Ants

Basement Bookcase - TV Box Removed

My wife noticed ants in a spare room on the second floor. What kind of ants are they? Are they carpenter ants? Are they eating my house? Call the bug man, he comes out and sprays. Now we are seeing dead ants, but we've still got ants coming in, plus we've got ants coming in the back door in the basement. 

Normally I don't mind a couple of ants, but it's never just a couple. Those two are just scouts and as soon as they find something good to eat they're going back and tell all their brothers and sisters and pretty soon you've got an army of ants in your kitchen. No thanks, let's put a stop to it now.

I got to thinking about this problem. Why are we seeing ants on the second floor? The place we are seeing them is just above the gas fireplaces and there is all kinds of space back there. The fireplace on the main floor is pretty well sealed up, but the one in the basement is surrounded by cabinets. On top of the fireplace is a big TV box and that box can be pulled out to give access to the space behind. Last time the bug man was here we didn't spray in the basement, this time I think we will. So I pulled the box out.

Basement Bookcase - TV Box Installed

I don't remember who the numb nuts was that installed the electrical outlet on the side of the box, but it sure made getting it out a bit more difficult than it needed to be. All these wires are needed to support the Frame TV we have upstairs. If someone had planned ahead, they could have put a recess in the wall upstairs to hold the driver box, but they didn't. Instead, the wires go to the TV box in the basement.

Screw Hole and Depth Gauge

My wife helped me hoist the box up and set it in the hole. Eyeball the placement and then check the mounting holes for alignment. First time the charm!

This cabinet used to hold a 300 pound 36 inch CRT television. I think we bought it around the turn of the century and it was replaced by a flat screen a few years later. I keep thinking I ought to do something with this big space, but I'm not sure what.

P. S. The chairs in the top picture were a failed attempt to support the box while we fed the wires through the holes in the back. Didn't work, chairs immediately toppled over sideways. So we used the printer table. It wasn't as high, but it worked just fine.

P. P. S. Bug man tells me we have more ants than usual on account of we didn't have a hard freeze this winter.

Refrigerator Repair

Insignia™ - 165-Can Built-In Beverage Cooler - Stainless Steel

As part of the big 2024 remodeling project, we got a mini-fridge for the kitchen. Because it's the cool thing to do, I guess. It lasted for a year and then it crapped out. I could just buy a new one, they're only $400, which is a chunk, but doable, if I have to. But I really don't want to because a fridge ought to last longer than a year, and it's a nice machine, it would be shame to throw it out. Since it's got an electronic control panel, the problem is probably in the electronics, which means it should be fixable. So five months ago my wife and I carried it out to the garage and set it on a table where, intermittently I would poke at and see if it had decided to start working. 

QP2-4R7 4.7 Ohm 3-Pin PTC Starter/Start Relay and Overload Kit

The first suggestion I ran into was to replace the starter relay. It looks cheap and easy, lets give it a shot. Does Amazon have one? Of course they do, $7. Easy enough to install, they just clip onto the compressor. Only problem was getting the plastic cover off. It was big enough to hold like ten of these relays. Very weird. Anyway, replacing the relay didn't help.

Industrial Silver Conductive Paste

So I got out the multi-meter and started probing the wires connected to the controller. Pretty good wiring diagram. The two sensors both read about 2500 ohms which seemed reasonable, so I got the idea in my head that the connections to the sensors inside the fridge were suspect. Ran into the same problem with the controller on my water heater. The connectors look fine, but maybe they are losing contact when they get cold, so maybe a little conductive past would help. $9 from Amazon. Very messy. The kit comes with syringe full of viscous goop and two super fine needles which means that when you push on the plunger the needle comes off the syringe and the goop goes sideways and makes a mess. Still, I managed to get some on the pins and plugged them back in, but it didn't help.

ACTIVLIFE for Temperature Sensor

Now I try measuring the resistance of the sensor where it connects inside the fridge and found that it was open. Apparently my earlier measurements were wrong, probably the wrong wires. Anyway, new sensor from Amazon, $32. Plugged it in and bingo! We're running.

Fireplace Thermostat

Emerson Low Voltage Mechanical Thermostat

There is a gas fireplace in the basement. It keeps the room as warm as you like. The fireplace is at one end of the big room and there is a thermostat at the other end of the room. I could never get the original thermostat to behave like I wanted, too large a temperature swing maybe. It's been a long time, so I don't rightly remember what the problem was. In any case I bought a new thermostat and it was satisfactory until it quit. Seems the old thermostat used a mercury switch and the new thermostat had mechanical contacts. The new thermostat is supposed to be used with a 12 volt control circuit, but the gas valve in the fireplace runs off the millivolt current supplied by the thermopile. It's like 600 millivolts which is less than one volt.

I don't know whether it was dust or corrosion on the contacts in the thermostat, but I cleaned them up and they worked for awhile, but then it quit again. Obviously I need a better solution. So then I got the idea of using wall-wart to supply voltage to a relay to trigger the gas valve.

