Just a few hours left until this horrible year is over. Will it actually happen? Will 2020 actually end? Or will some other black swan event occur to send us into a thirteenth month of it? Perhaps an alien civilization will open up a time warp on our world just for kicks and giggles, sending us back to January 2020 to relive it all.
I hop you all have a Happy New Year, or at least as happy as can be reasonably expected due to the circumstances. Take care, y'all.
What's the best thing about the internet? In my opinion, it's the fact that you can learn about anything. Not only can you learn any subject, but you can learn it from top-notch experts.
YouTube, for example, is full of tutorials for every subject. Yesterday, I watched some of Paul Seller's stuff. He's a British woodworker, and he does fantastic work. Early today, I watched a video of a guitar teacher breaking down one of Billy Strings's songs and really diving into the music theory. I played sax for many years and learned a good bit of technical stuff about music, but I never knew half the stuff this guy knows.
This is the real value of the internet. Knowledge is freely shared, and that accelerates learning on the part of those who are interested. No tuition or apprenticeships necessary. Only patience, practice, and determination.
It's never too late to master a new subject. Go for it! :D
Whatever your plans, I hope they go off without a hitch. If you're getting together with family, then I hope you and your loved ones are all doing well. And wherever you go, please drive safely, because lots of accidents happen on holidays.
Take care, folks, and have a Merry Christmas!
Saturn and Jupiter are going to put on a show today. They'll only be six minutes of arc apart, so they'll almost look like a single star. This is the "great conjunction" of 2020.
If the weather permits in your area, be sure to check it out.
On YouTube, whenever you see someone making a wooden mallet, it's always from pieces of lumber--like a 1x6, for example--that are sandwiched together to make the head of the mallet. I now know why they all go this route instead of trying to make the mallet head from a single piece of wood.
First, it's easier to make the hole for the handle. A lot easier.
Second, with the laminated style, you reduce the chance of the wood splitting when you pound the handle into the head. And I'm guessing you don't have to pound as hard since most of the straight cuts were already made at the sawmill.
Third, all the cuts and measurements have been standardized before you even get started, so everything fits snugly together without even trying.
If I ever try to make a wooden mallet again, I'm doing it the easy way, not the hard way.
On the plus side, I'm using wood from a tree I felled myself, so I should get bonus points for recycling, right?
I've said before that I'm not a woodworker. And I'll say it again: I'm a total novice at this stuff. I can hack up pieces of wood and join them together in a rough sort of way, but it ain't pretty. It's more like Frankenstein's monster.
I recently bought a chisel set. Today I did some chiseling as part of my current project. I learned three things from today's work:
1.) Make a chisel cut across the grain first. Only make parallel-grain cuts between your cross-grain cuts. The problem with parallel-grain cuts is that they split the wood.
2.) Start in the middle of your planned hole and work outward. It's a lot easier to chip way at an edge that it is to drive down into a place far from a hole.
3.) If you're chiseling all the way through, make some cuts or drill some holes or something on the other side. If you go in from one direction and try to go all the way, you'll split the wood on the back side.
Those are my newb-learns-the-hard-way lessons for today.
Adobe is phasing out Flash. This means no more Flash games, which means no more Bloons TD 5. There's still a mobile version, but I won't be able to just go to the website on my computer and crank up a free game.
It's a shame, because I really liked that game.
At least I still have Sudoku.
A giant in the history of aviation has passed away. General Chuck Yeager, the man who broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1 rocket plane, was 97.
When I was a boy, I did a book report on his autobiography. It was recently published--the same year of my report, I think--and I was utterly fascinated by it. Yeager's wartime experiences read like bad fiction. I say "bad" because, if it had been fiction, no one would have believed it. Readers would have rolled their eyes at the unlikeliness of it all. Professional critics would have derided the main character as a Mary Sue and made snide jabs about "author wish fulfillment."
But it wasn't fiction. It all actually happened. And that makes the man's life all the more remarkable.
I'd encourage everyone to check out the book, assuming you can find a copy. This is the one I'm talking about, though it seems to be a used copy (i.e., it's out of print). Hopefully his heirs will put together an ebook version some day.
