help if it pours for so long that everything floods or gets washed away. Did sacrificing your time & money in favour of not spending it on experiences help you in this situation? You lived through a forced austerity of your own making, and now what you did put away is but a splash in the bucket of the vast amounts you’ll need to rebuild. Was it worth it? To deny yourself all those memories, experiences, and in most cases, things you coveted. Hard to say. If something entirely out of your control hadn’t happened then you’d be golden, but now that an unforeseen circumstance has struck from out of the blue, you are no better off, actually worse, because you denied yourself things & experiences and memories that would have made you a happier person for brief stretches. It’s all so chaotic and random. I think planning ahead is a good thing. I think keeping a bit of control over your impulses is good. I think wasteful spending is terrible. But in the end something you can’t plan for, or expect may ruin everything. Some food for thought.

It’s Wednesday, Hump-Day, Middle of the Week Day! It has stopped raining for the moment, a hint of sunlight is reflecting off the cloud cover, and I managed to finish all my cleaning yesterday. I also made some slight progress on my resin kit, yes that is still ongoing. I have the legs dressed (armor), ready to be washed and painted. I got the new hips assembled which took some effort to do. Sprung loaded joints and all that fuss. I’m just about ready to once again primer the now reformed inner structure. At least for the hips to the toes anyway. I see I need to update both the chest and shoulders now too. So it is slow going. I was really busy throughout April, so I didn’t do much beyond spits & spurts whenever I could squeeze in three to five minutes of sanding, clipping, and drilling for test fitting all of these pieces. Might have it done by Christmas! Ha.

I’m more than half way through book twelve of my reading challenge. The book is good, but I’ve come to realize it’s part of a series, and I probably won’t get much of an ending to this first entry. I was kind of hoping for a solid one off experience. Who knows maybe I can locate the later entries in the series somewhere nearby. Or I’ll give it a miss. I’m just looking for quick, simple, one off stories worth reading all the way through. Not exactly a tall order.

The Dune Part Two trailer is supposed to drop at some point today. I’ll go scour Twitter or YouTube to see if it is up yet. I have some Photoshop work to do today, but otherwise a little lighter schedule than usual. Got out after school drop off to do some grocery shopping. Just a quick zip through Wally-Mart. They really give you the gears now to sign up for their customers rewards cards. She was a tad insistent if you ask me. I’m willing to bet they get audited to see how many cards they can sell in a shift. Poor buggers. I don’t need nor want anymore credit cards thanks.

Take care out there. Ciao Bella!

Finally had my tax bill prepared for me yesterday. Ouch. That took a rich, cleaved down to the bone chunk out of my account. Oof. Benefits of having earned more, and foing more paid work in a year. No matter. It’s what I have the secondary account for. Saving to pay the Tax-Man. Not my money, never really was to begin with. I have my HST payment to look forward to paying in June, so the damage is not done yet. At least this time around I’m not waiting on 2023 jobs to pay for 2022 taxes. As I get older I’ve gotten smarter and more cautious with spending money frivolously. At least that is what I tell myself. Whether it’s true or not remains to be seen.

I have saved enough to pay my dues, but I was hoping that the amount would be a bit lower, as I wanted to use whatever is left over to buy our new water softener unit. So I’ll need to redo my budget to cover the additional $1,000.00 for the unit plus install. Which can’t wait too much longer as hard water is probably damaging our pipes, faucets, shower heads, dishwasher, toilets, tub, washing machine, hot water tank, and anything else I can’t think of right now. So I’ll need to bite the bullet and make that purchase sooner than later.

I’m going to sort laundry, vacuum the floors and perhaps mop today before I start to work. I’ve made considerable progress on the website reskin project over the last two weeks, including yesterday, so I feel comfortable doing my Domestic Duties this morning. Towels to wash, sheets to wash. Clothes to sort & hang up. Oh my. The loud music awaits me! Ciao Bella!

Just brought home and opened an organizer for my impact wrench bits, and it wasn’t fitting properly, and I was fixing to throw a fit, but as I grabbed the box up to get mad at it I saw I bought the 3/8’s organizer and not the 1/2 inch. So my bad. I should have realized the price difference, and box sizes were relative to the sockets they carried. It won’t be an issue to fix it tomorrow by buying the appropriate size, but it did make me see red for a moment there. But it is my error. So glad I didn’t get too carried away with it all. On the plus side I do have my impact wrench bits sorted, and away from my regular sockets, so hopefully less chance for catastrophic failure when torquing on nuts & bolts. Just what I want to avoid, fatigued metal shrapnel from an exploding socket to the head, neck, chest and extremities. Super!

So last week was a wild one. This week, less so. At least for now. So I’m going to fire up the washing machine for the girls clothes, then hit up the dish washer, and do some tidying up before I go down to my office to pick up where I left off with the website reskin project I began a week or more ago. Domestic Duties Monday! Welcome back Kotter! Meant to grab milk when I dropped by Shoppers for my Rx, but spaced on it. Totally fled my mind while I was in there. I was so focused on my Rx, I didn’t even twig to the need for milk. Not until I wanted to have cereal upon my return from school drop off, and I was all…”Oh yeah!”. Had enough for cereal, but a bit light if looking to last more than another two days with my Milk-asaurous children. It’s almost 10:00am, I need to get a move on. Ciao Bella!