Car Relay 12V SPST

12 volt relay designed for use in a car ought to do the trick, but none of the old wall-warts I had lying around produced 12 volts. I even tried using a USB plug, but it didn't have enough oomph either. 

12 Volt Transformer Power Supply

Finally resorted to buying this LED power supply. 3 amps is overkill for what I'm doing, but it works a charm.

On Off Rocker Switch

After the thermostat quit, I resorted to using the switch attached to the gas valve. Awkward being as it is behind the lower grill and down around ground level, but it worked. Until it didn't. Time for a new switch. 

AVARBUVO Lever Wire Connectors

Don't want to wear out the new switch, so I resorted to connecting the two wires together with a splice connector. Once again that worked for a while until the it didn't. Connector is only supposed to connected and then left alone. It is not designed to be used as a switch. That's okay, I've got a bunch of these connectors, I can just throw out the old one and put in a new one.

Of course, using a connector to turn the fireplace on and off is silly, especially since I have all the parts I need to implement my relay scheme. Today the boss is on a tear and something must be done about all the valuable stuff I have collected in my dungeon. Fine, okay, I'll hook up the relay. After stalling for ten months it only took me 15 minutes to hook it up and so far it's working.

Date	Item	Amount
Oct 15, 2021	Thermostat	33.81
Mar 13, 2025	Relay	7.95
Mar 13, 2025	Connectors	8.99
Dec 22, 2025	Switch	15.99
Dec 25, 2025	Power Supply	9.96
	Total	$76.70

I sacrificed an old extension cord to feed 120VAC to the power supply.

Door Repair

I drove over to St. Johns today to help younger son replace the lock on his front door. The door has been not-quite-right for a while now, and the key finally sheared off in the lock. Extracting the broken key was an exercise in futility, so he elected to just replace the entire fixture. I get over there and the lady of the house is making French toast which we ate Romanian style, which means pouring a puddle of honey on a plate, then tearing off pieces of French toast and dipping them in the honey. Wonderful.

Coffeed and toasted we tackled the door. The old latch assembly comes out easy enough, the Makita makes short work of the dozen or so screws holding it all together, but now we see the real problem: the door is not square in the frame. There is a big (quarter inch gap) at the top on the hinge side and the other edge overlaps the frame by maybe a sixteenth of an inch. It's weird because hinges don't seem to be bent and they all seem to be fully seated in the respective places. The only thing I can think of to do is to chisel out the frame where the top hinge goes. We shave off a bit, but it's not enough. I think we ended up taking about an eighth of an inch off and that brought it into line.

The screws in the hinges were only about a half of an inch long, and some of the ones in the middle hinge were stripped. We replaced them all with some two and half inch long screws. You might think that the longer screws would have fixed the problem, but no. We tried that first and it didn't help. Thank goodness for electric screwdrivers. Can you imagine driving two dozen, two and half inch screws in by hand, and then taking them back out and driving them in again, not once, but two or three times? Mr. Makita got a workout.

Once we got the alignment problem solved, it was a simple matter to install the new latch. Oh, and look, the deadbolt slides home without making any fuss. Means we didn't have to get out the Dremel tool and grind the latch plate, which was what I was expecting to do.

Stanley Wood Chisels

We had one old, ragged chisel. When we ran out of screws we took a jaunt over to Ace Hardware. I used this opportunity to buy some Stanley wood chisels and a Milwaukee pocket knife. I don't really have any need to buy tools anymore, but I still have a hard time every time I go to Home Depot and I have to walk by the tool department. Tool lust is a disease and it is only through tremendous self-discipline that I am able to keep from drooling and and pulling out my charge card.

Milwaukee Pocket Knife

I have a pocket knife, but it was grown dull and Jeeves has been lax about sharpening it. I expect I shall have to speak sharply to him. Anyway, I had an excuse to buy a knife, and I indulged it.

Screw You IKEA

New Kitchen Cabinets

A couple of weeks ago I spent five days helping younger son install some IKEA kitchen cabinets. You wouldn't think a simple project like this would take so long, but you aren't allowing for the fact that we only managed to put in a couple of hours a day, and half of that time got ate up with driving to Lowes.

The project was a little tricky because the duct for the vent was right on the edge of the middle cabinet. We cut out the corner of the cabinet which meant the hanger in that corner went away. We got around this by bolting the two cabinets together.

The biggest headache was mounting the range hood. Because of our complications, we had to install the vent after we hung the cabinet, which means we had to hold the hood in mid air and align the screw holes that were up inside the hood with the brackets bolted to the cabinet. For reasons known only to IKEA, these screws, and only these screws, had tiny Torx heads (T-10) and none of the bits in our box of driver bits was small enough. Never fear, IKEA has a solution:

IKEA Torx Bit Adaptor for Range Hood
(Cabinet and Hood are shown upside down)

It was awkward but it worked, until the tip of the adaptor snapped off. 

