Good Morning!!!! 66F @ 6:15 AM. Some clouds this morning will give way to generally sunny skies for the afternoon. High 92F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph.
Winds have been out of the north all night, and the air quality is back in the hazardous range. It would be really nice to open up the house to the cool air, but instead it's buttoned up tighter than a drum with the air filter running full blast.
Remember how before the last software update here on TBN, if you clicked the wrong place before you finished writing your post, you lost what you'd just written? Well I just clicked on the previous page number and everything I'd written above appeared, as if by magic, at the bottom of this new page! No more lost posts, no more selecting everything and copying it before daring an errant click. Thank you, Mohamed! Thank you, thank you!
When I was a kid, people used to spread oil on gravel parking lots to keep the dust down. Much of that oil came from old transformers, and was full of PCBs. Lots of lawsuits followed, and don't I remember one where the guy that was on trial for spreading the oil drank a glass of it in the courtroom to show that it was harmless? Somehow I think there would be an incredible stink if someone found PCBs in salmon and steelhead trout sold at Costco in Kalifornia...
I sure am glad not to be in Afghanistan right now. Yet another sign of the approaching apocalypse.
On the way into town yesterday I swung by the junkyard to look for pipe and square tubing for the grizzly. My last time there I found tons of steel pipe, but hardly any square tubing. This time it was just the opposite. Also found some sheet steel we need, too. And confirmed with the clerk that they're still selling scrap at fifty cents a pound. That's a little better price than the steel warehouse sells its drops for, so we'll probably end up going to the junkyard for the square tube and the warehouse for the pipe.
Here's a liittle story about the solar power system. It's a little nerdy, so feel free to skip it and save yourself a few minute or two of your life. The solar power system came with a little control panel that sits next to the other components on a wall in the garage. There's a web page you can login to that provides much, but not all, the same functionality of the little control panel. So it's a lot more convenient to make adjustments from the comfort of my office chair than it is to stand looking up at the control panel cocking my head back so I can squint at it through my bifocals. But the differences between the two aren't documented well, and you have to dig through user forum posts and the like when something doesn't work as expected. One of those things is the time when the generator is programmed for the weekly "exercise" cycle. I'd like it to start at noon every Friday, but for a while now, it's been starting at 2 PM instead. I've been poking around in the web interface looking for the problem and not finding anything amiss, and finally yesterday morning I went out to the garage and poked buttons until I found where the date and time were set on the little control panel. And sure enough, both the time and the time zone were set wrong. I corrected the settings, then started digging through the documentation for the control panel, and found some fine print that told me it doesn't automatically compensate for daylight savings time, but relies on the web interface to do that. So I have to conclude that the web interface is broken in that respect. I love finding smoking guns, like the faint print on that upside down rubber boot on the red motorcycle earlier in the week. You can bet I'll be listening at noon today to see if I hear the muffled roar of a generator in the back yard. If I hear it, the week will not have been a total loss.
TGIF gang!
