Who are you? (update)

Posted on September 5, 2010 by Daniel Meyer

Regarding the post Friday about the guy taking pictures of our house that took off in his white van (THE vehicle of choice for sex offenders everywhere!) when confronted by our house guest:

Well, turns out he was upset with the city for towing a junk car off his property (after months of warnings), and was going around town taking pictures of other people’s stuff. He apparently feels he was singled out and we weren’t because we know the code enforcement officer (he is a good friend).

Annoying really. Both I…AND the code guy have so much more integrity than that.

Knowing the code guy doesn’t buy me any favors at all. He would follow the same procedures with me as he does with anybody…and since he stops by regularly to visit, I’d have little chance of “not getting noticed.”

The dude in the van was actually shooting pictures of my bucket truck (the left-handed fargle-snorker), thinking since it doesn’t move much it must be a junk vehicle.

The left-handed fargle-snorker hard at work

The left-handed fargle-snorker hard at work

Truth is, it moves quite a bit…usually every weekend but every other weekend at least.

I moved it this weekend to hang my banner on my evil headquarters…but that’s another story.

I move it to haul stuff from the shop, pick up stuff from the lumber yard, to mow the area, and sometimes just to run it around the block and keep the batteries charged. I think the longest it has sat is about 3 weekends…that happens sometimes when we miss a weekend or the projects just don’t take me “fargle-snorkering”.

Thing is, there’s really only one good place to park it the way our gates/fences are currently laid out so I park it in the same place every time.

Whether it moves or not though is truly irrelevant and frankly, none of anybody’s business.

It’s registered, inspected, insured, and operational so it’s not a problem with the city.

I don’t know…I guess the guy’s harmless…but really dude, if I have something that’s a problem with the city…that’s between me and the city. You need to deal with your issues. Being a dick-head and creeping out my house guests isn’t going to change your situation one little bit.

Or at least stop and talk when confronted. You might learn something new, or even make a new friend.

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer

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Who are you?

Posted on September 3, 2010 by Daniel Meyer

Who are you…and why are you taking pictures of the back of our house?

The driver of this van was shooting pictures of the Old Vic yesterday evening. (click for bigger):

Who are you?

He rapidly skedaddled when our friend (who shot this pic) tried to ask him what was what. That’s what makes this a bit suspicious…well, that and the plain-Jane unmarked white van (THE van of choice for nefarious dealings everywhere).

A casual picture taker/cool-house-picture-taker-type would be shooting the front or interesting features, not so much the back of the house…AND be willing to chat with our friend about what they were doing.

Same with a tax or insurance appraiser, and THEY would be in a marked vehicle anyway.

An insurance appraiser would notify us first as well.

City vehicles/personnel are marked and again, they would be willing to explain themselves.

So what gives? If you’re legit, give us a call, shoot us an email, make an appointment, or be willing to chat with us or our friends.

If you’re not legit, knock it off. You’re creeping people out, our home is our castle, and we Texan’s tend to take that sort of thing somewhat seriously.

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer

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The Old Vic meets the 21st Century

Posted on August 21, 2010 by Daniel Meyer

The Old Vic got broadband internet yesterday. Finally got all the hubs/etc straightened out today (the massive structure of this place literally EATS wireless signals!).

One more step forward.

Paint is on the agenda this afternoon and tomorrow. $200 bucks worth picked up this morning. That’s one…I say…ONE room.

Heh…good thing it was on sale!

Pictures of that later!

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer

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BOOM Shagalaga!

Posted on August 15, 2010 by Daniel Meyer

And thus the Lord did mightily smite…our pecan tree apparently.

(pictures below)

We had some unexplained stuff at the Clarksville house last weekend…

A tripped circuit breaker on the old wiring…the old knob and tube wiring that remains is on one 15 amp circuit in the new breaker box. It just provides some lights in parts of the house I haven’t wired yet.

It shouldn’t have been tripped.

Every light on that circuit together only adds up to about 240 watts…and the little fridge that is also on that circuit only pulls about 60 watts…perhaps double that for an instant when starting.

So…if everything was on at once…we’re talking 2 amps here. That leaves a good 13amps of steady load to go before trip-age AND all the lights were off. The spec on a 15 amp breaker says a transient load (under 100ms) could reach 30 amps before trip-age.

WTH?

It WAS hot all week…and I mean TEXAS hot…with temps reaching 108 some days and not dropping below 86 at night.

Buildings heat up then…and can’t cool off at night. That’s when the heat warnings are out.

I thought maybe the little fridge had trouble starting or something and tripped it. Since it started right away on reset of the breaker and was running cheerily along (with no hint of straining) I wasn’t happy with that explanation, but had no other so it would have to do for the moment.

I visually checked out the old circuit though. Everything was fine.

