Food Poisoning and Chinese Power Tools

So the ol’ blog here hasn’t seen much action from me, and that isn’t entirely my fault (even though I’m the only one that can post). So, after my glorious and self-gratifying accomplishment of hacking apart my bathroom wall to insert a metal box with a mirror on it (see previous entry from medicine cabinet installation) as a surprise for Kari while she was away on her first business trip I apparently ate something with a touch of The Nasty. Tuesday (2/10) started normally enough with me having my workout before school. But during class, my stomach didn’t feel all that great. So, before heading straight into work, I thought I would stop by the house and take a swig of pink, chalky, bismuthy, vile liquid to settle my stomach. Well, I never left the house. For the next 4 hours I spent equal times either in bed or in the bathroom trying to guess if I had to kneel in front of the toilet or sit on it (or both). Hmm… I don’t think I’ll be able to pick up Kari at the airport. She happened to call shortly after my first bout of porcelain yodeling and she just happened to be in a fish market and wanted to know what type of smoked salmon I wanted since I had asked her before leaving to get some. Well, you can guess that with the current state of my stomach, I really didn’t want to think about that choice at all. I told her my current situation and told her that she’d need to contact her mom to get a ride from the airport later that evening. I returned to my shivering and dashing to the bathroom right afterwards. OK, sparing the details, I was laid up for a couple of days and my muscles were so wore out afterwards that I was in no mood to tackle any projects that weekend. However, that didn’t stop me from cleaning out the garage and actually having enough room for Kari and I to both park in it! Sure, we couldn’t get out of our cars, but there’s enough room for both of them in there! Ok, that was to be the extent of any projects that weekend. However, some light had been shone on a possible project to come soon during my throes of agony earlier: my dad had called and based on some plans I had drawn up to replace my current side gate with a metal framed one had priced the 2-inch square tubing and had come up with a very reasonable figure. So, after cleaning the garage and noting I had enough space to store interim progress on the gate pieces, I called my dad and gave him the green light to get the metal.

The next weekend on the 21st, my dad came up with some welding equipment and metal cutting tools. My brother-in-law, Steve, was to show up shortly after with the metal tubing. So, my dad shows up around 9:30 (early for him, as I think his bed time can sometimes be just a few hours before this) and we start laying out the equipment. Lo and behold, he’s donating one of his small welders to me and will be teaching me how to weld! This will be a very useful skill in my new role as a home owner I’m quite sure. About 30 minutes later, Steve shows up and we unload the three 20-foot lengths of 0.090 wall thickness, 2-inch square steel tubing. After a few minutes of discussing the plans and defending choices I made arbitrarily on the plans and changing a few others, we decide to get work. Steve had to take off and actually go to a paying gig, but not a big deal, this was not a major project by either my dad’s or Steve’s estimation. Today’s task would be to create the two frames for the gates and then paint them to seal them from the moisture to prevent rust. We measured our top pieces and made the first few cuts. The cutting on my dad’s metal chop saw was slow going so he decided to change to a new cutting disc that was a little larger and we started again. This time the cut went much better. However, as we were nearing the end of cutting off the end at a 45° angle (the second cut after changing the disc), the saw started to slow down no matter how hard I squeezed the trigger and then I saw the magic smoke come out of the motor housing. Well, this was just no good. My dad at this point, PC as ever (as some of you know), started extolling the virtues of foreign-made equipment especially Chinese. He wasn’t too upset as he only paid $20 for this particular tool. So, after a few minutes of discussion, we decided to pack everything into the garage and head to Home Depot to look for a replacement. There weren’t too many choices, but the ones we did see were about $200. He said he was going to see if he can find one on eBay or something for less. Now, at this point, I’m thinking he already learned not to go “cheap”, but I’m not going to point that out to someone who’s donating time and teaching me something to boot. As it turns out, my friend Taylor’s family has a mill shop and he mentioned that he could loan one his to me for the job if my dad can’t find a replacement. So I got that going for me … The saga will continue probably on 3/7.

Tomorrow will see my first Physics 301 (Digital Electronic) test and I’m a little anxious about it. I feel comfortable with the material, but I don’t know how the instructor tests, so we’ll see. It’s a mixture of hands-on circuit building and then some problem solving exercises. It shouldn’t be too bad. So far the work we’re doing in the class is very interesting. I’ve built a 4-bit parallel full adder circuit with 2’s-complement correction on the fly with LEDs for its binary sum, overflow, and an LED to indicate whether the result is a negative number not. It’s a great thing to be able to add and subtract numbers from -16 to 15 with just TTL chips, a 5-volt DC power supply, some resistors, and a whole bunch of wire. Yeah… now I can have the machine do that part for me! One less worry! My other class on the history of early modern Europe is still interesting as well. We’ve been reading about remission requests (pleas to the king of France for grace to avoid execution) in 16th century France and I’m now starting to read about witchcraft and the legislation behind the accusations. Lots of seemingly unrelated issues that are all tied together by social and legal thoughts of the day. Interesting…

Well, as long as I don’t have any more of The Nasty, I’ll be posting again soon. This weekend may not see much in the way of house work as we’ll have guests all day on Saturday.