The Neck, he is not happy

Posted on July 8, 2010 by Marchbanks

I’ve had a herniated disc in my neck (left posterior C5-6 herniation expressing inward) since about 1986 or 1987, and recently it started giving more trouble than it has in a while, so I took it and myself to a neurologist for evaluation.  Her assessment is that the disc is degenerating; it’s got to the point that it’s sometimes pressing on the spinal column, causing weakness and erratic movements in my left arm (and I’m left-handed).  My left leg is prone to weakness when I get tired, too.

This has been complicated because I did something to the disc in early June that sent it into an inflammatory flare, with pins-and-needles, numbness, and sometimes outright pain in my left arm and fingers.  Treatment with Voltaren and a round of Medrol hasn’t yet knocked it down, so today the neurologist decided to try a second round of Medrol, and continue the Voltaren.  I asked whether massage or passive traction might help (I still have my old traction harness from 1994), and she said she thought they could help, but that I should stay away from manipulations.  That’s fine with me; I didn’t want to be Rolfed anyway.  She’s in no rush to surgery, which suits me too.  Even though spinal surgery has advanced a lot, I still don’t want to have a surgeon go in and monkey with it until there’s no other good choice left.

So now I need to find someplace to set up the traction gantry again.  It’s an over-the-door thing, and I have a nice salvaged window-sash weight that ought to be about right for a weight.  And I’ll have to figure out what to do about arranging for massage.

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For this was dead and is alive again

Posted on July 5, 2010 by Marchbanks

I got the amplifier and turntable back from the shop Friday, only to find the AC hum was still there, dammit!  Some swapping of input plugs isolated the problem:  the turntable was causing the hum.  I could plug in anything else I liked and get no more than an open-circuit hiss, but the second one of the turntable plugs went in, the hum came back.

So I dragged it back over to the stereo shop Saturday afternoon, and the owner put it on the bench while I watched him confirm that yes, the turntable caused a hum in his bench amplifier, as well as my own.  He tried wiring a ground patch, but it didn’t help, at which point I decided the problem was that after ::mumble::-teen years, the turntable’s electronics had just worn out and given up.  This didn’t surprise me, ’cos it was only a mid-line model, so I doubt Onkyo dropped in any really good electronics to start with.  I’d already started thinking of getting something else better.

So the turntable giving up didn’t change anything, it just pushed up my schedule.  I asked the shop owner what he might have that would do me, and he came back with a late-70s Sony PS-T22 direct-drive that had been upgraded with an Ortofon FF 15E Mk II cartridge.  The dust cover hinges are busted (but may be fixable; I’m pondering ways and means) and it has a few gouges across the top, but cosmetics aside, the mechanics run very nicely.  I gave him the Onkyo and $75 boot, and left with the Sony.  I came home and reconnected everything—and as the Who LP I’m playing at the moment is proving, the Sony turntable kicks the Onkyo’s ass.

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That nearly worked

Posted on July 4, 2010 by Marchbanks

For dinner tonight, I cooked up a chicken biryani, using a spice mix from a Pakistani company called Shan Food Industries (locals:  you can get them at Fiesta).  Prep was very easy following the box directions, but the result, while good-tasting, turned out to be a lot too hot for M—i.e., hot enough that I liked it and broke a light sweat.  I’ll have to try that again sometime when I have something else already done for her dinner.

Earlier in the day, I had my first try at making a window screen using a jig to drill dowel holes instead of toenailing in finishing nails to hold the members together.  I need more practice at getting the holes the right depth, so the bits all meet up evenly, but I think I can do it with practice.  And a doweling jig is a totally useful little tool.  L scraped paint, trying to get M’s room ready to repaint before my MIL comes to visit in a couple of weeks.

And rebuilding my blog, which is a LiveJournal mirror for my friends who aren’t on LJ, continues.  The old blog, which was in Movable Type 3.x, blew up beyond recovery, so I switched to WordPress 3.0, which couldn’t manage to import the MT content.  The rebuild’s gonna take some time to do, since I have to re-create seven hundred and some posts and a couple of thousand comments.

 

Rube Goldberg was awarded a fnord for his cartoon work.

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Fandangling

Posted on June 23, 2010 by Marchbanks

Somehow or another, we’ve decided to go to Albany, Texas this weekend to see the Fandangle, an outdoor community musical that’s been put on by Shackleford County residents since the late 1930s, which commemorates Fort Griffin, a post-Civil War outpost established to fight the plains Indians.  Fort Griffin was closed in 1881, but it still looms large, along with other long-gone posts such as Fort Phantom Hill, in West Texas history and mythology.

My mother has been after me for years to arrange it so we could go with her to the Fandangle, but I never felt the real pull until this year—and wouldn’t you know, she’s buried at work, exhausted, and not up to making the trip.  But we’re going to go anyhow.  We’ll pick up M from Girl Scout camp Friday about noon, then drive four hours to Abilene and reserve a motel, then drive to Albany (35 miles north and east of Abilene) for the Fandangle.  Saturday, we intend to drive up to Lubbock and see both the windmill museum and the glider museum.  Both museums are small and shouldn’t take that long to see, so we’re planning to be back in Austin either late Saturday or Sunday morning, in time for me to be at the Lane of Færie for work.

 

The result is an astronomer’s oasis.  Fnord.

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Forlorn and thin-walleted

Posted on June 22, 2010 by Marchbanks

Every errand I had to run today involved spending money I didn’t want to spend.  I had to take both my stereo amplifier and turntable to the shop; the amp has developed a noticeable sixty-cycle hum, and the heel of the turntable cartridge is set at too low an angle of attack and skates along the record surface, causing an ungodly rumble when I’m ripping.  The stereo-shop guy said not to expect them back for a week and a half.  So much for getting any more LPs ripped before July.

