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Post by CampKohler on Dec 19, 2015 23:45:10 GMT
Whoops! I misread potato bag clip for potato chip bag clip. There's many a slip between the bag and the chip.
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Nice wood on the table top. Too bad you didn't get the bottom, too, even if it wasn't as delightful. What does the bottom of the top look like (attachment points, etc.)?
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I worked on the photos-in-posts topic in the Technical Forum, which I finished up today.
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Post by floppycatlovingbunny on Dec 21, 2015 21:02:48 GMT
Sunday late afternoon just before sunset (4:15 pm) I went to the library to look through their bins of books on the sidewalk for recycling pickup. I blame you for this. I ended up taking over 20 books, and that was from what was left over after all the other book-pickers had done their worst over the weekend. Various books about health, gardening, anthropology books, a book about how to buy a house and another about how to start up a business, Laura Ingalls Wilder's last book "These Happy Golden Years". There was also a swiveling chair left out, that needed some reupholstering but could have been useful to somebody. Inside one of the bins as I found it What I took home
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Post by CampKohler on Dec 22, 2015 20:45:15 GMT
By "blame this on you," I assume you mean "offer your grateful thanks." You're welcome! Congratulations on the book finds. Our libraries here put all their discards in locked steel bins which are transported back to a warehouse where they get them ready for yearly book sales and recycle the bad ones and all scrap paper and cardboard.
The chair is a "task chair," to distinguish it from the more magnificent executive chair, which is designed to hold the more magnificent executive ass. That one has a ring at the bottom for resting the feet, which is seen only on chairs used at high tables, such as drafting tables. As drafting is more or less completely computer work nowadays, the rings are probably on the way out. Does the chair have a gas cylinder for adjusting the seat height? Even if it leaks down or is otherwise defective, the cylinder can be easily replaced.
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In the morning I ran downtown to get my check into the hands of the traffic ticket people before the deadline, which was today. I requested a hearing in person to get it straightened out, because their review by mail was just plain wrong. And 52 USD is 52 USD.
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I cleaned out the car of large objects in order to get ready for Christmas shopping. (I bought two largish kid's toys for my friend's child care place at the 1/2-off sale at Goodwill Sunday. It's amazing that these things go for 20 USD at the store new, but only 2.50 USD at Goodwill. Kids can't tell the difference.
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Last night I lobbed a big soda bottle at my bed and managed to cream my reading lamp. The CFL broke (I'm out 33¢!) and the lamp socket broke off. The socket itself is made from heavy ceramic, but its support was thin Chinese plastic instead of steel. Now I have to find a replacement socket or lamp.
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Post by floppycatlovingbunny on Dec 23, 2015 2:07:42 GMT
This little branch library is where they hold the book sales. If they brought these books to the main central library, and put them in a Free Books box, they would all be taken. But this city doesn't give a damn, so this is where they put out for recycling the ones they don't expect to sell in the basement of this little library.
The books I took home I had placed on the chair because it was there at the time. I didn't mean to imply that I had also taken the chair home, I did not take it.
Two years ago I lived three streets away from this library. I collected several hundred books from there, and when I moved to this little apartment I had to bring nearly two barrels full of them back to the library, because there just isn't room for them here. And there really still isn't. This one room apartment is so crammed with my stuff that there's very little room for me to move, let alone sort through the boxes of things I have here. That's why I could not have taken the base of that wooden table from the dumpster. I can absorb the bagful of books I took on sunday. But I can't fall back into the habit of collecting new ones on a regular basis.
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Post by CampKohler on Dec 23, 2015 21:35:08 GMT
Too bad you couldn't tow the chair with your bicycle. How come your pix of the building does not look like the one on SV? Isn't there only one address on Homer?
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I spent yesterday Christmas shopping. Back at it today. It is hard to find the exact right things by looking in the brick and mortar stores, so it is no wonder everyone is buying online and having it delivered.
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Post by floppycatlovingbunny on Dec 24, 2015 2:01:42 GMT
Homer Street is the main central library I mentioned, where they OUGHT to bring the books for people to take for free instead of putting them out for the paper recycling trucks. The one in the photograph is the Auburndale branch library. If I had wanted to take the chair, I could have one way or another. As I said, I really truly do not have the room for it, even if it were in perfect condition. This is part of the reason I was really needing to buy a house to live in, aside from the even more urgent matter of the money wasted by paying rent. This will be among my specific goals for 2016.
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Post by CampKohler on Dec 29, 2015 20:03:33 GMT
If you look at the Auburndale Library to the left of the bicyle rack, there is a strip of concrete with what appears to be a collection of access ports of some sort, e.g fuel oil, etc. The next time you visit, can you find out what each one is for, from the one nearest the street to the one nearest the building, and report back here?