Steam Heat

Steam Heat Boiler and Pipes

Darling daughter moved into a new rental yesterday. Found this very clean installation in the basement. I think this may be the first time I have actually seen a steam heat boiler. The place was built around about 1920 and is still in pretty good condition.

Fluorescent Lights

TCP LT814B2CCT LED Light

Fluorescent lights in the basement are burning out. Go to Home Depot, all they have is LED replacements. Apparently you can't buy actual fluorescent bulbs in Oregon anymore. They had one there that claimed to be a Direct Replacement, so I picked up a pair for about $15. They plugged into the old fixture, no problem, and turned on, but you may as well have not bothered as they were nowhere near as bright (1800 Lumens) as the old ones (there are still some fluorescents that aren't burned out). So I go to Platt Electric Supply (which is actually closer to my house) but they don't have any fluorescents either. However, they ordered me a pair brighter LED lights (2600 Lumens) for $25. Only problem is you have to rewire the fixture to bypass the ballast.

WAGO Triple Connector

While I am waiting, I notice they have WAGO connectors on the shelf. I've heard good things about them, so I pick up a couple of small boxes, about the size of a deck of cards, thinking there will be a dozen connectors in the box and it will be five or six bucks. Then I check out and each box is like $25. That's when I notice there are like 100 connectors in each box. Well, in for a penny, in for a pound. I have an old yogurt tub full of wire-nuts that I could use, but you know what? Those wire-nuts, bless their little plastic hearts, are just a real pain. Something about wires, they just don't like to line up against other wires, and if they do then the ends are not aligned. If you can get them to behave, you can twist on the wire-nut and have secure connection. Usually. If the wire-nut gods are smiling on you. These little WAGO connectors cost somewhere around forty cents each but they are infinitely quicker and easier to use. I recommend getting a variety pack that has connectors for 2, 3, 4 & 5 wires. I only got 2 & 3 wire connectors, so I had to cascade them to get all the wires in the fixture connected. 

The wiring is dirt simple. You can supply power to both ends, or just to the two pins on one end. Schematic printed right on end cap.

Got the fixture wired and the lights installed, Now I get to select what color I want. Switch on the end cap has five settings:

• 3000K
• 3500K
• 4000K
• 5000K
• 6500K

I think I set mine to 5000K.

More Fun with Plumbing

Vermeer Navigator Horizontal Directional Drill

The day after my last plumbing catastrophe I got a card from the city telling me I'm using too much water. Okay, it's not a horrendous amount, maybe one unit (100 cubic feet) more than normal for this time of year. I'm a little sensitive to this kind of thing since I had a irrigation leak a few years ago that cost me $400, so I go looking for a leak, but I'm not finding anything. Turn off the water to the irrigation system and to the house and water meter is still ticking over at the rate of about one-sixth of a gallon a minute. That's 6 gallons an hour, which is like 150 gallons a day, which is 4500 gallons a month which is like 600 cubic feet, or 6 units. Better put a stop to this. So I called a plumbing company to find the leak.

Guy from 3 Mountains Plumbing shows up, bright and cheerful but he isn't going to find the leak, he's not even going to look for it. Fixing a leak in an underground water line is a waste of time, his solution is to simply replace it with a new line, for $10,000. Yowzir!

I didn't like that answer, so I called Cornel's Plumbing. Guy shows up and he's telling us the same story, and the same price. 

Okay, but where's the leak? So I call Leak Locaters to find the leak. I was curious about this because my lawn man tells me they inject Xenon gas into the line and use mystery equipment to find the leak. Well, I gotta see this and the $350 price tag looks like small change compared to what the plumbers are telling me. He shows up with a big van and connects a hose to the water line. There is no fancy gas - he simply pumps the line full of air and then listens for it. He's got some fancy probes from Siemens that he jams in the ground and then uses to listen for air escaping from the water line. He doesn't have to look too hard because we can hear it coming up through the river rock that is right next to the house. I didn't take a picture of the probe because I thought I would surely be able to find it on the web, but I must not be holding my mouth right because I found nothing.

I am slowly adjusting my brain to the idea of forking out ten grand for what should be a two dollar repair, but surely someone has a different option, so I call a third company - 1-800-Plumber+Air. Zori shows up, takes one look at the situation and tells me the same story. He also gives me an estimate to simply do the repair - $2500, but he doesn't recommend it and there is no warranty. 

The problem apparently is that the water line is PVC and it's 30 years old. It's past its use-by date. If I was a younger man I might have tried to tackle it myself, but I'm an old man and I know it would probably take me a month of Sunday's to do it myself, so I tell Cornel's to go ahead and replace the line. (my wife liked Cornel's guy best).

Dirt Vacuum

Four guys show up Monday morning with four trucks and two trailers loaded with equipment. They start with excavating the irrigation valve complex using a dirt vacuum. 

