Apr 28, 2018
The other of the two new cats. He looks kind of scruffy because he’s a longhaired cat, was a stray and, apparently, was completely covered with burrs when he went into a shelter was sickly when he was forced (by rental rules, ugh) into a (Utah; apparently there’s a thriving trade importing pets into Oregon, so he’s a Beehive State boy) shelter, and apparently got his coat matted & filthy while he recovered. So instead of spending several months s-l-o-w-l-y combing out the tangles they just shaved him and now we have a fractionally floofy cat.
We don’t know if he’ll keep this name or not (honestly, we give our cats so many nicknames they won’t care as long as we use the appropriate supervisor voice) but this is the shelter name he’s got.
—orc Sat Apr 28 21:57:38 2018
Mavis is getting lonely and neurotic, so we needed to get her a couple of friends. Currently they’re tucked into a safe room so they can settle in (I suspect that they’re already settled; these cat are so skittish that Thor was actually napping in the car when we drove them back from Purringtons Cat Lounge (one of the Portland locations where cats from the Cat Adoption Team are placed while waiting for new owners)) before we pop open the door and see just how much Mavis flips out when these two new cats start wandering about the house.
—orc Sat Apr 28 21:32:30 2018
Apr 27, 2018
Dust Mite has taken Mavis’s place
—orc Fri Apr 27 19:27:58 2018
New, for values of “new” that include “pulled out of my bike mess where’d they’d been sitting since I pulled them off the mountainhack a year and a half ago. I also respaced the rear wheel out to 130mm, because the DS/NDS spoke tension was absurd (very high on the DS, very low on the NDS) and wedged it into the rear triangle w/o cold-setting it (this needs to be done, though, because it’s hard to fit the wheel in even @ 126mm OLD because I need to get the DS skewer bolt around the dangler and that’s a really tight fit when the wheel is also being fit into the space between the brake pads.)
—orc Fri Apr 27 17:31:10 2018
Apr 25, 2018
“Red Beans & Rice”, made almost completely incorrectly but in a hurry because I’d just made mac & cheese and scrambled eggs for the family and needed something to eat for myself.
Next time around I’ll actually plan more than 5 minutes ahead and actually make it properly with all of the ingredients (at least the ones that I can eat; no onion, becaus – grrrr! – I’m allergic to it, and no meat ‘cuz vegan) and have it simmer properly for a hour or so before eating it.
—orc Wed Apr 25 21:16:21 2018
Apr 20, 2018
Dust Mite & a couple of different racks
—orc Fri Apr 20 18:32:10 2018
Apr 16, 2018
Time to replace this sti cable housing, or is it good for another few thousand miles?
—orc Mon Apr 16 21:53:11 2018
Apr 14, 2018
Old growth along the Old Salmon River Trail in the Mount Hood National Forest.
—orc Sat Apr 14 23:43:54 2018
We walked up there this morning. There isn’t any snow in the town of Zigzag, but once you get onto Road 39 (6 miles and 750 feet up) and start climbing the snowpiles take over in a hurry (and it’s supposed to snow down to 1500 feet on monday?)
—orc Sat Apr 14 14:15:20 2018
Apr 13, 2018
Someone dumped a boat ¾ths of the way up Shipley Road (or, alternatively, they were trying to run it up a little stream that runs down the side of Devil’s Backbone and this is where they couldn’t get it to go any further?)
Too big to fit into my rando bag, or I’m sure I would have scooped it up.
—orc Fri Apr 13 20:57:18 2018
A cozy perch for a Dust Mite
—orc Fri Apr 13 20:21:19 2018
Riding out to Welches today via Marmot & Barlow Roads; they made the roads steeper in the last couple of years, so I was pretty damn happy by the time I clawed my way up to the top of Marmot Road.
—orc Fri Apr 13 19:41:58 2018
Apr 12, 2018
Google maps directions to a cottage we’ve been invited to this weekend. I’m not positive, but I don’t think the people on the east side of the Salmon River would like it if I went charging through their side yard to try and jump the gorge to get to the west side, particularly since if you went 500-1000 feet further south on Elk Park Rd it would take you to a nice bridge that crosses the river without any stunt riding.