In recent years, General Yeager took to posting on Twitter. I don't have a Twitter account, so I don't "follow" anyone, but I'd read some of Yeager's posts from time to time. He revealed some fascinating behind-the-scenes stuff about the things he had been involved in, not just as a pilot, but also civil service things like diagnosing the Challenger disaster.
He lived a long, action-packed, amazing life. The world is a little duller now, a little less bold and brave and forthright.
Rest in peace, General.
...my head is hot and my feet are cold.
That's what happens when you have HVAC vents in the ceiling. The warm air gets pushed down until it reaches the thermostat. Then it shuts off. Everything below the thermostat, though--which is me when I'm sitting down, which is most of the time--remains cold. Except my head which is close enough to the thermal boundary to get hot.
If those vents were near the bottom of the walls where they belong, the house would warm from the bottom up. Hot air rises, so the air would mix better, too.
The moral of this story is that if you ever design your own home, don't put those vents in the ceiling. You live in the lower half of the room, not the upper half.
Good news: my toe seems fine. I think I must have just rubbed it the wrong way while doing yard work or something. In any event, it's not infected, it doesn't hurt, and I'm back to my normal routine.
Friday night, I felt a little sick. Fatigue and chills, the usual stuff. I suspected I had picked up a bug from my relatives at Thanksgiving. However, I felt fine the next day, and I've felt fine since. So it was a false alarm. Probably just still tired from all of Thursday's activity.
I've been getting some exercise in. I'm not anywhere near where I'd like to be as far as physical fitness goes, but I'm making progress. I'm pleased to be moving in the right direction.
Fun fact: Accept's Blood of the Nations album makes for good workout music. :)
I just finished the final scene in book 5 of Wheel of Fire. Unfortunately, I still have a bunch of middle scenes left to write.
I usually write sequentially. I outline thoroughly, and then I write the scenes in order. I do this so that, if anything changes, I've only screwed up the remainder of my outline, not a big chunk of the draft.
For this book, though, I've had trouble staying focused. Hey, 2020, right? But I needed to jump-start things, so I'm trying different tricks. One of those tricks is writing the scenes out of sequence.
Hopefully everything will work out.
Got to see the extended family. Ate some good stuff. Had fun.
I hope y'all had a nice holiday, too.
My toe has been healed up for several months now. For most of this year, I've been wearing normal shoes and doing normal activities. I thought this whole abscess thing was behind me.
On Monday, the toe started hurting again. Same place where the abscess had been. And it was a little red and swollen, too.
I should add that, as far as I can recall, this development was due in no part to anything I did. I didn't pluck out another hangnail. I didn't drop something heavy on my foot. I didn't trim my toenail too close to the skin. There's no identifiable reason for this to be an issue.
Yet hurt it did.
On Tuesday, I started treating it. I'm cleaning the area with alcohol, applying antibiotic ointment, and bandaging it. I won't be wearing shoes for a few days, just flip-flops.
Psychologically, I'm really bummed out. It's like the universe decided that all the stressors from 2020 just weren't enough, so let's heap another one on poor Jeff's shoulders. :(
The good news is that the pain, which hadn't gotten too bad yet, has already subsided a bit, so maybe the area just got pinched in my shoe or something. Maybe it's not another infection.
If it gets worse, of course, I'll have to seek treatment. But I'm really hoping I don't have to do that. I'd love to beat this thing myself over the next few days. Because right now, I need every personal victory I can get, no matter how small.
I've been watching this guy's videos on YouTube. He's simply phenomenal. Like Doc Watson reincarnated.
I won't embed a video here. Better to go to YouTube and search for Billy Strings, because then you'll get the sidebar full of recommended videos and you can browse the songs he's performed.
But yeah... awesome picker.
I like the word "sober." We usually use it in conjunction with alcohol consumption. It's not limited to that, though. The word can be used in other circumstances, and it's those other circumstances I'm talking about here.
The first definition in the dictionary is the alcohol-related one. The second definition is this:
marked by sedate or gravely or earnestly thoughtful character or demeanor
Veterans Day is when we remember and appreciate all of those, both living and dead, who have served in America's armed forces. It can be celebratory at times, but it should also be sober at times. We should take a moment to reflect on what those men and women have done and why it matters. We should do it sedately, gravely, and in an earnestly thoughtful manner, just as the definition says.
