nosrednayduj

Today's adventure was a tour of the town's water system. Valerie had won a bid on this as a church fundraiser – a member of the town water oversight board is also a member of the church and offered such a tour.

The town's first large communal well was dug in the late 1800s as a private enterprise for people in the town center area. The operation was sold to the town some 15-20 years later and has been municipal ever since. Originally, there was no water metering; you paid based on expected usage by counting the number of people in the home and acreage and what you were doing with that acreage. Now we have metering. There are 6 different wells that the town uses in different parts of town, and they have different qualities and so some of them are only run at high summer when there's great demand, because there's a lot of iron and manganese in the earth, and that ends up giving discolored water, which people don't like. The town uses about a million gallons a day in winter and about two million gallons a day on the hottest summer days.

There is an old historic building which was used for the original pumphouse that was recently restored and is now being used as offices and labs. They did a beautiful job on the restoration, saving old rolltop desks and original blueprints and pressure meters, some for decoration, some for actual use. Then for some of the extras, like they needed a large table, so they actually built one out of wood so it would look nice with the historic desks rather than getting some Formica crap.

We then walked over to the construction site of the new PFAS removal plant so we could talk about what it was going to look like, and where the giant tanks for this and that would be. The site is also where the current pumphouse is for one of the wells, so we got to go in, and there was some handwaving of where the pipes go and how they go through a temporary PFAS removal station and then return to have chlorine etc. added. The chlorine tank was not huge, maybe three times as big as my water heater, but I guess you just don't put that much in.

I neglected to take pictures in the pumphouse or of the construction site. But I did take pictures of our next stop, which was down the road a ways, of the newest water tower. On the outside it's just a cylinder; on the inside it's also just a cylinder with a flat ceiling pretty high up. The water is above that ceiling. Hope it doesn't crash down upon us while we are standing inside it! It's fiberglass lined, and has an 18-inch concrete slab as its base. Perry was surprised that there was such a high ceiling and that the water was all the way up there; he expected more volume to be used for storage. But it's really all about water pressure and you need height for that. All of the water towers are targets for cell phone companies to put antennas; the steel ones get antenna bases welded to them, which the water guy was underwhelmed about. The new one has cell phone antenna mounts built in. Which means that they can't add any more beyond the 3-4 that they've got.

The water guy was seemingly thrilled to spend a Saturday afternoon leading people around town, answering all kinds of questions we had, volunteering all kinds of information. Apparently they are having a labor shortage problem because there's some certifications that you need to get in order to work on or supervise water systems, and people aren't getting those certifications. Hopefully they'll be able to hire some more folks soon. They have reqs out.

The big pump at the bottom of the water tower.

A machine consisting of a white cube with a 2-foot pipe coming in on the left going through it and back out on the right. On the right, the pipe splits into a shallow U shape in front of the cube and goes back into the pipe on the left. There is a 90° junction on the far right and the pipe narrows and goes straight up. There are some red things wrapped in plastic in the foreground on the left (I don't know what they're for), and some monitoring equipment mounted on the concrete wall behind.

The big pipe going up to the top of the water tower.
A curved concrete wall with a 12-15 inch diameter white pipe going up at least 50 feet to a metal ceiling with black girders. The back of a white man's bald head is visible at the bottom along with part of the pumping apparatus.

A curved concrete wall with a 12-15 inch diameter white pipe going up at least 50 feet to a metal ceiling with black girders. The back of a white man's bald head is visible at the bottom along with part of the pumping apparatus.

A package was allegedly delivered by FedEx. But it did not come to the front porch. We went online, and they had taken a photo, and we discovered that it was in our garage. A white package on a white plastic chair, and so we had not noticed it, not really expecting somebody to put a package in the garage. (The garage door was open, so it wasn't totally crazed placement.)

Those photos are pretty useful! It would've been a long time before I found it there.

They are forgiven for this strange placement, because we are having a section of our roof replaced, and so there is a giant dumpster next to the house, and probably at the time of delivery, there were a large number of worker bees scurrying about, and possibly a truck or two parked in the way.

It was magnitude 6, and a bit hard to find. I let Ken do all the work, except for I helped carry the telescope outdoors. "Little fuzzy icicle, a great big flop."

We hadn't used the telescope in ages, but all the parts worked, even the battery-powered target finder, whose battery even worked, and everything was still aligned.

Then we looked at Venus, but it was too close to the horizon for a good view. I always like it when you can see the crescent Venus, but it was gibbous today, and there were chromatic aberrations. And then we looked at Jupiter, and we could not really see the stripes, but we saw all four moons. So it was not really a big flop.