Irrigation Valves

The boxes enclosing the valves were entangled in roots from the surrounding vegetation so they used a sawzall to clear out the roots. 

RIDGID 21893 SR-20 SeekTech Lightweight and Utility Line Receiver/Locator

They used a fancy Ridgid gizmo to get a closer reading on where the underground utility lines are, which is kind of important because all our utilities are underground here - gas, water, power and telecom.

Digi-Trak Falcon F5 Detector

Then they used the Vermeer machine (top) to drill a hole under the driveway and into the crawlspace under the house. They used the Falcon F5 to monitor the drill's position. Once they have the drill all the way in, they hook up the new PEX water line and drag it back through the hole and out to the water meter. Now they repeat the process to run a new line to the irrigation valve complex. Now it's a simple matter (ha. as if.) to connect up the new lines. 5 PM and they are all done.

I filed a claim with my homeowners policy today. We shall see if they send me any money.

The detectors are expensive. The Ridgid probe is like three grand and the Falcon is over ten grand.

Update 2 weeks later - homeowner's insurance paid. The adjuster I talked to seemed really happy that there wasn't any water damage. With a water leak inside the house, I imagine the bill could have been more like a hundred grand instead of just ten.

Fun with Plumbing

Garbage Disposal Bracket

A few days, maybe a week ago, my wife is cleaning strawberries in the kitchen and water starts pouring out of the cupboard and onto the floor. Not good. Investigating, I discover that the disposal is not perfectly vertical, it is slightly tilted. What gives? What gives is that only 2 of the three mounting hooks are engaged. You can see two of them on the ring at the bottom of the above image. There are three ramps on the flange that is sticking out of the hole in the bottom of the sink. You can see most of one and part of another in upper part of the image. These hooks do not just come undone, not without being hit by a car, bulldozer or similar implement. So what happened here?

I suspect that it has been that way since it was installed over a year ago at the tail end of the big remodeling project. Okay, that might have been, but why haven't we had a problem with water before? Stay tuned.

The next day the kitchen sink is backing up. (Think this might be related to yesterday's problem?) The drain must be clogged. Try the plunger, no help, but no leaks under the sink, so I reinstalled the disposal bracket correctly. Okay, let's try a snake. It goes in about 8 feet but then stops. No amount of spinning makes any difference, it's like we've run into a brick wall.

Drain King

I go looking for my Drain King, greatest drain unclogger ever invented. I know I had one, but it's been years since I needed it and it has evidently crawled off into the weeds. I drive over to Home Depot, expecting to find one there, but no dice. Whaaat? How can that be? Back home I check their web site and it is listed as Out of Stock - This item is currently unavailable. What's the deal, Home Depot? The place must have been taken over by commies.

Who else might have one? How about Ace Hardware? There's one here in Hillsboro, but they are out of stock, but the store in Forest Grove has one. I drive the five miles and they do indeed have one. Back home I hook it up to the garden hose and shove it down the drain pipe, turn on the water and wait five minutes. It makes the most god-awful racket, but maybe that means it's working. Turn off the water and by the time I get back inside the bladder has shrunk and been pushed out of the pipe and all the water that had gotten shoved into the pipe came running out and all over the floor.

I suspect that the drain from an upstairs sink intersects the drain from the kitchen sink, and the small stream of water that comes out of the business end of the Drain King was slowly filling that drain pipe. It didn't reach the upstairs sink so there wasn't more than about ten gallons of water, maybe only one, but it made a big mess when it got loose. Good thing we saved all those old bath towels.

It's getting on about five o'clock and I am at the end of my rope. I ask Migal, who's rebuilding a retaining wall in the backyard, if he knows a plumber, and he does. So about 6 or 7, Jesus (Hay-zoose) and his assistant come over and set to work. They have a TV camera on a snake which they use to take a look. They go after it hammer and tongs for like three hours with no luck. Decide we are going to need to cut the pipe down in the basement and work on it from the other end. We'll do that tomorrow.

The next day I run errands to pick up tools and pipe fittings. I'm looking for the old table lamps that used for work lights, but they too have evidently crawled off into the weeds. Hay-zoose cuts the kitchen drain (sawzall makes short work of that) and finds the pipe is broken where it connects to the drain.

T should connect kitchen drain

T does not connect kitchen drain

This is how we found them, just sitting next to each other

So not only was the disposal not connected to the sink, the drain wasn't connected to the sewer and it's all just been working fine, without a trace of a leak, since forever. I'm flabbergasted, I tell you, flabbergasted.

I mean, how did that pipe break? ABS sewer pipe is some tough stuff. The plumbing was redone about 20 years ago when we finished the basement, and there weren't any cars or bulldozers in the basement, so what the heck happened?