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Yesterday I cam upon the scene of a utility pole repair project, involving many trucks, closed off lanes, etc. I parked across the street to ake a series of pix. When I returned, someone had broken the passenger side window of my Saturn. Fortunately, it appears they were scared off, because nothing was taken, including a couple of bucks on the seat. As I had a Nikon camera, tools, etc. in there, it could have been a lot worse. Nevertheless, now I am vacuuming handfuls of broken tempered glass bits in preparation to getting the glass replaced. As I have electric windows, I may have to buy not just the glass, but the entire regulator assembly. What a pain in the butt, but at least it is not raining.
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Post by floppycatlovingbunny on Dec 30, 2015 11:01:12 GMT
There are two basement windows visible in the my photograph of the library, to the right (from our perspective) of the front wheel of my bicycle in the photo, just above the tops of the green barrels. Are these the "access ports" you are referring to? To the left of my bicycle in this photo there are some concrete bricks visible, that are simply part of the architecture of the building.
There's also a concrete set of steps that take you down to that basement from outside there, to the left of the visible stairs under the green door. This basement is where the 4-8 book sales they have each year are held.
I presume you have auto theft insurance that may cover the damage to your car? Also, after this you would probably want to investigate what kind of alarms are available, many are available as smartphone apps that can alert you if your car is being tampered with.
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Post by CampKohler on Dec 31, 2015 7:29:39 GMT
So the items in the concrete strip are just designs? They don't look very artistic to me; just utilitarian. There are actually five items embedded in the concrete, none of them having the look of bricks. Perhaps you can take a closer look next you visit. ---- There is a built-in alarm, but it only goes off if you open a door. In any case, it only tells you that you've been screwed; it doesn't prevent it. There's not much you can do if some whack job throws a rock at your window because he thinks the world is out to get him. And there are a lot of those guys wandering around nowadays, waving their arms and definitely not talking to someone via bluetooth. My car is a '97, so it's not worth buying a comprehensive policy. I spent the day vacuuming out endless glass particles and learning "the secrets of the door." I couldn't imagine how I was going to get at the regulator properly until I figured out that what I was looking at—the inside—of the door was really the door itself; the outside was just a plastic slip cover (a feature later abandoned by Saturn) and not sheet steel. By removing the cover, the guts of the door are accessible from the outside, like one of those Visible Body toys. So I trotted over to an auto dismantler to pick up the glass (35 USD), a taillight assembly (65 USD), an outside mirror (35 USD), and a spare tire of the "donut" variety (35 USD), the latter three being projects that have been long delayed. So it will all come to about 190 USD. Taillights are so expensive, I guess, because there is a big demand for them. One teensy fact the parts guy failed to tell me was that the parts are still on their junker, so I couldn't pick them up just before closing time. I will have to drive the 50 mile trip tomorrow morning all over again. Live and learn. Once upon a time, while I was backing up, the mirror barely touched a plastic garbage can and shattered into many pieces. I managed to glue it back together with Gorilla Glue, but that evidently is not the best glue for hard plastic, because it started breaking up months later. Once upon a time, the taillight got broken when backing up out of a parking spot very slowly. The other guy zipped by, raking most of the side of his car, which I later learned, would be my fault being as I was moving. However, he claimed that his registration, etc. was at home and for me to wait for him. I knew it was a big lie, and either he had an open warrant or no insurance, because he never showed as I expected. I had the CHP take a report just to cover me in case he did. But that was fine with me, because it meant that there would be nobody to put a claim against my insurance. Once upon a time, after a flat, the spare I have now began shredding at about 50 miles, which, as the manufacturer states, is really and truly the life of these spares; you put them on to get to a tire store and then put them back in the trunk. So all of that will be fixed. PS: A friend of mine once came out from work to find his taillight missing. He checked into buying a new one and it was over 130 USD, so he then understood why someone would steal his.
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Post by CampKohler on Jan 6, 2016 19:57:10 GMT
Yesterday I finally got the new used window glass installed in the Saturn. Lesson 1: no matter how many times you probe along the rubber-coated tracks where the window resides, there will always be one more piece of busted glass lodged there to gum of the works. All of those have to come out. Lesson 2: You have to lube up the tracks and glass with soapy water so that the glass will slide into the tracks properly. In the Saturn, there is about a 6"-long portion of the track that is covered up by a steel part of the door, so you can't get to it, and that's where things hung up. A flap on the edge of the track would fold under instead of over the glass over and over again. But by wiggling and wiggling, the glass finally popped into the track and all went well from there. At least I am an expert on it should I have to replace another one. I am surprised I didn't break the replacement with all the futzing around with it in the middle of a steel door. (With tempered glass, all it takes is a light tap on the edge of the glass and you instantly have granulated glass.)
