Self created black hole of work
[podcast]https://blog.duf.net/podcast/guzziexhaust.mp3[/podcast]
It’s a weird thing. I did so much work over these past four days that Thanksgiving feels like it happened a couple weeks ago already. Let’s see if I can remember back that far.
Typically I will watch a good chunk of the Macy’s parade on a Thanksgiving morning. This year I may have seen a minute of it. Ali wanted to do a 6 mile training run in the morning and I was her support/security team on bike. We headed out on to Immokalee Road and did an up and back straight route, not the most exciting of runs but it was good enough. Ali was pooped after she was done but hell she did it. She has been doing a great job following her program and is right on track to run her first ever half marathon in January.
We had told mom we would come to her place around noon. Because of Ali’s run and me having to stop at three different gas stations until I found one with a functional/available air machine we were almost a half hour late. I am rarely late but the past two times we did something with mom we have been tardy. Mom of course commented on my belated arrival. She better be careful, now it can almost become a fun game to play for me.
Mom made enough food for at least a half a dozen people. Considering we only had a measly three at the table there was no shortage of food. For the first couple of years that we started having Tofurkey at the table we also would prepare a small turkey breast for my mom. The past couple years we have abandoned the turkey altogether, enjoying an all vegetarian meal. Tofurkey really isn’t bad at all. Sure it isn’t the least bit traditional but I don’t really care.
We were all stuffed after eating. I made a call up to my brother who was sitting at the table at my dad’s place. I got passed around the table to talk to everyone there. Mom also asked if we could help her set up her xmas tree that she bought last year. Mom was very proud that she somehow managed to stuff the tree back into it’s original box, something I was unable to do with our tree last year. Well when I went to attach the middle section I immediately noticed something was odd. It looked like I had the section upside down, all of the branches were pointing up in the air. I double and triple checked that it only went together one way.
So I got down on my knees and took a close look at the branches. Every single branch was bent upwards. Evidently mom somehow managed to jam that section into the box with the branches bent the wrong way. At first I tried to individually bend the branches back but it was a royal pain in the ass. I decided to remove the section and lay it on the ground to try to roll it around while applying weight to bend the branches back somewhat. This helped but it still looked a bit odd when the section was put back in place. I did some more manual bending to try to make it look as presentable as possible.
We thanked mom for the great meal and she thanked us for trying to fix her tree. We piled the dogs back in the van and headed home. I had a massive workload planned for the four day weekend so I wanted to get started. I decided I would work on the Moto Guzzi.
When my dad brought the bike down he had just had a bunch of work done and he thought it was in good running condition. Well when we tried to run it after unloading it from the truck, gas poured out of both carbs when the fuel lines were open. When we took the carb bowl off we saw one of the floats had gas in it which would prevent it from working properly. Dad ordered two new floats and two new needle/seat assemblies which arrived last week.
Now I never have done any internal carb work, I have replaced entire carbs but never ripped into one so I was a bit worried about what I was getting in to. Once I got the bowl off I immediately ran into a snag, how the F does the float pin come out? The ping had a spline on the end so I wasn’t sure if it unscrewed in some manner. I spent awhile trying to turn the pin with various tools with no luck. I quickly retreated inside and did a Google search on “moto guzzi float pin” I found out that you basically just yank the sucker out.
So back into the shed I went. I grabbed the end of the pin firmly with a pliers and yanked hard. The pin came right out. After that the rest of the procedure wasn’t bad at all. After removing the floats I had access to the needle and seat which was very simple to replace, just unscrew and rescrew. After putting everything back together the moment of truth came, I turned the gas lines on and hoped I didn’t see anything spilling out. It worked, no gas!
Ok now I was ready to see if it runs. I hit the starter and just get a click. F, the battery is dead!!! So I drive my truck through the newly installed gate and hook up some jumper cable to the bike. I flip the choke, hit the starter and VROOM, it starts up instantly, nice!! I twist the throttle a few times and am rewarded with the downright mean sounding Moto Guzzi exhaust note. (you can hear it above) I go grab my phone and call my dad with the bike still running. He answers and I rev it a few times to signal my success. Dad was happy to hear I got it running. It’s a sweet thing when something gets fixed on the very first effort. Later in the weekend I hooked up my battery charger to the bike to get some amps into it. At this point I am pretty much ready to take my motorcycle safety course so I can get this thing on the road legally.
Friday was the most arduous of the four. It was the day I designated to trim up the remaining cabbage palms. Another list item was hanging the xmas lights so I saw trimming the trees as a prerequisite to that. I certainly couldn’t trim them after the lights were up. Last year I did this chore using my long pole saw. I broke the task into many segments as trimming with the pole saw works but gets rather tough when the trees are as tall and as dense as these palms are. I had trimmed up three or four of the trees a couple weeks ago but I still had another 10 to do.