And what about that duck tape? I peeled off the duct tape to see if there was any damage to the T and there isn't. All I can imagine is that somebody hit this pipe with a sledge hammer and broke it and sent someone else into put duct tape on it, but the guy putting the tape on couldn't see the crack, so he just wrapped the tape around the big pipe. This is just spooky.

Anyway, Hay-zoos and his buddy got the pipes are reconnected and things are flowing smoothly. What clogged the drain so solidly, you might ask? Best we can tell is that it was egg shells. The drain from the kitchen runs about 20 feet with only about one foot of drop, so evidently a couple of drops of egg goo every day for umpteen years piles up. Drano on a regular basis from now on, my friends.

Electronic Water Meter
Shine a flashlight onto the meter's solar cells to power up the display.

That was last week. Yesterday I got a notice from the city that my water usage is above normal, so I go take a look, and huh, look at that. All the water lines are shut off but the meter shows I am still running about 10 gallons an hour, which will add up to a whole unit (100 cubic feet) over a month. So I got a leak in the pipe connecting the house to the meter. 3 Mountains Plumbing came out this morning and verified what I found. Their proposed solution is to run a new line of PEX piping which they could probably do tomorrow, for $10K. That's a chunk of change, so I called a leak detection service and they are going to come out Thursday and pin-point the leak for the nominal fee of $350.

We had a leak once before, I dunno, maybe 10 or 20 years ago. The line from the meter to irrigation system had been carelessly backfilled and the line had been depressed and eventually it cracked. I wonder if our repair was not up to snuff. If the leak is in the same place it should be a relatively easy matter to fix it. My only problem is, well, actually doing any of the work. I could do it but it would take me a month of Sundays. Maybe I can talk the boys into digging the hole. On the other hand my insurance agent assures me that my policy covers these kind of disasters, so maybe I should just tell 3 Mountains to go ahead. Still, it's a chunk of change to lay out on somebodies say so.

Lawn Mower

Troy-Bilt 21 inch Lawn Mower

Bought a new lawn mower last week. I have a small lawn in front of the house and another small lawn in the back of the house. The house is built on a hill, so the backyard is one story lower than the front. Once upon a time there was a path going down the side of the hill so a lawn mower could be wheeled up or down the hill, but a while back we put in some fancy stone stairs right over this path, so no more wheeling the lawn mower up and done the hill. Lawn man didn't care, he had a partner, so the two of them could easily carry the lawn mower up and down the stairs.

But now Rob's partner is moving on, Rob is cutting back, and so carrying the mower is no longer viable. For a long time I've been trying to think of a solution, like replacing the wooden steps on the other side so they incorporated a ramp, or making some kind of removable ramp that could be laid over the stone steps, but all these seemed like a lot of work (which meant expensive, like a couple of thousand dollars), so nothing ever came of it. But now push has come to shove and I realized simply buying a lawn mower and keeping it in backyard would solve the problem.

About a month ago I dialed up Craigslist and saw several ads for used mowers that looked like a good deal. I fiddle farted around and didn't do anything about it, and the next week when I went back all the good deals were gone. So I go to Home Depot and Amazon and found several mowers for under $400. Then I remembered Home Depot had sent me a coupon for 10% off, so I went with them.

There are cheaper mowers available, but I've found that the cheapest item is not always a good deal. Spend a little more and you are likely to get much better quality.

I thought about an electric mower, but the electronics and the battery scare me. Electronic circuits are generally very reliable these days, but if they fail there is usually no recourse than to replace the whole circuit, and it will likely cost as much as the mower. Same deal with the battery, except that it will almost certainly die before you want it to, which means buying an expensive replacement battery. Probably cost near as much as the mower in the first place. After all, tool companies practically give away the tools in order to sell you a battery.

Anyway, this mower with a cover and the discount was less than $350. It only took me nine years to arrive at this solution. Very sad.

More Fun with Uniberp

Cast Iron Kohler bathtub removal by demolition
uniberp

Previous episode here.

Fun with an angle grinder

bath floor tile mud set demolition
uniberp

I'm impressed with the cloud of dust that the cutting operation raises.

Fun with doctors and plumbing

Yesterday morning I went to see Dr. Schmidt, the urologist. Mom went with me. He listens to my tale of woe and prescribes Oxybutinin. I'm already taking Tamsulosin to cope with an enlarged prostate gland. When the prostate gets enlarged it becomes more difficult for it to relax enough to let urine flow, so the bladder, a muscular organ, has to work harder to push the urine out. The Tamsulosin lets the prostate relax so the bladder doesn't have to work so hard. Near as I can tell, after a long period of having to deal with the recalcitrant prostate, the bladder gets to be in a state of constant tension. So now I've got Oxybutinin which is supposed to relax the bladder. I took this once before, about a year ago, for a month, and it helped, but now the same problems have returned, so it looks like I will be adding one more drug to the handful of pills I take every day.