—orc Thu Apr 12 21:52:00 2018
Some spam I got this week:
Dear Editor,
My name is Jess and I’m a writer at (nope). I was doing research on straw bale gardening and just finished reading your wonderful blog post: http://www.tsfr.org/~orc/bookmarks.html
In that article, I noticed that you cited a solid post that I’ve read in the past: http://www.strawbuilding.org/
I just finished writing a guide that is even more detailed, updated and comprehensive on how to start a straw bale garden in 30 days. It is over 10,000 words and includes many practical tips and advice. You can find it here: (nope)
If you like the guide we’d be humbled if you cited us in your article. Of course, we will also share your article with our 50k newsletter subscribers and followers across our social platforms.
Either way, keep up the great work!
Warmly,
Jess
The “wonderful blog post” in question; my bookmarks page, which, not surprisingly, is just a list of bookmarks. And the strawbuilding “page”? It’s a website, not a page, and it’s for building houses with strawbale insulation and/or structural elements, not using them as a foundation for a garden.
So, sorry “Jess”, I don’t think I’ll be replying to your keyword-search solicitation.
—orc Thu Apr 12 20:33:04 2018
Apr 09, 2018
Part (or all?) of the Errol Heights colony, but these were up on the top of the hill foraging along Flavel Drive.
—orc Mon Apr 9 19:39:57 2018
Apr 08, 2018
File this under “the joys of home ownership”; after several months of our new (2 years old) low-flow American Standard toilet getting worse and worse in the department of being able to flush (it was at the point where we had to pour buckets of water into the toilet every time we needed to flush, because it didn’t otherwise have enough puff to blow the dirty water and/or filth into the drain tube) we snapped and replaced it with a Kohler (yeah, yeah, Wisconsin Republicans, but not Walker-scale even though they’re perfectly happy to eviscerate the United States to save 45¢ in taxes) unit. But before I removed the old toilet I had to close the cutoff valve for the supply line, and I needed to crank fairly hard because the cutoff valve, like most of the plumbing in our house, was bottom-barrel cheap that was badly installed, and after closing the valve it started leaking like mad for no apparent reason. So I decided I’d just turn off the water to the house and replace the cutoff valve with a new one, at which point I discovered (by snapping the end off the cast iron supply line that had been concreted into the floor) that this unit was installed without any sort of grease or insulating tape and had become welded to the line by rust.
I attempted to fix it (by chiselling a cavity into the concrete floor) but when the end of the cast iron supply line snapped off it snapped off at an angle, so the compression housing I bought at the hardware store did not fully seat and leaked (through the floor & into the kitchen), and then the expanding plug I bought to replace the compression housing couldn’t get a good grip and popped out as soon as I opened the master water supply valve. So I shut off the house water (which, because of the whole pile of bodges plumbing, meant that the master valve doesn’t close all the way and I needed to open the valve for a hose to keep the water from dribbling out from everything in the house), mixed up a big pile of metal-filled epoxy, and permanently (?) plugged the line that way. But until then we’re going to have to live with this horrible kludge and whatever horrible kludge we have to do to replace it with a supply line that doesn’t have a ball of epoxy keeping the house from turning into a swamp.
So then, to have a toilet that flushed I needed to get a longer supply line (30 inches, which, not surprisingly, was not available as a single supply line so I had to buy an extension line and splice it in) and line splitter so I could get both cold water and toilet water. And, of course this meant that the el-cheapo cold water supply line leaked when I put a slight bend into it so I could fit the splitter into the line.
So. Toilet flushes! Yay! We have water in the house! Yay! But no cold water in the bathroom sink so we need to brush our teeth with hot water. Bleah.
When I win the lottery™ the plan is that I’m going to rip out all of the existing plumbing, then fabricate (or have a carpenter fabricate) a vertical channel on the SW corner of the house (inside the house; probably between the main part of the house and the shed that contains the meaningless room, the sleeping porch, and the back porch storage area+bathroom) and move both bathrooms (the full one upstairs and the half bath downstairs) to the SW corner of the house and then have all of the plumbing routed into that channel so that there’s only one place to look for leaks and those leaks will tend to fall down the channel and into a basement drain. But until then we’re going to be living with this kludge or whatever kludge we end up doing to bypass this supply line that ends in a big old ball of epoxy.
—orc Sun Apr 8 21:33:15 2018
Apr 06, 2018
Dust Mite is capering about the room.
—orc Fri Apr 6 23:17:53 2018
Apr 04, 2018
A handful of gutted Dell servers dumped on the Springwater Trail.
—orc Wed Apr 4 15:38:31 2018
Apr 03, 2018
The RossIsle & RI20 at work carting gravel around the lower Willamette River
—orc Tue Apr 3 16:17:11 2018
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