I bought a couple things last week to make the job go quicker, a lightweight 20 foot extension ladder and a heavy duty pair of loppers that utilize gears to increase your cutting power. The ladder allowed me to get right up into the canopy of the trees and the loppers were much quicker than trying to fumble with a pole saw from the ground. I was able to drop fronds left and right. The only problem was after dropping all of those fronds someone had to pick them all up and dump them all in the pit. That person would also be me.
Ali offered to help but I knew she wasn’t really into it for a couple reasons. First it was chilly out, very chilly by her standards as a cold front blew through the prior evening. It actually was perfect weather though for working outside. Second a couple years ago she really tweaked her back after a day of picking up fronds. With her running training schedule she was very leery of doing anything that could derail her progress. Since I am very supportive of that goal I was fine with taking on the entire project on my own. I told her to go to the bank and get groceries.
So after cutting down 100 fronds or more I began the clean up portion of the job. I pulled the truck around and started jamming the bed full of them. After stuffing as many as possible into the truck I drove back to the fill pit and started throwing them in. I would try to grab a few at a time and throw them into the fill pit like I was throwing the hammer at the olympics. In total it probably took me 10 trips back and forth until I had everything cleaned up, I was spent. I basically worked from 8 in the morning until 3 in the afternoon on tree trimming. I was thankful when it was done, but I wasn’t done.
Next I moved to the new shed. I needed to properly anchor it to the ground so it doesn’t blow away in a hurricane. I dug out four holes with the post hole digger, dropped the hurricane anchors into them and then back-filled the hole with a combination of dirt and cement. Then I attached the metal straps from the shed to these anchors and tightened them. The next day I back-filled them the rest of the way. Hopefully the shed will now stay put if another Wilma level storm comes our way. While I had the post hole digger out I decided to sink the two dock pilings the woman donated to me from the shed purchase. I stuck them in between the current bird feeders with the idea that I could mount some additional feeders on them.
Nope not done yet. Ali came out late in the afternoon and said she was going to knock out the mowing. I took that as my cue to man the weed whacker. After about an hour of weed whacking I was finally done with my labor for the day, whew. To say I was exhausted would be an understatement. I slept quite solidly Friday night.
The main project on the docket for Saturday was Christmas decorations, both indoor and outdoor. We decided to start on the inside since Ali wasn’t thrilled about going out into the chilly air. I was worried that our artificial tree that we paid some big bucks for last year might not work or possibly have some of the same branch issues that mom did. Luckily the tree set up easily with all branches intact as well as all lights lit. It still looks good despite a year in it’s trash bag containers.
Ali and I dug into our 7 or 8 Rubbermaid bins of ornaments and decorations. It is amazing just how many xmas decorations we have. Luckily our tree has a near endless supply of sturdy branches to hold it all. We have tons of sit around the house stuff as well. I bet we spent a good couple hours just setting stuff up. Now it was time for the dreaded exterior lights.
I have always had an adversarial relationship with Xmas lights. They frustrate the hell out of me. It is amazing to me that someone has not invented Christmas lights that work for more than a year or two. Last year I bought some sort of light fixing tool that supposedly makes fixing broken Christmas light strands “easy”, yea bullshit.
I sat down in the living room with my two boxes of lights to test them. Out of the 20 or so strands I tested, maybe a third of them lit up completely. The others were either half or totally dead. So I pull out my tool and go to work. I managed to fix exactly one set before I gave up. Using the tool was still frustrating if the initial pull the trigger 20 times thing didn’t work (which it never did) You had to go light to light and try to read for voltage at each socket. Well with at least 50 lights out in each section this could literally take forever. So I said f it and went outside with the few strands that were still working.
Ali helped me with the process. On low sections we would stand on either side of the tree and hand the bundle of lights back and forth, wrapping them upward. Once we got too high for that we tried to use ladders, once that didn’t work I grabbed the pool brush that is on an extendable pole to finish up. Once again we ran into half lit strands of lights that we had to work around. The entire process was totally annoying. By the time we finished with the last of the six trees up front I had enough and declared I was not going to go around the roof line with lights as I have in the past. I told her if I felt like it, MAYBE I would go around the front windows and doors some other day. Despite the frustration of the process, the decorations did look nice when it was all said and done.
Saturday night we planned to go to the movies, we checked out 2012. I always like end of the world movies and of the three movies we were considering to see I thought 2012 would most benefit from the theater experience. Let me start with the good parts of the movie, the special effects and action which were indeed incredible. The realism they are able to bring to the big screen today is flawless. The special effects alone were almost worth the price of admission. Woody Harrelson’s character was quite entertaining as well, he always does a good job when he is thrown in the “crazy guy” role.