Here's wishing everyone in America a sober Veteran's Day.
I hate it when this happens. I'll be putting my contact lenses in, and one of them will turn sideways for whatever reason, and the edge of the contact pokes my eyeball.
Sometimes it happens because I was careless. That's not the case this time, though. I wasn't careless. And it still went sideways.
So I'm in glasses for a few days until my eyeball heals from its scratch.
I cut down a young sweetgum tree recently. These trees drop little spiky balls on the ground, and those things just suck, and the tree is in the shadow of a much larger sweetgum tree anyway, so the younger tree served no good purpose. It had to go. It was about five or six inches in diameter, so I was able to handle it myself instead of needing the services of a tree surgeon. Once it was down, I chopped it up into manageable pieces. I now have several sweetgum logs.
I've decided I'm going to try to make a pair of wooden mallets from a couple of the logs. I used my angle grinder and a flap disk to debark the logs. (This worked pretty well, by the way.) At first glance, the debarked logs look like good pieces of wood. No internal rot or anything like that, though I won't know for sure until I start cutting into them.
Sweetgum isn't typically used by novices like me for woodworking projects. It's a hardwood, but it tends to warp more than other hardwoods as it dries out. Its commercial value is in things like plywood and veneers. I have no idea if these logs will dry in a satisfactory manner or not. They might crack and split all over. We'll just have to see.
Right now, though, they're handsome pieces of wood, so I'm cautiously optimistic.
I lost internet and cable service early Thursday morning due to Hurricane Zeta. Those services came back Saturday afternoon. For about two-and-a-half days, I was unplugged from the world.
In the meantime, I did a little reading on the Kindle, and I cut down a tree. It was a nice little respite.
After Zeta blew through, the air got cooler, and it's predicted to remain that way. Late October finally feels like late October.
I'm not a woodworker. Just a reminder. I'm a total novice when it comes to this stuff.
Today, though, I finally got around to trying out my new chisel set. I made a practice mortise in an old piece of 4x4. I had another piece of scrap wood that functioned as my tenon.
The good new is that I actually made half-decent mortise for a beginner. The tenon piece fit snugly inside, and I think it went in to the proper depth. There was a small space on a couple of sides of the tenon where the sides of the mortise weren't flush to it, but it wasn't too bad. Overall, I'm pleased with how I did.
I did have some chunks of wood get torn out from the sides of the mortise while chiseling. I guess that's what softwood does. I don't know.
Anyway, it was a new experience, and while it looked a bit rough, it wasn't a failure. That's a win in my book.
I woke up on Saturday with a stuffy nose and what looked like a sinus infection. I decided to nip this thing in the bud, so I stayed in, didn't do anything strenuous, and drank a lot of water and Gatorade.
It might have actually worked. I usually fail at nipping illnesses in the bud, but none of the days since Saturday have been that bad. *knock on wood*
It would be nice to not be down for the count for a couple of weeks, which is what sometimes happens.
In a completely unrelated side note, I still don't like the new Blogger. It puts a single-space indentation at the start of my blog post. I have to delete that space every time. It's not enough to be a proper indentation--that takes three spaces, if I recall correctly--but it's enough to annoy me. It serves no purpose that I can fathom.
But as long as Blogger is free, I guess I can't complain too much. I still like it better than the alternatives.
I usually prefer to have a story outlined to within an inch of its life before I start writing. The reason is that, if I don't, then I tend to wander off on tangents. Before I now it, the story has morphed into something very different from what I intended. Usually that means that I've written myself into a corner. That's the main motivation for outlining: to prevent yourself from writing the story into a corner.
Right now, though, I'm living on the wild side a bit. I've got the bare bones of a story outline, but only vague stuff, not the usual detailed scenes. And I've started writing the story.
The good news is that I've got over 10k words, and I'm not in a corner yet. It's usually somewhere between 10k and 20k that "the corner" happens. So I'm cautiously optimistic.
The bad news is that I've still got lots of unknowns to tackle. But for now, I'm willing to face them head-on.
In the meantime, I'm putting words on the page. I'm doing what writers do. I'm cool with that.