Later in the weekend I found 4 CFL’s that wouldn’t come on. Strange. They weren’t very old and are supposed to last 10,000 hours…ah well. replaced them.

Something happened, I just don’t know what. Perhaps a voltage spike.

Stuff on the new system was okay though, including the air-conditioner.

After we left Sunday, our friend Larry called. Babe, our neighbor across the street discovered that our pecan tree had been hit by lightning. It blew bark clear across the street and into his yard. He says it jumped into the chain-link fence. They heard the strike last Tuesday I think, said it sounded like a bomb went off in the neighborhood, but didn’t know exactly where until he saw the tree.

I saw none of this and I walked by the tree once in the daylight while turning the water off to leave (it was night when I turned the water on). I guess I wasn’t looking up!

That explains the issues in the house. There are limbs on that tree within feet of the house, and only the old wiring is in the front of the house. Probably by induction (but possibly direct), we got a surge on the old wiring. A big one I’d expect.

We were lucky.

Some of that luck we made for ourselves though. Pulling the bad splices, connections, and other screwed up wiring out, and attaching the old circuit to the new service system probably saved our bacon. No weak splices (on top of flammable wall paper), proper grounds on the service and boxes, solid connections etc…

“Zork” says the lightning.
“Pop” goes the breaker. That’s that. End of problem.

The old stuff probably would have lit the house on fire in about 6 different places I can think of off-hand. I tore out stuff that had been working for 40 years because I knew it couldn’t handle anything out of the ordinary.

I’m very glad I did.

I hope the tree will survive…it has LOADS of pecans on it, they are very tasty, and it’s a durn big tree…something around 50 or 60 feet tall. I’d hate to have to cut that sucker down!

Anyway, on to the pictures! I especially like the ones that show the spot welds on the chain-link fence!

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer

Posted in Electrical, Yard | 2 Comments

106

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Daniel Meyer

106.

That’s one-hundred and six.

Worked on some. Basked in others.

Let’s just say…August is here…and air-conditioning is a very good thing.

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer

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Score!

Posted on July 27, 2010 by Daniel Meyer

My sister’s SO drives a truck for a scrap yard. Thanks to him I scored a 10-foot stainless steel prep table and food sink…AND a hand-washing sink…complete with faucets and drains…all for $236…it was headed to be scrunched and bailed and sold as raw metal.

New it would cost me 10 times that. Used from an equipment dealer would have been $800-$1000.

It’s in perfect condition. No dents, no scratches. A few minutes with some BonAmi and a scrubbie and it will look like new.

This has a place in our commercial building. This is how we are trying to equip our upcoming business. Cash, no debt. Good equipment. There will be expensive things needed, but when I can save a couple thousand bucks on a prep table…well, that puts us that much more ahead.

It’s a start.

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer

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Apparently we ordered too many peaches…

Posted on July 26, 2010 by Daniel Meyer

We must have ordered too many peaches this year.

Early on, I knocked a bunch off the tree as even when they were grape-sized I could see there were too many.

I didn’t take near enough.

The extremely heavy crop, combined with some wind from a storm last week, smashed two of the big limbs on our peach tree.

I trimmed it up…there’s still enough peaches to fill a pick-up.

Poor tree. Pics later. It should recover…it’s an amazing producer…and freestone too!

Mmmmm…peaches. They should be about ready this coming weekend…

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer

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On nooks and crannies (part one)

Posted on July 4, 2010 by Daniel Meyer

On nooks and crannies…and why poking into them isn’t always a good idea…part the un…

We didn’t take full advantage of the holiday weekend…working on the house-wise. Rather, we cut it a bit short as I have some minor motorcycle repairs to do before my run to Michigan in about 7 days…minor repairs like a new tire, some new oil…maybe some sparkers and an air-filter…that and replacement or repair of some rather seriously damaged structural fender panels…ya know…details.

Anyway, Monday for that…another story yada yada…I’ll post those pics over here.

One of our tasks this weekend was some cleanup on our commercial building on the square. We’ve literally hauled tons of junk out of there…at least as much more still remains.

We were working on the mezzanine, which is a half floor at the back of the building between the first and second floor. Ours measures about 25′ x 20′. It was previously used for storage and also hosted a gift wrapping station. The problem with this extra, bonus 500 square feet of space is that it was packed…floor to ceiling and wall to wall…with junk.

We’ve worked several days cleaning it out. There are cash-registers from the last 30 years (maybe 12 of ’em), typewriters of all ages (from the old royal portable manual to several electric models), at least 5 adding machines, dead computers, cases of flash-bulbs (yes, real flash-bulbs), and about 5000 boxes of packing material, old computer labels (heavy!), green-stamp machines, postage stamp machines, an ancient copier, and heaven only knows what else…I’ve mentioned that this building was a pharmacy and doctors’ offices since it was built in 1896 or so…a little imagination about the tools and times can generate nightmares. Remind me to tell you about the spreaders…(shudder).