Get done with all that and doc asks me if I want a prostate exam, cancer screening you know, and mom says yes. I'm pretty sure I had one of these a year ago, but with the two of them ganging up on me I submit. It's annoying and unpleasant, but it only takes a few seconds and I should be good for a couple of years. I suspect the doc offered to do it because he knows that medicare will pay him $25 for the exam and it will only take a minute. $25 for a minute works out to $1500 an hour, which is pretty good pay in anybody's book.

After 30 years the stopper in the sink in the upstairs hall bathroom bit the big one. Found one on Amazon for $5 and had it delivered. In the drawing above, note how the Pivot rod goes through a little ring at the bottom of the stopper. The ring had broken loose from the stopper but was still on the Pivot rod. The Pivot rod goes through a hole in the side of the drain pipe and is held in place with a nut. Unscrewing the nut allows the Pivot rod to be removed, but when you do that the ring is going to fall off into the P-trap. If might get flushed down the pipe and out the sewer, but it might just hang around there collecting other bits of trash and eventually block the trap. 

P-trap

Best to get it out. Normally, the P-trap can be easily removed, but because our custom cabinets have drawers underneath, there is a shelf directly under the P-trap, so in order to remove it I had to unscrew the down pipe that contained the Pivot rod access hole, which slid into the P-trap and allowed me to pull the whole thing out. Of course water pours out when you open the P-trap, but my brain was operating so I had an old towel on hand to mop up the spill. The back of the shelf had water stains that appeared to come from the shut off valves, but the valves were dry, so I just put everything back together. 

I'm working blind getting the Pivot rod into the hole in the new stopper, but must have I got it right  one because it's working.

This morning we drove out to North Plains to let the shutter man into our old neighbor's new house. They decamped for Palm Desert, and the shutters hadn't yet made it to shutter man, so we got to be the good neighbors. The shutter man got the worst of it. We had a ten minute drive from our house, but he had an hour and a half drive from Oregon City. Morning rush hour through some of the most congested highways. Normally that drive would take half that time.

We stopped at McDonalds and got a couple of breakfast burritos and coffees and it cost like $10. You order from a big flat-panel touch screen. Tap, tap, tap, tappity tap, tap, tap. Every item takes at least 3 taps, and final check out takes several more. It seemed a bit ridiculous, but we got through it. The only people we saw was one person behind the counter, one person mopping the floor and the person who delivered our order to our table. I don't know if I like this, but the food was fine and the price was excellent.

Now we head over to Providence Hospital on the east side where the striking nurses are out in full force. The parking garage was fuller than usual today. We parked on level F and took the elevator down. Sign by the elevator says level D for the skybridge, level C for walkway to main entrance. Get down to level C and find we have to take the stairs down one more level to get to the street level.

Mom gets checked in and the fire alarm goes off. Very loud and very obnoxious and everyone has to leave the building. Me, fearing the worst, suggests we start walking. I mean, who knows how long we are going to be stuck outside, and it's freezing. Maybe we can find a coffee shop. We walk two blocks and indeed we find a Starbucks where we order a couple cups of coffee and a couple of the smallest scones in the world for $15. Meanwhile, mom gets a message from her doctor in the same building, so she calls her back and finds that the fire drill is over and we can go back inside. Seems that was the third fire drill this morning, and it's only ten o'clock. If we hadn't gone to Starbucks we would still be standing outside, freezing, because god hates us.

The dexascan reports that mom's bone density has gone up, which is good. It looks like that her expensive personal training regimen is paying off.

I stop in the bathroom on our way out. I'm sitting on the toilet thinking I ought to send a note Providence to compliment the janitor for keeping the restroom so clean. Then I lean over, the toliet flushes and squirts me in the butt. Dang it! Apparently I leaned over far enough to trigger the automatic flush trigger. Bah. 

Wash my hands (at the sink) and reach for a towel. There is an automatic, wave-at-me towel dispenser. It  rolls out six inches of paper towel. Wave again and I now I have two pieces of paper towel, each six inches long, barely enough to qualify as one sheet. Try the other dispenser. It rolls out a nice long sheet, at least fifteen inches. So not all automatic gadgets are junk.

Back home we head to Walgreens to pick up my drugs. It looks like there are half a dozen spaces in the parking lot, but they're all allocated for special people. There is the requisite handicapped double spot, a spot to pick up online orders and two spots to charge your electric car. Is there an ordinary empty parking spot? Oh yes, there is! One. Bueno.

We go inside, I go to the pharmacy to pick up my drugs. They have some, but not the whole order. Serrrano tells me that the rest will be here this afternoon. I know his name is Serrano because he has it written in big letters on his forearm and when I asked him about it he told me.

I'm done and go look for mom. She's waiting in line to buy toothpaste. The only reason we're buying toothpaste here is because because Medicare or our health insurance gives us $25 a month to spend on stuff, presumably health related. Shoot, if you're gonna give me money, I'll take it. You'd have to be in pretty bad shape to need money for toothpaste, but I imagine there are scads of people who have been driven into the ground by effing Biden and his commie cohorts. The line is long, and I'm gonna have to come back anyway, so we head home, eat tuna salad for lunch and write this story.

