Dull Men's Club

Had a friday hankering. Edit: I feel I should add this was for 4 people :)

When you move to a new property, you'll have the right-sized cover and box to store them in for protection. I have a closet nearly full of them.

Keep the smaller ones too, for that matter.

My handkerchief supply has dwindled over the years. Time to re-up.

I wanted sweets from the old days of big glass jars in the corner shop, so I bought aniseed balls and cola cubes online, because they are no where in my sleepy town.

I only briefly glanced at the weights and assumed they were about right, and in my giddy, pre sugared state I glossed over the price.

Imagine my surprise when I got a kilo of each.

I have eaten so many aniseed balls everything tastes like medicine, which I also quite like.

It's nice that they're so polite.

Ordered it a couple of weeks ago and just got it yesterday. Taking it down the hill later to split some rounds for the wood shed.

I can't figure out why: usually it's because I've been doing some dirty job, working on the car, planting, etc, but I have not been doing any of those things.

I was out of town the last couple of days and we got a huge snowstorm. When we got home the hot water wasn't working.

I checked the unit, looked up the error code, the issue was the pilot not lighting. The cause was 4' of snow covering the entire exhaust pipe.

I shut down the unit, cleared the snow, built a snow barrier and slope to avoid drifts coming back, then rebooted the unit and it all works!

My sister-in-law is over and she was saying "wow, you're really handy", which is seldom true, so I feel very good tonight.

Plus my wife got a fun picture of me chest deep in the snow shovelling. I'm angling to get it a place on the fridge.

Currently they're in types in ziploc baggies but there must be a better way

the baggies:

• USB A > USB C
• USB C <> USB C
• USB A > USB B Micro
• Ethernet
• HDMI to different sized HDMI
• HDMI to USB B
• HDMI to other USB
• HDMI to HDMI
• USB female to male and extenders
• Dongles, converters, and USB hubs
• VGA
• USB A to lightning bolt
• A few old ipod charging cables

Not pictured: separate drawer for guitar cables, XLR, headphones jack to jack and adapters, phono and midi; separate duffel bag for long power cables; separate baggie in another drawer for international adapters and plugs

I live in a one-story ranch with an unfinished basement and attic, in the middle of a project where I'll have access to a bare, un-drywalled wall. I know that eventually I'll want to run low voltage/Ethernet cable from the basement out to my attached garage, probably through the attic as the garage is only separated from the rest of the attic by Sheetrock.

I just don't know how much Ethernet cable I'll be wanting to run.

I think conduit would probably be the best for traversal/future proofing this, but I have no clue what kind to get.

Any suggestions? Things I should look out for?

Grabbed a mandarin from the fridge. This tiny thing has apparently been hiding behind its regular sized peers in the net.

Moved my kitchen cabinets and found this catalog shoved between cabinets and the wall. Early 60s house, US, California

Resorption in a front tooth. Had it extracted and now there's a fancy titanium drywall anchor grafted into my skull. A few weeks of healing and then I'll have a false tooth bolted in.

Ended up getting sick with the flu on my week off but I got mostly everything done. We also had 3 new baby goats last Sunday.

Apparently 30 roses is $200 AUD ($126 USD).

Florists making a killing today.

Our dryer crapped out a few months ago. It wasn't heating up, so I ordered a new heating element. It came with all new sensors, so I installed those too. One of the wire connectors was a bit loose, but I figured it would be fine.

Today, it stopped again, so I took off the back panel and sure enough, the wire was off. Plugged it back in, but no luck.

It's probably the thermal fuse, but I'm considering paying the $95 to have my home warranty send someone out to just fix it.

I'm only in the hole $25 so far, so maybe I'll replace everything again and see.

My suspicion is that there's something shorting out, though. It's definitely not a clogged vent, because I'm anal about clearing the trap after every cycle, and the vent pipe to the attic looks squeaky clean inside (and the vent tube from the dryer is clean too.

Edit: while typing this I realized that the loose wire probably caused the short, so I'll try to replace that sensor before calling someone. Thanks for being my rubber duckie.

Update: Problem solved. The loose wire was to the high temperature cut-off that sits in the coil housing. This caused the coil to get too hot and pop.

A while ago, I wrote this overview of California's Coast Rail Corridor project, which would run conventional trains between the existing, popular, state-subsidized commuter rail systems in Northern and Southern California. This is nowhere near as sexy as high-speed rail, but imagine a single seat that rolls through the rice paddies outside Sacramento, past the oil refineries of Richmond in the Bay Area, down through Oakland adjacent the Coliseum, bisecting Silicon Valley, then hugging the coast of Central California towards the beaches of Santa Barbara entering Los Angeles County and then further to San Diego.

Then make it affordable and timely, and all of a sudden there's a way to spend time watching the scenery slowly, while also being practical. Trains are much less of a slog than sitting on a bus. High speed rail is important and laudable, but this humble, rather dull project will likely carry passengers between north and south a decade or more before high speed rail does, which is why the state is pursuing it in parallel.

I hope this type of content is an alright fit for this community.

in & out in 30 mins.

Turns out dryers are pretty simple and mostly all decent. It's the washers that are more complex and you should choose wisely.

I spent like 4 days looking at videos about dryers anyway. It's like, the most exciting thing to happen this month.

At least my clothes come out dry in one cycle now.