The internet is full of jokes about Keith Richards, mainly aimed at his inexplicable longevity in the face of his past drug use. But there's another side to the guy, too. In addition to being a fantastic guitarist--and an underrated vocalist, too, in my humble opinion--he's a class act who exhibits lots of respect for the musicians who blazed the trail he walks.
He's not the sort of guy to normally put on a tuxedo and play a country song. He's a rocker, after all. But he'll do it for Jerry Lee Lewis, and he'll do it on short notice. That's the sort of guy Richards is.
If you buy enough Amazon Basics products--Amazon's house brand--then they'll send you a ten-percent-off coupon for your next Amazon Basics purchase. I didn't know they did this. Apparently, though, they have purchase tiers, and when you hit the next tier, you get a coupon. Pretty cool, huh?
I used my coupon to buy the Amazon Basics chisel set.
I recently bought a hand plane. I figured it was a good thing to have on hand for any future woodworking projects. I'd never used a plane before, so this was a first for me. I have an old piece of scrap wood, a 4x4, that I tried it out on.
It was... awkward.
For one thing, you've got to clamp that wood down tight, otherwise it'll absolutely shoot off like a bullet whenever the blade bites into it.
For another thing, you need a heavy table on which to work, otherwise the whole table will jump when the wood is clamped to it and the blade bites the wood.
The there's the pressure involved on the front end. How hard do you bear down with the left hand? Well, that's a trial-and-error thing, apparently. :/
I used it enough to where I sort of got in a rhythm. I didn't quite get the wood flat, but I was on my way there--somewhat--when I decided to call it a day. It's a workout, too, by the way. If you want to burn calories and sweat, do some planing for a while.
One thing I couldn't figure out is how to plane the area behind the blade. Am I supposed to start planing with the tool hanging off the end of the wood? Am I supposed to plane from the opposite direction? I'm planing with the grain here to avoid tearout, so going from the opposite side seems wrong. And starting with the plane mostly hanging off the wood seems wrong, too, due to the angle and the leverage and whatnot. So that's something I'll have to research, I guess.
Anyway, it was a neat experience. Maybe I'll get good with it with more practice.
I saw the trailer for Dune 2020. Here it is:
Okay, so it's got some good stuff there. I like the look of the soldiers floating down to the surface. (Not sure whether those are Harkonnen soldiers or Sardaukar, but I think they're Sardaukar.) And the personal fighting shields are better than the blocky things in the Lynch movie.
But the trailer ends with the sandworm, and I'm a bit disappointed with it. I've always seen the sandworm with a three-jawed mouth apparatus, and this one doesn't seem to have that.
Wiki says the three-jawed thing is a result of an early book cover, not from the actual description in the book. So it's technically not canon, I guess.
John Schoenherr provided the earliest artwork for the Dune series, including the illustrations in the initial pulp magazine serial and the cover of the first hardcover edition. Frank Herbert was very pleased with Schoenherr's art,[8] and remarked that he was "the only man who has ever visited Dune".[9] Schoenherr gave the sandworm three triangular lobes that form the lips of its mouth. This design was referenced for the sandworm puppets that appeared in the 1984 movie adaptation of Dune.[10]
Still, though, there's this thing called "fan expectations." The three-jaw design is decades old and ingrained in the consciousness of the fans. There's no good reason for Hollywood to ditch it.
Then there's the fight scenes. We only get a brief glimpse in the trailer, but the hand-to-hand stuff looks a bit too choreographed for my liking. Hopefully it'll play out as more realistic in the movie.
The trailer shows Jason Momoa more than it shows Rebecca Ferguson. That's an ill omen. Lady Jessica is a far more important character than Duncan Idaho. Hopefully the movie won't sideline her.
I really hope there's no Pink Floyd music in the movie. Nothing against the band, but I want a symphonic score. Symphonic music is timeless.
I didn't get to see enough of the ornithopters to form an opinion bout them. I didn't see much of the Fremen, either. Or Baron Harkonnen, or Feyd Rautha, or the Spacing Guild... I know a trailer is just a trailer, but this is like a Star Wars trailer not showing Darth Vader, the Death Star, any rebel fighters, or the Imperial fleet.
Was the spice mentioned at all? If so, I missed it.
So, yeah... I'm not terribly enthusiastic about the trailer.
However...