Tom is in the shop, getting the fixes he needs to pass inspection (new front brakes, left front turn signal, some odds and ends).  He’s also going to come out with all four wheel covers on; I picked up two replacements today (at fifty dollars each!) from Hub Cap Annie.

Then my cell phone died over the weekend.  It won’t detect a signal anyplace, no matter how strong.  I’d been putting off the day I had to replace it, because I knew I’d have to buy two phones along with it, and new SIM cards.  (My old cards are twelve years old, and current-day phones can’t even recognize them.)  So L and I went to the AT&T store, where she picked out a Samsung slider phone and I got a Pantech flip model.

So lessee . . . that means about $600 I’ve either spent or committed to spending today, just on fixing things.  Which is No Fun.

 

They say it’s green.  Fnord.

Posted in Cars, Minutiae | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Suddenly available

Posted on June 10, 2010 by Marchbanks

L and M are leaving for the state square dance convention in Galveston this afternoon, and won’t be back until Sunday.  So I find myself suddenly without any commitments or engagements for the next three evenings, with no real plans.

Now wodd eye do?

 

Sand reads an exotic travelogue of unheard places.  Fnord.

Posted in Minutiae | Tagged | 1 Comment

Just keeping count

Posted on May 31, 2010 by Marchbanks

Things done so far this weekend:

  • Lots of firewood from The Shedding Tree chopped up (there is yet far more to chop)
  • One half-cord wood rack bought
  • Three gallons of purple interior paint, along with ancillary rollers, pans, stir sticks, etc. bought
  • New tub  of pre-mixed Peel-Away stripper bought, after we used up the thirty-year-old box of the powdered version (this stuff does an astonishingly good job of getting multiple coats of paint off, all at once)
  • New shelves bought to replace a collapsing set of shelves in the shed
  • Mini-blinds partially scrubbed down, to get rid of years of built-up dirt
  • Three-quarters of the yard mown
  • Half the yard scanned with a magnet stick for loose, lost nails (also finding pounds of other and older miscellaneous hardware buried in the dirt)
  • About two-thirds of the household laundry washed and dried

Things not yet done:

  • Fold and put away previously washed and dried laundry
  • Assemble the wood rack so aforesaid chopped firewood can be stacked
  • Invert and finish scrubbing down the mini-blinds
  • Build and paint window screens
  • Trim back the yellowed parts of the climbing roses
  • Roundup the resurgent poison oak (again)
  • Assemble new shelves for the shed and transfer everything to them from the collapsing shelves

 

There were, of course, various ways of stopping him.  Fnord.

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A short (but not very sentimental) interlude

Posted on May 15, 2010 by Marchbanks

I finished wiring the network box in the sewing room.  Both ports now have connectivity.  Now I just gotta figure out HTH to get the damn thing to stay in the wall, instead of falling back into the inter-joist space, ’cos there’s no room to drive nails or screwdrivers.  L has already started agitating for a desktop box of her own to put in there.  I foresee another trip to Discount Electronics coming.

I went down to Threadgill’s World Headquarters last night for a concert by the reclusive legend Willis Alan Ramsey.  We got two sets of one guy with a guitar and a harmonica doing nothing but his own fantastic originals, a mixture of tunes from his astonishing 1972 debut album (the only one he’s released to date) and from his gonna-be-released-Real-Soon-Now second, Gentilly.  While the music would have been helped along by some backing (particularly the lurching beat of “Northeast Texas Women,”), what we got was just fine, and the audience for a miracle just SHUT UP and listened to him.

Now I’m gonna go try to change the blade on the bench saw, and see if I can split out some more firewood from bits of The Shedding Tree.

 

Praise the Lord and pass the mescaline.  Fnord.

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Bullet-point update

Posted on May 9, 2010 by Marchbanks
  • The roof is mostly on.  The head-hancho roofer has to come re-do a bunch of venting that either got overlooked or won’t pass inspection as is.
  • Had a second row over the carpenters who built the new gable; they cut the power cable to the A/C air handler and failed to tell anyone they did.  It took a hundred-dollar HVAC repair call to discover this.  There will be a third row over who pays the AC service call bill, ’cos I don’t see why I should pay for his people’s fuckups.  They also did something to the outside light over the north door that makes it trip the circuit breaker whenever you try to turn it on.  Probably that’s yet another row in Coming Attractions.
  • M’s room is empty, the sewing room nearly so.  This means the sheetrockers can get started to work early this week.
  • T was home for several days of mental-health vacation.  While here, she bought her first car of her own, a silver 2009 Malibu LT, for which she paid just about exactly the $18,500 she had expected to spend.  The new car meant T was able to give back the ’95 Toyota T100 she borrowed from us, and I have something that I can haul things with, again, without gouging the paint or bending things.
  • I bought T her first laptop, a Dell Latitude D630.  It’s about 18 months old and should have another four years of service before it’s totally obsolete, and it’ll allow her to junk the Dimension 4400 she got second-hand from L’s mother, which is by now totally obsolete.
  • Split some of the sawed-up wood from The Shedding Tree, decided I need to go buy a new blade for my bench saw ’cos the old one will barely cut butter.  (Yes, I use the bench saw to make preliminary scores, then finish splitting the billets with a hatchet and engineer’s hammer.)
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Bang bang bang bang crash crash bang

Posted on May 6, 2010 by Marchbanks

Roof tear-off is going on at full volumespeed.  A crew of four is stripping the roof back to the decking (open), while trying not to fall off the 12:12 pitch.

It appears the roof stratigraphy is

  • 1994 standard composition shingles
  • 195x ugly red hexagonal comp shingles
  • 1937 cedar shingles
  • decking
Posted in Construction, House | Tagged , , | 3 Comments