Communication Channels

My Wiring 'Closet'

I finally got around to replacing the across-the-floor ethernet cable with one routed across the ceiling and inside the wall. When we started the big remodeling project over a year ago, we moved into the basement and we took our TV with us. The remodeling project was only supposed to last a few months, so it's okay to have a cord running across the floor. I mean, we're in the basement. Actually the only place it ran across the floor was at the bottom of the stairs and we covered it with a rug, so it was practically invisible. But it's been a while, and the TV is still in the basement, so I ran a new cable in a more secure and permanent manner.

The Portland Trail Blazers, Oregon's NBA team, have been having a rough time since all their star players have moved to greener pastures. They're getting better, slowly. They beat the Atlanta Hawks Tuesday night in a nail-biter. Since they are rebuilding the team, they are also trying to rebuild their fan base, which has been decimated since the all-star team they had is no more. To that end, they are now broadcasting all of their games on commercial TV - Charge! 2.2. We have an antennae in the attic, let's see if we can pick it up. Plug the upstairs TV into the coax and bingo! NBA basketball clear as a bell. The antennae is a big old thing that I probably set up 30 years ago. It's not one of these miniature things they are using for their ridiculously high frequency, but it works fine.

Since I was running a new ethernet cable, and since we discovered a new use for coax, I figured I might as well run a new coax cable as well. Plug in the basement TV and run setup to scan for broadcast channels. It found, I dunno, a couple of dozen including the one channel we care about. 

But then I remember that new stuff has been showing up on the ROKU, so I go take a look. One of the new things is TV channels, and there are a bunch of them. ROKU displays a list and I spent a couple of minutes scrolling through it looking for Charge! 2.2. I must have scrolled through a hundred channels. I did not find Charge! 2.2 and I did not find the end. It might be there. Seems as though everybody and their mother that has a broadcast license is making the content available over the internet. I noticed half a dozen news channels from around the country.

There is only one coax cable running to the upstairs TV and no easy way to run ethernet, so now I'm wondering if I can send ethernet signals over the sane wire as the antennae signal. I mean, what frequency domains are we talking about here? Are they even in the same ballpark, or are they in different leagues, playing in different cities, on opposite sides of the country? I have no idea. 

Turns out you can run both broadcast and ethernet signals over the same coax and both signals come through loud and clear. Previous post about the Hitron adapters I used. I am only using one set of signals at a time, so it's possible if you were using both sets of signals simultaneously there might be some interference.

Those stupid screw-type coax connectors are a royal pain. If you hold the cable at the correct angle, the nut screws on easily, but get just a little off center and it jams up. You make or break half a dozen of these connections and your fingertips start complaining. It's basically ridiculous, but it's what I've got. There used to be quick connect coax connectors that just plugged in, no nut screwing required. I think those came with video games, but I don't have any of those connectors and all my coax cables have threaded connectors.

Our country has a zillion video channels all being broadcast simultaneously. YouTube has like a zillion channels, but each of those YouTube channels only put up new stuff intermittently, like once a week. But there are a zillion people watching those channels. How many channels are active at one time? Channels where we have someone broadcasting and somewhat actually watching? Is it a zillion times a zillion times a zillion? Or maybe the cube root of a zillion? If you had access to YouTube statistics you might be able to come up with a number. Of course, YouTube is only one player in the great social media landscape, and all of the traffic that involves an actual person is no doubt dwarfed by the tsunami of bits flowing between machines.

Meanwhile, over in Finland, somebody cut one of their undersea communications cables:

Undersea data cable between two NATO countries breaks 

Excerpt: 

“Disturbances occur from time to time and there can be various reasons,” Bergstrom added. “For example, they are susceptible to the weather and damage caused by shipping.”

Finland’s Security and Intelligence Service (SUPO) told Yle that it was too early to assess the cause of the cable break, noting that around 200 undersea cable breaks happen around the world every year.

“The most common cause of cable breakage is human activity, such as fishing or anchoring,” a SUPO spokesperson said.

Two days later we get this report:

Danish Navy Hunts Down Chinese Ship Suspected Of 'Sabotaging' Baltic Sea Cables

From Michael Every:

So, if you want to worry, look at less glamorous but arguably more significant headlines that don't point to world war, per se, but to world disruption, and major world market volatility.

Official allegations of sabotage were made in the EU as: two of Finland's five nuclear plants had to be shut down; a key Norwegian oilfield was shut by a power outage; the support cable on a Finnish suspension bridge broke; and two key Baltic EU data cables were severed. The Chinese vessel Yi Peng has been flagged as a possible cable culprit and at time of writing was forcibly moored in Denmark. This is likely to prompt a strong Chinese diplomatic response; and perhaps an EU one if it proves a Chinese ship damaged key seafloor infrastructure (again: this also happened to a gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia in October 2023).