Also it was a nice break from cleaning the basement.

In college, I was a pretty big fan of Meat Loaf. So I was vaguely sad when I learned that he had died. Then I read a bunch of Twitter, and I was pretty sad that it turned out he was a Trump supporter. But, still, I had enjoyed his music.

So with a little help from Ken, Friday night I dusted off the record player, which we haven't used in some years and required some fussing with the speaker and amp wiring, found Bat Out Of Hell, and played it as a tribute. I'm sure that I was not the only aging hippie doing that very thing at that very time. Turns out I can still sing all the words to Paradise by the Dashboard Lights and Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad, and most of You Took the Words Right Out Of My Mouth (including the spoken intro to that song, but not the sportscast in Paradise). Kind of vague on the rest of the songs on the album.

I explained to my housemate that if Elton John dies, Yellow Brick Road is a double album and they will have to listen to all of it :-)

Current Mood: melancholy
Crossposts: https://nosrednayduj.livejournal.com/359877.html

Last year, I had a big birthday bash. This year, obviously that wasn't happening.

I had a pretty good birthday anyway. I made blueberry French toast casserole the night before for Valerie to put in the oven in the morning (since she gets up earlier) so we could have it piping hot for breakfast. Since she was up early anyway, Valerie had borrowed this object, and had plenty of time to inflate it before I got down for breakfast, so I walked into the dining room and there was this ridiculous thing!

Just the previous day, somebody at work had decided we should be having social hour occasionally, so I had said "let's start Wednesday at lunch and wish me happy birthday!" So I got to put the ridiculous thing on video, and that was kind of fun.

In the afternoon, I had an optional errand in Somerville, and I decided to take my motorcycle since it was 52°. I got a little cold, but not bad. There was a lot more traffic than I expected, since I went at 2pm, I expected there really not to be much. Anyway, it took longer than I expected, so the amount of work I got done that day was not very much. But, it was my birthday!

Then, for dinner, I decided that we should have party food. See, for the big birthday bash the previous year, I had purchased a bunch of those frozen hors d'oeuvres, and had not managed to put them out, because there was so much other food. At some point earlier in the year we had party food for dinner, but there was still some left. We still have some of the little hot dogs wrapped in dough, and the first time there is some potluck or party, I will bring them.

And of course, we had cake for dessert. Jocelyn wasn't home to decorate it, but our friend Peg rose to the occasion.

Crossposts: https://nosrednayduj.livejournal.com/339952.html

So there's this Saturn and Jupiter conjunction on solstice. Unfortunately, it's going to rain and snow on solstice, and generally be cloudy, which is going to make us sad about "making a fire from the sun", and also it's going to make the conjunction difficult to see. So, tonight it was clear, and the next couple of nights are predicted partly or mostly cloudy, so we decided to take a look. Turns out, it's close enough now that both of them will fit inside the view of our telescope! Well, it's cold, and also snowy, and in order to actually see the conjunction, we would have to carry the telescope over the snow a ways so it wouldn't be obscured by trees. Thus, we had the brilliant idea that we could leave the telescope indoors! It's not exactly indoors, because it's an unheated porch, but at least there's no snow. There is window glass, but it wasn't terrible.

Unfortunately, I can't get a picture through the eyepiece, so you don't get to see what I saw. Instead you just get to see the setup:

Crossposts: https://nosrednayduj.livejournal.com/334380.html

So I try to "buy local" or at least "buy small", by not getting my stuff from giants like Amazon and Walmart. Unfortunately, the little guys are really a lot worse at providing services.

I bought some long underwear, and the random place I ended up with took like two weeks before I actually received them, and the tracking was terrible. They were using a DHL/post office combination, but they only told me about the post office part so for over a week it said "en route to post office". If they had told me about the DHL part, it would have told me where it was and at least when it was going to get to the post office. I actually ended up going through their support in order to learn about this. So, they should have told me about DHL in the confirmation email. Still, it was a (in these days) ridiculous amount of time before I received my package.

The other fun thing about the long underwear purchase is that the place ended up being primarily an "adult clothing" place, and in the "you might also like" section there were things like bras with cutouts for your nipples. NSFW! Fortunately we're all working at home now!

Separately, I should have paid an additional $2 for shipping on my bicycle odometer, which I bought from some small bike shop. That would have gotten me UPS rather than USPS. The Postal Service is sucking hard. My odometer, according to tracking, has been in an adjacent town for three days. Tracking says "in Transit, Arriving Late". Duh! It also says "It is currently in transit to the next facility." Well, no. It's only 10 miles away, and I'm sure it's not been in transit for three days. A snail would get here sooner. It's sitting in a pile somewhere, just not having managed to get onto the truck for our town. I don't know if there's anything I can do to say "please go get my package off of the pile and send it to me" for the post office.

