Stan’s Blog

1st Place for Show

Eddie designed a new Pinewood Derby car for his Webelos II competition. It used 3 different colors and a  lego driver with an X-wing canopy.  Eddie and I cut it to his chosen shape and we sanded it down to 600 Grit.  Laura and Eddie Laid down 3 layers of a base coat using Lawn Care Green.   Sanded the green to 600 grit.  Laura taped the parts of the car that were supposed to stay green, got the can of Red Gloss paint and shot it at the car.  The first squirts out of the can must have included a lot of solvent because there was a bunch of big bubbly red streaks on the car that would not dry properly.  Laura was sad.   I had to scrape and sand the gooey red stuff down to the wood since it had dissolved some of our pretty green paint.  I shook up the paint can real good and went at the car again.  It did a little better.  We bought a new can of red paint.   When we had sanded the red paint to 600 grit, Laura taped off the car sections that were to remain Red when the next color was added.   The Blue paint went on much better.    When Laura pulled off all the tape, we had a Red, Green and Blue car.  Then a layer of Clear Gloss.  Then all the decals.  Then More Gloss.

Meanwhile, Laura had also polished the axles and the wheel hubs.    It was then my turn.  I had to install the wheels and the weights to bring the car up to 5 oz.    This time I decided to use my drill press to pre-drill the axle holes, therefore guaranteeing that the tire axles will go in straight.  Wrong.  Two of them still went in cockeyed and I had to whap on the axle nails with a screwdriver so that all 4 wheels touched when it was rolled.

I weighed all the parts together before I assembled it and trimmed off the Lead until all the separate parts were exactly 5 oz.  I then put all the parts on the car and then weighed it.  The car somehow was up to 5.2 oz thus proving that things weigh more than the sum of their parts once assembled.  So I started trimming the lead again to get it back down to 5 oz.

I had volunteered to run the Pinewood derby software for the Pack using my Laptop which was connected to the electronic speed equipment on the  Pinewood derby racing track.    There are 107 kids in our pack.  Each with a car.  Each car was to have 6 races running on 3 tracks at a time.  If you do the math that is a total of 214 races.  This would be from 8 in the morning till 3:30 in the afternoon.  From my previous years experience, I had learned all the tricks to make everything work together because it would mess up after about 15 races.  I would reset power to the timer, unplug and re-plug cables and restart the software.  Last year, it always worked.  Not this year.  This year the special software updated itself over the internet.  After the update, it still seemed to work fine.  But, after about 40 races, nothing would work and the software would not get the race times from the timing equipment.  This would also really really mess up my computer.  On a reboot, it once gave me the BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH (BSOD).  I would have to shutdown and reboot 2 or 3 times before it came up cleanly enough to run the Racing Software again.   All this would be occurring while a room full of about 60 parents and kids are ALL looking at me attempting to fix things and they were not smiling at me.    For the little stuff, I would stop the race and signal to the helpers to push things while I did stuff to the computer to verify everything was working again before starting the next race.   Luckily the big crashes would wait until the end of the races which would end the competitions.  Then I would reboot and give the results to the leaders.  BUT, for the last set of races for the Bears, a hard crash happened after the 4th heat with 2 more to go.  I stopped the race, fidgeted with things.  Nothing worked.  Everybody is watching me.  I go to the Pack leader and tell him that I need to reboot the computer and it will probably take about 15 minutes before we can restart the races.    He makes the announcement and takes the Bears out to play outside.  Meanwhile, I am waiting for my Laptop to reboot.  Various techies stop by to offer me unhelpful advice on what I should be doing.   Eventually, I get rebooted and verify that the hardware seems to be working.  I give the signal and all the Bears trudge back in.  We finish the last 2 heats with no problems.  Afterwords, a couple of parents stop by and tell me that I had the worst job and they felt sorry for me.  I thanked them.

For the Webelos II races.  Eddie won 1st place for show and came in 4th place for speed.  Yay!  We go to the District finals on Feb 20.

After Laura changed the shower head in the Master Bathroom, she noticed that water was coming thru the ceiling on the stairs under the shower when I was taking a shower. So I set up our funky folding ladder on the curving stairs so that I could cut a hole in the dry wall behind the shower.

Drywall Hole to see the back of the Shower

I discovered that there is about a 3 foot gap from the drywall to the back of the shower. Not very useful for attempting to find and fix the leak. So I cut a hole in the guest room to get closer to the back of the shower.

Guest Room Hole To access the back of the Shower

This worked. So I fired up the shower and spent the next 20 minutes watching for a leak. No leak. Bummer. I put a different shower head that I could turn off in order to put the maximum pressure on the pipes and still no leak. I now have 2 big holes in my drywall and no leaks. It is good thing we didn’t call an expensive plumber to find this out. And now that Laura has seen all the wasted space behind the shower, she wants me to put in a new closet or some kind of storage space in there.

My current plan is to go back to using the master bathroom shower until it leaks again. I will leave the holes in the guest room drywall and try to fix the stair’s drywall hole.

If it leaks, then I will know where it is leaking. And I will try to figure out how to use the wasted space in my walls.