When the trailers for The Matrix hit television back in 1999, I thought the movie looked pretty dumb. I thought it was just a mindless action flick made for the purpose of playing around with CGI. When I saw the movie later, I was blown away. It's one of my favorite movies. And I was pissed off at the trailer for giving me the wrong impression. So I'm not willing to write off a movie based on the trailer, because I know first-hand how a trailer can fail.
The movie is part one of two, so it's also possible that the trailer only shows stuff from the first movie, not the second one. Still, though, that's no excuse for not mentioning the villains or the McGuffin (the spice).
Nevertheless, I'm still looking forward to seeing the movie. I won't fear the impressions given to me by the trailer. Fear is the joy-killer, the little-death that brings total disappointment. I will put the trailer out of my mind, and when it is forgotten, only the movie will remain.
Hurricane Sally blew through in a hurry, didn't it? The forecast had predicted several days of rain, but it looks like that's not going to happen. Once this storm came inland, it stepped on the gas pedal. It was in the Carolinas in no time flat.
So what does 2020 have in store for us next?
Hurricane Sally is here.
Looks like Macon is getting dumped on at the moment. I suspect there will be some flash flooding there.
The areas downstream will probably flood, too, because water flows downhill, so the coastal plain gets both the rain from the storm and the rain runoff from upstream.
As for me, though, I'm fine. Just the usual heavy rain. No winds powerful enough to do any damage. The northern part of the state is pretty immune from hurricane damage due to being so far inland and at a higher elevation. By the time a storm gets here, it's already lost a lot of energy. So don't worry about me. Worst case scenario is a few low-lying areas experience flash-flooding, and I'm not in a low-lying area.
Best wishes, though, to everyone affected. Y'all stay as safe as you can, and watch out for each other.
Okay, so it's not actually a Jawa sandcrawler. But it looks like one.
My street is in the process of being resurfaced, and one of the construction vehicles is a tracked thing that looks like it belongs in the Tatooine desert. Four tracks, just like a sandcrawler. When it rumbles past, the room shakes.
I think they're just fixing the sunken-in parts of the road for now. From what I hear, the plan is that they'll repave the whole thing next week, presumably after the hurricane blows through.
Speaking of the weather, it's seventy-one degrees right now, and the projected high for the rest of the week is only seventy-five. It feels almost chilly.
In other news, I started a new story recently. I was stuck in neutral with book 5 of Wheel of Fire, and I needed something to jump-start my production. So I started a new story. We'll see what happens.
Thanks to the lockdowns and factories being shut down or on limited shifts, stuff has become scarce. I'm browsing for a tool box, and most of the items I've looked at on Amazon are only available from third-party sellers.
So I'm browsing Walmart's site now. It looks like they might have something that suits my needs, though I'd have to actually go in person to the local store to get it.
So, yeah... even the tool box supply has run low. Way to go, 2020. You win again.
I've been seeing a swarm of hummingbirds around the feeders lately. They're putting on fat for the long trip over the Gulf of Mexico, and that makes them frantic and competitive. But they've also all been female. I haven't seen any males in a few days.
So I guess the males are gone. It's typical for the males to leave first and the females to follow about a week later. Last year, the males left in early August, much sooner than usual, and the females stuck around an extra month. It'll be interesting to see how long the females stick around this year.
Blogger has decided to force us all to use its new interface. I don't like the new interface. I prefer the old one.
*sigh*
This isn't the first web site to do this, of course. It happens all the time. Using the internet means constantly having to throw out some of your knowledge and start from scratch.
Such is just "the times," I guess, the inevitable consequence of living in this century.
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The character was a vicious Ugandan headhunter with face and body paint copied from a Frank Frazetta painting. His backstory was that he was a former bodyguard of deposed President of Uganda Idi Amin who had been discovered by J.J. Dillon during an excursion to Africa. A promotional vignette aired on WMC-TV featuring a spear-wielding Kamala seemingly emerging from a steamy African jungle; the vignette was actually filmed on Jarrett's farm in Hendersonville, Tennessee, with the steam effect created using dry ice. To establish Kamala as a monstrous character, Jarrett instructed him to wrestle in a brawling style with chops and biting. To preserve kayfabe, Harris wore robes and refused to speak English while in public in Memphis.