Crossposts: https://nosrednayduj.livejournal.com/334179.html

Yesterday morning we found a unopened can of "vanilla orange zero-sugar Coke" on our front lawn near the street. Then, on my bicycle ride, about 2 miles away, I saw another one next to the curb. Also unopened. I didn't actually stop and read the can to verify it was the same flavor, but I could tell by the orange strip around the top. Valerie posted about these two finds on a local Facebook group, and two other similar cans have been described in town!

So, WTF? If it was just litter tossed out a car window, you would have expected the cans to be empty, or if somebody wanted to chuck their whole sixpack (I certainly wouldn't want to keep that flavor) you'd think they'd be all in the same place rather than scattered about town miles apart.

Crossposts: https://nosrednayduj.livejournal.com/333817.html

Two years ago I happened to be in a discount store, at a time when my Ugg knockoffs were falling apart, and I picked up a pair of (different) Ugg knockoffs for (drumroll) seven dollars. I figured they'd fall apart in a few weeks or months, but at least I'd have something on my feet for a little while. Two years later, I'm still wearing them, and until recently they didn't show any sign of falling apart. Normal humans would replace them when the seams started unraveling. But, Covid. So, I spent 15 minutes with a needle and thin fishing line repairing them. I think they'll probably last another two years!

Crossposts: https://nosrednayduj.livejournal.com/332001.html

Today, my work said we could all come in and get our stuff which has been sequestered for three months, and also we could borrow equipment from our desks. I borrowed my chair, my docking station, and my monitor (although I recently purchased a new monitor, so I'm not sure if I'm going to use the one I borrowed.) I also brought home all my personal stuff, because who knows what's going to happen, and if I have completely cleaned out my desk, then if they want to reorganize the office space, they can just do it. If they lay me off, or if I quit, you would think that would also make it easier, but presumably I would have to return the borrowed equipment in that case, so I'd have to go there anyway. Hopefully neither of these things will happen; I'm unlikely to quit, because getting another job would be quite the pain, in addition to the fact that I really hate working full time. I've been working nearly fulltime -- 6-7 hours a day, and that's really all I ever had in me. Maybe normal humans also are like that, and it would be considered full time anyway. I really don't know.

Anyway, it required a trip up to Waltham, 45 minutes each way, and I got to listen to the radio. I kind of miss listening to the radio while commuting; I never really wanted to do it for as many hours as I always did each week, but once a week is good. Once a month is too little.

On the way home, I stopped at a friend's house, and sold her a Black Lives Matter sign (prearranged). We still have four left, and I think we're going to just keep them, although it's probably better to get them out there, than to keep one for theft remediation.

While I was away, we had a lightning strike near home, and it fried two things: the Comcast modem, and our home server. So for a couple of hours we camped on the neighbors xfinity, and then Comcast got us a new modem. Meanwhile, Ken was researching the options for replacing the server. We had hoped we would be able to just plug in the disk and reboot, but the guy at microcenter said that would not work. So now our hope is to get linux on it, and get it to read the other disk. This is not trivial, because windows machines really don't want you to run anything besides windows… Anyway, I had another nice drive up to Cambridge, listening to the radio. There was some concern about getting there before they closed, but I had 15 minutes, and was not the last customer checking out.

Crossposts: https://nosrednayduj.livejournal.com/324779.html

I posted on twitter last week about how we had bought a bunch of extra #BlackLivesMatter signs, and offered them for sale on a local face book group, and sold about 15! So, I've been riding my bicycle around town, looking for them, and I found some of ours, but I also found quite a number of other different styles. This one is enormous; I had to stop and take a picture. It occurred to me that it would be cool to take a picture of all the different styles, and make a collage. It also occurred to me that I would probably never actually get around to doing it, so I thought I would at least post this one picture.

I'm like, totally proud of my town. Plus, now we have safety-in-numbers "herd immunity" for ours getting stolen!

Crossposts: https://nosrednayduj.livejournal.com/324546.html

So Boston pride was canceled. So we had a local pride parade, in what seems to be our go-to technique: in cars. We live on a major road, and so all of the car parades end up going past our house. We went down to the road wearing tie dye and waving rainbow flags as the parade drove by. I swapped out my usual bicycle safety flag for a rainbow flag, and had some idea that I would try to follow the parade on my bicycle. However, it took about a minute to get my act together and get on the road, and by then they had driven a ways down the road, and they were going faster than 15, so there was no catching them by me.

