Nov 27, 2020
Nov 25, 2020
Picking up a bunch of food in preparation for the thanksgiving covid-19 superspreader event. We will be hunkered down crossing our fingers and hoping that we don’t catch the roundboi before Biden is sworn in and the vaccines start becoming available.
—orc Wed Nov 25 23:56:48 2020
Nov 24, 2020
Picking up a pizza for dinner
—orc Tue Nov 24 23:41:28 2020
Nov 23, 2020
PH&W 578 (rsc2 rebuild by Alco) and Montreal Terminal 10001 (rs3 rebuild by the MTRR shops); both rebuilt along the same lines (with larger cabs, low short hoods, and 251s instead of 244s) but quite different looking. Alco used a (slightly shortened) rs32 short hood when they rebuilt 578 in 1965, and the Montreal Terminal fabricated their own short hood with rs11-sized notches so the sand hatches could be placed there instead of up on the top of the hood (both notches have hatches, but they feed into a common reservoir) when they did their rebuild during the great 244 purge of 1985.
The rs251r has the hoods & cab glued together and gaps filled with plastic putty; the rsc2m is waiting for me to finish the rs251r & b11 (so any oopses will have worked their way out of my system) before I glue everything together.
—orc Mon Nov 23 20:46:34 2020
“Air fry” mode, aka boiling off a lot of the water in the stuff that’s being cooked. And where does the steam come out? There’s a handy vent as the base of the control panel that the instruction manually helpfully mentions so you won’t freak out when your brand new range starts venting white smoke.
—orc Mon Nov 23 08:56:45 2020
Nov 21, 2020
Not wired in yet, because I still need to cut back some of the countertop so I can snuggle it up against the wall.
—orc Sat Nov 21 21:26:19 2020
And, oh joy, the wonders of remodeling that were exposed when I levered the thing out (I forgot to latch the door shut when I was doing this and it flopped open and and crunched my big toe. Oh well, I didn’t need that toenail anyways) so I guess that I’m stuck with having to redo the kitchen cabinets to kludge around the mess.
—orc Sat Nov 21 14:33:03 2020
At Forest Junction this time.
—orc Sat Nov 21 11:22:54 2020
Nov 20, 2020
What was it the engine and the Dust Mite said,
Noses touching, head to head,
Facing on a single track,
Half a world behind each back?
—orc Fri Nov 20 23:02:05 2020
Nov 19, 2020
60 pounds of kitty litter and cat fud, because they obligingly both ran out at the same time. The steering gets a lot more interesting on this thing when there’s that much weight sitting out front, though the basket helps keep things from sloshing around as much as they would on a bare platform.
—orc Thu Nov 19 23:05:05 2020
Nov 17, 2020
Converting an Athearn RS-3 into a Montreal Terminal RS-3m (MTRR calls it a RS-251r, but railfans call it a -3m) by cutting off the cab & short hood and replacing them with a cut down RS-11 high short hood and a RS-32 cab. It came as L&N 123, but it’s going to end up being MTRR 10001 after the cement has cured and I can clean up the seams and fill in the gaps.
(I need to redo the MTRR roster to better represent my evolving headcanon for what my model railroad operates.)
—orc Tue Nov 17 20:09:38 2020
Nov 13, 2020
The appliance repair mite takes a look at the dead oven in our ancient (and soon to be replaced) Frigidaire Compact 30 range.
—orc Fri Nov 13 23:36:35 2020
Nov 09, 2020
I was coming back from a short but cold loop out to Henry Higgins when I heard EPT #100 hooting down on McBrod Ave, so I stopped and waited for about 5 minutes and then it charged up the hill with a single reefer in tow.
—orc Mon Nov 9 21:05:51 2020
Nov 08, 2020
More test riding on the longjohn I finished building; it’s not a proper test if I don’t take it shopping, so I took it up the hill to Trader Joe’s, then out to 52nd and down the hill to the Springwater Trail (I was cautious on the descents – the machine turns tentatively – so I didn’t get up past 34mph) before returning home. I would have taken it on a longer ride, but no lights and the sun goes down @ 5pm these days.)
—orc Sun Nov 8 23:24:53 2020
Nov 07, 2020
The national nightmare may not be over yet, but the end is in sight.
—orc Sat Nov 7 09:09:44 2020
Off to New Seasons for some supplies, which almost fit in my bags. Thank goodness these panniers have an external pocket :-)
—orc Sat Nov 7 02:33:56 2020
Nov 06, 2020
Dust Mite and I are trying to move a macosx installation onto a larger hard drive, but have run headlong into the steaming pile of shit that is apfs. I can’t actually delete an apfs filesystem from inside macos, so I need to fire up clonezilla and dd half a gigabyte of zeros to the disk. Siiigh.
(This macbook is somewhat broken – it doesn’t seem to recognize more than 8gb of core, plus the trackpad starts flaking out when the computer warms up – and needs to be replaced. Fortunately mid-2012 mbps are still available and can be snagged on ebay for not too much money.)
—orc Fri Nov 6 23:50:28 2020
Nov 03, 2020
Waiting for the votes to come in is so much fun!
—orc Tue Nov 3 19:56:14 2020
Nov 01, 2020
I finished (except for the front brake) building up this cargobike yesterday afternoon, so I needed to take it out for a test ride today. And, of course, it involved a little bit of (city park) trail riding, because why not?
—orc Sun Nov 1 14:38:57 2020
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