All this is leading up to this…We were done with the mezzanine. Everything was cleaned out. All that was left were the shelves, and all we needed to do was sweep the place up and turn out the lights.

And then I poked my nose into a nook…or perhaps it’s a cranny.

The stairs that go to the second floor have a landing. The landing is over a corner of the mezzanine and the space was covered by what I thought was a wall underneath.

It turned out to be an old table/desk thing turned sideways and shoved underneath.

There was a reasonably large space underneath…perhaps 4′ x 6′ and maybe 4′ high. Is that a nook? Or a cranny?

So…me…being the fool…I pulled the desk thing out…well…it wouldn’t come quite out…something SOLID was holding it in…but it came out enough so I could look in…

The space was more than half filled with paint. Lots of paint. Cans upon cans of paint. Probably 500 pounds of paint…in mostly quart cans. Paint so old the cardboard boxes have rotted around it. More than a hundred cans of it.

What I SHOULD have done….was shoved the desk/thing back in, and then nailed a piece of plywood over it, painted it to look like the surrounding walls, and just forgot about it. The next owner could worry it…well, perhaps it would be me…after the cans started leaking and paint seeped into the downstairs.

Sigh.

What I did was crawl in and hand it all out to the wife, and then we passed it down the stairs, and now we’ll find a proper way of disposing of it.

Here’s some of it:

Paint. Lots of paint.

Paint. Lots of paint.

There’s something more than 40 gallons here. It has such color names as “meteor black”, “(something weird) orange” and “pasty blue” or such. It’s alkyd based, high-build, glossy, and contains “dow corning silicone”. We’re guessing by the condition of the cardboard (and the amount of dust) that it’s 10-15 years or more old. Perhaps 20 plus.

So let’s see…if a gallon can cover 300 square feet then 40 gallons…divide by two, carry the three, multiply by pi…well…what, 12,000 square feet? A wall 10 feet high by 1000 feet long (we’d spill a bit)?

So…anybody need something painted in glossy, obnoxious colors? Something large? I have some paint here…

Oh, and why the “part one”? What could possibly be “part two”?

Glad you asked. It’s an interesting question…could be several interesting questions actually…this nook in part deux is over 6 feet tall…but it really boils down to one VERY interesting one.

Big, old, safe.

Big, old, safe.

“Is the poison gas…still inside?”

Sigh.

More on this later.

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer

Posted in On the Square | 3 Comments

Random Cat Gourd!

Posted on June 21, 2010 by Daniel Meyer

No good pics this weekend…not a lot of work happened on the Old Vic.

We helped friends install a walk-in tub on Saturday (my part was installing two new electrical circuits for the pump and heater).

Sunday we cleaned up some trash out of the building on the square, and then hotfooted it back so we could see my Dad for a Father’s day dinner.

It was also 100 degrees this weekend with very high humidity…so we may have been slightly “less energetic” than normal.

So…since I have no interesting working pics…

Random cat gourd!

The rare, elusive, cat gourd.

The rare, elusive, cat gourd.

(I bought this at this year’s Clarksville Fine Arts Festival).

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer

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Summer’s here…

Posted on June 14, 2010 by Daniel Meyer

Yeah, I know summer officially starts on June 21…but we’re here in Texas and we know summer when we see it…hot, sunny, chance of thunder-storms…sweat pouring out of my salt-stained shirt…AC running overtime…temperatures at NIGHT not falling below 85 degrees…

Yeah, it’s summer.

Maintenance stuff more than rennovating stuff this weekend…I got all the tree limbs we cut a couple weeks ago (a metric sh!t-ton) and some more I trimmed Saturday all chopped up and burned.

I also cleaned up an old burn barrel site (glass, and tons of bailing wire for some reason) by shoveling it into feed-sacks and throwing it away…

Mowing got done…weedeating got done…

Oh, and we cleaned a bunch of trash out of our building on the square just for good measure.

A hot weekend for that kind of work…

I also fiddled more with the paint-sprayer…which I thought I had fixed but it is still not working right…this is a problem…I really need to spray some of these jobs to do it right…and the budget says I can’t buy a better rig at the moment…but this one is not cooperating. A date with a shotgun may be in its future…

There was a bicycle event in Clarksville this weekend…so there was live music on the square Saturday night…the square is very pleasant once the shade shows up…balmy, breezy. Texas summer night magic…

The band was Native Pride, a rock Band featuring Clarksville Native Wendell Davis. They are quite good and did a couple sets of great music.

Me and the wife spent a nice evening, arm in arm, sitting on a park bench on the square enjoying the breeze and listening to the music…

Music…a nice Italian dinner, a bottle of wine…

Yeah, Texas summer night magic.

Working hard and living well.

Hope y’all are doing the same!

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer

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