The new used remote mirror took literally about 30 seconds to install.
The next project is to empty the car entirely and make sure every last bit of the glass particles is vacuumed out. Those things are pernicious.
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Other than that, I have been goofing off while dog sitting my sister's dog, which ended yesterday. But it starts in again next Monday when she goes to Reno for a week to visit with the great grandson, wife and baby, who have flown in from Texas for a visit. In the old days, a family generally stayed put in the home town (or at least returned to it), but now it seems the offspring take to the winds and scatter across the countryside. Christmas and Thanksgiving gets smaller and smaller each year. And I'm the oldest (ulp!).
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Post by CampKohler on Jan 9, 2016 5:13:35 GMT
I went to the Recorder's office during the afternoon Thurs & Fri to do more research. I helped out a young lady who was being sued for $10,000 by meany neighbors for driving over a sliver of their land one inch wide to get to her driveway. She was looking for an easement, but the previous owner was U.S. Dept of HUD, which practically cuts off the trail of owners, because of the huge number of properties that passes through them (too many deeds to read). I told her that her best bet was to claim a prescriptive easement, which is what you automatically have if you have been using a path across someone else's land for five years.
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Post by CampKohler on Jan 10, 2016 23:38:56 GMT
All the plans have changed. The grandnephew's wife just had some surgery and is not up to the trip, so that was cancelled. However Sis is still going up to Reno for the grandniece's BD for a night and then down to their Grass Valley vacation place for the rest of the week, so I am still on for a week of dog sitting and free cable.
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Gotta get all those glass granules out of the nooks and crannies the car.
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Post by CampKohler on Jan 13, 2016 8:26:35 GMT
I found an absolutely filthy Panasonic microwave out back of a Goodwill. I don't think it has ever been cleaned in its entire existence. Ick! Someone cut the cord off, which is not too hard to replace, and the glass turntable is gone, but those are available. It is a late model with a single rotary knob instead of the typical keypad. Instead of the typical power supply consisting of literally three parts, it has "inverter technology," which is a snazzy way of saying they saved the cost of an expensive transformer by substituting a much cheaper printed circuit board having a zillion parts, any one of which will kill it. I have cleaned it up and it is very spiffy looking indeed what with it's stainless steel trim, but I will have to slap a new cord on it to see if the inverter has bit the dust.
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Post by CampKohler on Jan 15, 2016 20:06:02 GMT
Yesterday I cleaned up Sis's place after my stint at dog sitting and went home. I never did get the car cleaned out of all those glassicules. Next time. ---- Today the library is closed, so I stopped by at the Lionsgate Hotel on the way to the Recorder's office downtown. It is the old officer's club of the former McClellan AFB, now McClellan Business Park. There is one PC position there for guests, but you can only get your hands on the screen, keyboard and mouse, so you can't use a thumb drive, earphones, etc. However it is not locked down like the library PCs; you can access the Start button and get at programs and the speaker works. Now I see a YouTube message: "Ooops, your web browser is no longer supported." Egads! At least you can bypass this and still see YouTube.
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Post by CampKohler on Jan 16, 2016 20:51:24 GMT
At the Recorder's office, for a parcel of interest, I had a huge gap between an earlier owner (1920s) and a later owner (1950's). No matter how cleverly I searched the computer, I couldn't find any deeds transferring ownership bridging the gap. Near the end of the day, I fell back to the microfilm of the handwritten General Index (which is what they used before computers), and I found it in the second roll I searched. The missing deed was indeed recorded and dutifully appeared in the General Index, but it never got indexed in the computer system of 1963 onward. This means that every title upon which this deed bears and was later insured by title companies also was defective, at least in documentation. It leads one to wonder just how good title insurance is, because they specifically exclude from the insurance coverage anything the title can't see in the public record, which is exactly what missing deeds are. It's like having life insurance that is good only up to the moment you die. Floppy, when you buy your house, you might be surprised to see the difference between what the title company has on the chain of title vs. what you can find at the county recorder's office. Depending on how dedicated you are, you could research it before you buy, and, if you find anything missing, see if the company that wants your business has records that are more complete that what you have. It looks like you can search online only from 1974, so you might have to go in person for earlier records. ---- I watched a couple of episodes of the TV show Unforgettable out of a Season 2 set. The premise is that this woman police detective has perfect memory and, by recalling the tiniest things she saw or heard during the investigation, can put them all together and solve the crime. She only relied upon the clues she remembered, so the show was a one-trick pony, whereas the Mentalist is more creative; in addition to careful attention to the clues, the hero would "read" the suspects and devise clever ways to lead them to their legal doom. In addition, the writing of Unforgettable is not quite as good as the Mentalist is, so after two episodes, I called it quits and just now put it back in the library return slot.
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