Monday Update: It leaked this morning, but not from the pipes to the shower. We discovered a path that water could splash out of the shower stall and leak thru the floor. So…. I poked holes in my Drywall for nothing. I just need to seal the floor better and to keep the splash out to a minimum.

Since my lawn maintenance worker decided to stop mowing my lawn, I had to get Nick to fix the walk behind mower that I bought from him about 10 years ago.  After Nick played with the carborator, it started on the second pull.  I decided to mow my lawn today.   So I chased the mower around the yard and when I got about 3/4 thru, the mower started surging and then died.  I called Nick, who remotely diagnosed that  I had water in my tank.  I drained some gas into a bottle and could not tell if there was any water in there.  I had to syphon the gas out of  the tank and I now remember vividly what gas tastes like.  I then practiced spitting a lot.  I tore things apart and figured that there was a bunch of dirt at the bottom of the new tank that Nick had put on the mower.   The new gas filter he had put on, was full of junk.  I was jamming Q-Tips into the drain thing to try to clear out the clog but nothing worked.   I eventually put a hose on the drain thing and blew air back into the tank.  At first it was hard to blow and then it blew clear.  I once again remembered what gas tasted like.  When I hooked things back up, the gas was flowing freely.  I finished mowing the lawn.  Later I decided to chop down a maple tree that was putting too much shade in my back yard with my Axe. It was only about 6 inches in diameter, so I figured I did not need to get out the ChainSaw.   After about 3 minutes of chopping the tree went Thump, Thump and was leaning against another tree with a very long 3 inch diametor branch sticking out over the back yard.  It was about a foot  over my head and I tried to swing at it to start cutting it off.  I missed.  It was a very hard swing.  I had not expected to miss it.  My arms continued to move in an arc past the branch and then down straight in front of me.  Next thing I knew, it had stopped by hitting my left ankle.   I had sharpened my Axe very well.  I looked down at my foot, expecting the worst, but found that I had put my hiking boots on in order to mow the lawn.   There was no blood.  I went inside and took the boot off.  I had a 3 inch line of scraped skin starting at my ankle that was beginning to swell.  Like Ouchie.  I had thought about wearing my Teva sandles to mow the lawn,  but in retrospect, I made the right decision.

I have a Brita water filter in my office space which I use to make my coffee each morning. After I made my coffee today, I noticed that there appeared to be a green sticky stuck to the bottom of the flask. I could see it since the container was clear an it was a pretty green blobby color on the bottom. So I went ahead and brewed my coffee. While I was drinking it, I stared at the blob and decided it was not a sticky but it looked like someone had used a green highlighter on the bottom of the container. This seemed like a silly thing for someone to do and I realzed that the green was on the inside of the container. So I stuck my hand in the water and rubbed some green slime off of the bottom. Ah Ha! I thought, I have algae in my filtered water. How did it get there? My fancy filter should remove anything the algae might want to eat. My next thought was that I was drinking chlorophilliated flavored Coffee. I wondered if the brewing process would kill any algae poisons that might exist. Possibly it might actually be healthy. Some sort of macroBiotic NewAge drink. Maybe I have just started a trend. I decided to clean my filter.

Well we tried again to make a fast car. We failed. We got 6th place out of 12. But Eddie’s new car design still won 2nd place for show. If the 1st place winner does not want to go to the Reginals then we get to go. We will find out later.

I got to run the software for the pinewood derby race for all 124 scouts in our pack and each scout ran 6 races 3 at a time for for a total of 248 races.  The software would time how long each car took to run each race. It was a cool mix of Hardware and Software with a lazer being triggered at the starting gate and another lazer at the finish which would be used to identify the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners of each race. Everything went smoothly except for the couple of times that it failed to work. The fun part about that is you get 30-40 parents who are giving you the evil eye while they are wondering if the whole event has just been ruined and they are going to have to go home with their disappointed crying child It made things more interesting. I was able to clear up each of the problems and nobody succeeded in killing me.

Mom has a new kitten which jumped onto my lap and fell asleep.   I had to go look at something, so I picked it up and placed its limp sleeping body in the chair.   When I was done I came back and sat down.  After about 10 seconds I felt something move under me.   I looked down and saw  a little black paw sticking out from between my legs.   It wasn’t making any noise or struggling in any way.  I got up and the cat was just laying there on its back with its legs all kinda splayed out.   When I picked up the kitten, it was all limp in my hands.   I couldn’t tell if the cat was just still asleep or that I had killed it.  I shook it some to see if I could just wake it up, but I was worried that if something in the cat was broke, that I would make the cat’s problem worse if I shook it too hard.   So after some gentle wiggling of the cat, it seemed to move its legs a little.   Eventually after much poking, I woke the cat up and it walked slowly away from me.  Now I don’t know if I knocked the cat out or just had a hard time waking it up, or both.   But the good thing is that I didn’t kill mom’s cat.

At least for today, when I search for “Stanley Turner” on Google. I appear at the top of the Google list. At least my LinkedIn page does. My blog isn’t doing so well in the google list. Oh well.