Garage Fascia

St. John's Garage Fascia

Put up a fascia board on St. John's garage today. The garage is old and whopper-jawed, but the frame is solid and it has a new roof. The tail ends of some of the rafters are rotten, so we're just trying keep the rot from getting any worse. The picture doesn't really do it credit. In person it looks totally warped. I don't understand how it looks so good in the picture.

Happy Birthday to Me

Faucet Aerator Thread Gauge

Wednesday July 3 went to Cafe Nell for lunch. Had an order of huevos rancheros, my favorite dish there. It's kind of a foo-foo place, but I've gotten old and slow so I enjoy it. Stopped at older son's compartment and his kitchen faucet had gotten kind of wonky, so we walked half a mile over to Ace Hardware where they had a rack of about hundred different aerators. They also had a thread sizing gauge very similar to the one shown above. I swear every one of those threads was something demented. One was like 55/64" by 27 threads per inch. The Amazon blurb reads: "Identify thread pitch & diameter for 20 of the most common aerator sizes from 1/4-18 to 15/16-27". I think ours ended up being something like 15/16" by 23. It took a while to sort through the selection but we eventually found one. $10. I cracked wise that back in the day they probably cost 15 cents, and it turns out I was about right:

Curent Price of Gold	$2,300.00
Price in 1970	$35.00
Ratio	65.71
Price of Aerator	$10.00
Equivalent 1970 price	$0.15

So I had a nice meal, went for a walk, explored the arcane world of kitchen faucet threads, fixed something and got to complain about the gummint. All in all a pretty nice day.

Electricity

VEVOR Hot Water Dispenser

A month or three ago we started decompressing the basement and expanding back into the main floor of the house. We had a remodeling project going on last year and while that was going on we were living in the basement. Usually I have place to myself, but we were both living in there for the duration of the remodeling project. Plus we had all the furniture. It was a little congested. My workbench suffered the most. Anyway, things are getting back to normal and I thought I would move the coffee maker and the hot pot onto a table in the big room. That worked okay until somebody tried to print something using the laser printer that was plugged into the same outlet and a breaker tripped. Laser printers draw 15 amps! Who knew? Certainly not me. Actually it was a bad arrangement overall. The coffee maker and the hot pot each draw about 15 amps. The coffee maker and the laser printer probably only draw that much for a few seconds, so you could probably get away with running both of them on the same circuit as the odds would be low that they would both want big power at the same time. You might even get away with it until you have completely forgotten about this whole power arbitrage thing. So, to keep the peace among my minions I moved the coffee maker back into the work room and the hot pot into the kitchen. The coffee maker displaced the battery chargers, so they got sent out to the big room.

There are still some problems with the current arrangement. The laser printer is still on the same circuit as the air fryer oven, but we seldom use it. I guess there was a time when we were using it regularly, but it's been months since it's been turned on. The hot pot died and has been replaced by an always hot pot. I suspect it is on the same circuit as the microwave but no problems. So far.

Then the new hot pot died. No, wait, it's working. No it's not, it quit again. What gives? The outlet is bogus. Maybe the prongs on the new plug are thinner, or something with fat prongs was in here before. In any case it's not a solid connection. So I replaced the outlet, 77 cents from Home Depot, and all is well. Except, while I was trying to sort out how many circuits I had, I discovered that the outlet under the sink is busted - no power at all. So now, since I'm getting all electricicated, I am going investigate. 

Did ROMEX Cable Change Again? (NM-B Update)
Backyard Maine

I found the problem in the switch box. Presumably the outlet under the sink is for the disposal that was never installed because we only use the basement for drinking beer, nothing serious like actual food. The switch is for the never-installed disposal. What I found in the switch box was three Romex cables. One would be power and one would go to the outlet box. The third? Well, hell, every electrical box in the world seems to have two or three extra Romex cables that often have nothing to do with whatever the box is for. But the wires in this one aren't connected to anything, they are just taped over.

Check the hot lead and it's got 15 volts. Check taped leads, and whoa! This one is hot! Talked to Jack at lunch today and he suspects that the 15 volts was induced by running next to a live wire. 15 volts, but no oomph behind it. So I decided to just tape it off and leave it. 

Electricians earn their money. Stuffing those wires back into the box takes some oomph, and trying to contort myself so I could reinstall the outlet under the sink was a struggle.

Vanity

Vanity

Sunday I helped younger son install a new vanity is his recently remodeled bathroom. Only had to make two trips to the local ACE Hardware store for bits and pieces. Fortunately the sink, cabinet and faucet all fit together like they were made for each other. The water lines to the faucet even connected right up to the cut off valves. The only dodgy bit was trying to connect the drain to the pipe in the wall. ACE didn't have a one and a quarter inch close coupler, so we used a two inch piece of hose coated liberally inside with silicon sealer.