Ok let’s talk about the bad stuff, mainly the dialogue, especially deeper into the film. There are just so many situations that seem totally wedged into place and make no sense in the context of the world falling apart. The black scientist guy is the king of this weirdness. He assumes command in certain situations where he would have no business doing so. Then there is his inappropriate flirting as millions of people are dying around them. Ali and I were constantly looking at each other and just laughing at how stupid some of this was.
My favorite stand out stupid moment was when his Indian scientist buddy whom he was supposed to have flown out of danger calls the black scientist as a mile high tidal wave is about to crush both the Indian and his family. A few minutes prior they announced that all land based communication was dead yet this guys cell phone worked (must have Verizon). The Indian dude just wanted to let his buddy whom hung him out to dry know that the wave was coming from a different direction. Yea that is what I would do in my last moments on earth. The movie is filled with just silly stuff like that. It’s not a terrible flick and like I said the special effects were amazing so it’s hard to give it less than a B. Try to get matinee prices though.
I had heard a decent amount about 2012 doomsday prophecies for a few years now. I was curious how viable the scenario depicted in the movie was so I did some digging. Of course the movie version took all sorts of liberties with the actual science. However what I did dig into was enough to give pause. Tt seems like far too much of a coincidence to have so many totally distinct cultures, religions and civilizations all point to the year of 2012 as a stopping point for life as we know it. Primarily you hear about the Mayan calendar ending 12/21/2012 but that date is significant across many other sources.
One of the things significant about that time is all of the planets in the solar system will be aligned. Supposedly this could have some sort of strange effect one of which could be an increase in solar eruptions that can cause a myriad of problems. However to me the most significant threat was the talk of Niribu or Planet X. You can Google the terms yourself and find out all about it but here is the Cliff Notes version.
Basically there is speculation that there is either a large planet or dwarf sun that has a huge elongated orbit around our sun. Every 3600 years or so it passes through our inner solar system. Because of the mass of this object it has a large gravitational field. Depending on how close it would pass to Earth it could have a devastating effect on our planet. When you go back through history you can make some correlation between the passing of Planet X and periods of huge upheaval on the planet including the extinction of the dinosaurs and the great flood. Well if you subscribe to the worst case scenario that is out there, this is once again coming, quickly.
Supposedly sometime in 2010 you should be able to see Niribu with the naked eye. As 2012 approaches the object will get larger and larger, at one point rivaling our own moon in the sky. The bigger it gets the more trouble we are in.
Read up on the subject, you may be surprised (and concerned) at what you find. Supposedly the government is well aware of the possibilities of what could go down and has quietly been making arrangements all along for at least a decade and a half including building a new super infrared telescope in Antarctica whose primary function is tracking the southern approach of Niribu.
Sunday morning while Ali was out doing another training run I decided to knock out putting up the lights around the windows and door. Immediately I ran into a hellish rats nest of lights. Every year when I take the lights out I curse myself for not taking the time to come up with some sort of storage system different than haphazardly wrapping them around a piece of cardboard. Likewise every year when it comes time to take them down , I so badly just want to the job to be over with I once again just quickly wrap them up and toss them in the bin. It’s a cycle I need to get out of.
After spending a good 15 minutes untangling lights I got to work. At this location, having half lit strands of light actually comes in handy. I can use the unlit portion of the lights as a redneck extension cord. I didn’t feel as stressed out as the prior day. I even spent some extra time to run the lights around the small palm tree to the right of the front door. The final product looks good. I’ll try to get some night time shots.
Sunday afternoon we watched the Eagles game. They came perilously close to losing to the stinking Redskins at home. Luckily they put a drive together late in the game that resulted in a field goal to go ahead followed by Washington failing to move down the field afterward. I still saw nothing to make me think the Eagles have anything special this year. Right now I would expect them to possibly make the playoffs as a wild card and lose in the first round.
Did you see Asante Samuel miss on another bullshit shoulder tackle? It’s hard to point a skeptical eye at a guy that had two int’s. However the announcer made a big deal about it, acting like he was just doing shoulder tackles since he was scared of getting a stinger. As far as I can remember in his Eagles career, Samuel does nothing BUT shoulder tackles. I don’t know if I have ever seen him wrap a guy up with good tackling form, ever. Brent Celek had a rough game, at one point they threw to him four or five times in a row and he came up empty. McCoy looks like he has a chance to be Westbrook’s replacement. I would not be surprised at all if the Birds cut loose Westbrook and his fat contract at the end of the season. He is constantly hurt and has been for the last several years. Hey the Birds are 7-4, they are in better shape than they were last year at this time.
Ali went with Michelle to the Nutcracker Sunday night. I enjoyed the time to just hang out, watch some documentary on Planet X and play some WoW. It was an exhausting four days for sure. It will be nice to go back to work so I can “rest”.
I updated this photo collection to include my work from the weekend.