So I had my own private pride parade, randomly riding around town, mostly looking for "black lives matters" signs. One person did yell out "happy pride", so they had noticed my flag and my tie dye. Anyway, the point about the "black lives matters" signs is that after we bought 10 more after the latest thefts, and the town was having all these vigils and protests, we offered some up on the local facebook group, and sold them all! So we bought 10 more, and sold five of those so far. (We're taking a small loss, to make it an even $10.) Anyway, I wanted to see some of our signs. I saw one that I already knew about, and another "in the wild". Somewhere there are 13 more…

Pictures from the parade:

I went to a vigil.

https://twitter.com/nosrednayduj/status/1267234961238765568
https://twitter.com/nosrednayduj/status/1267236427005407233

Valerie had the idea we should "take a knee". We were slightly surprised nobody else followed our example, however, we brought padding for our knees and the sidewalk was hard, so if people hadn't thought ahead, I can see why they wouldn't have followed.

Oh, and our BLM sign was stolen again a couple days ago. I expect it'll be stolen again very soon. Sadly, surveillance camera did not get the license plate. The sign in the pictures on twitter is our backup, but probably we should buy more backup signs.

Crossposts: https://nosrednayduj.livejournal.com/323718.html

So I went to the site recommended by the recent dw_news. I found an interesting fact: It claimed one of my email addresses had been compromised. However, the password I've used at that account for years, it claimed had never been seen in any breach. So, whatever data they have, it isn't connected. Maybe it's some site where my username for the site is that email address. Anyway, I'm not really worried. I have very little to hide. I suspect that if someone tried to steal my 401k or something I'd be able to get it back, and they're welcome to my purchase histories.

Crossposts: https://nosrednayduj.livejournal.com/322825.html

Probably they know so probably I won't make a bug report.

Many people came, though not nearly as many as our summer party. One person expressed interest in boating, but since he was not an accomplished boater and wouldn't have been safe alone, it didn't happen. Not as much board gaming as other random activities, but I did get to play several games, some of which were new to me.

I had made the aforementioned ton of food, and many people also brought food, and so now we still have a ton of frozen hors d'oeuvres because I never got them out. We also still have a lot of chips and stuff because people brought chips and cheese and crackers. Half my cheese came out because there were two different cheddars out, and someone mentioned "which is sharper" and so I had to get mine out so we could have a three-way taste-off. And some of my chips came out because I seeded the party with two bowls of chips. Probably more could have been eaten if I'd been paying more attention to refilling bowls. But there was a ton of other food besides chips for people.

I really like huge masses of people singing, especially when some of them can really sing. "Happy Birthday" was beautiful with 30 voices! Way better than just a few people singing, half of whom are off key.

The birthday cake came out a little too late -- because I'd eaten too much for dinner and needed to digest! So some people had to leave before cake. Thus, we have lots leftover. I'll probably bring some leftover desserts to work tomorrow, and the leftover chili can be frozen.

Tomorrow it's going to be my actual birthday so we'll go out to dinner at one of those japanese grill-at-table restaurants, just a few of us. And the temperature will ALSO be 60, so maybe I'll ride my motorcycle to work!

Crossposts: https://nosrednayduj.livejournal.com/317720.html

I love ASCII art.

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   `.'      `.'      `.'      `.'      `.'      `.'      `.'      `.'hjw

Crossposts: https://nosrednayduj.livejournal.com/316963.html

I took Valerie to a local pedicure place, because she'd never had one, and I thought she'd like it. (She did, but probably not enough to go on her own in the future.) Turned out, we went on Chinese New Year, and they were having a celebration. At the end, after I paid, I was handed two little red envelopes. Opening them at home, they turned out to contain these:

Now the question is, should I unfold and spend it?

Crossposts: https://nosrednayduj.livejournal.com/316273.html

I just got an error from the crossposter to LJ.

Crosspost to nosrednayduj@LiveJournal failed.

Failed to crosspost entry to nosrednayduj@LiveJournal: Client error: 
Your IP address is temporarily banned for exceeding the login failure rate.

This never happened before, and I haven't changed my LJ password in aeons. I just verified it by logging in to LJ, and then typed it in to the crosspost settings. So, "this is a test message" to see if it works...

I didn't go to the first sendoff, but Valerie did. About 100 kids from the high school walked up to the train station, were met by people from the UU church for a mini-rally at the center of town, and then took the 9:03 train in to town. My theory was that the rally didn't really start until 11, and so there was no point in going that early, so I took a bike ride around town first, and then got my stuff together and took a shorter bike ride to the train at 10:30. (No way was I taking a car, even an electric car, to the climate strike!)

I tweeted this, but for those who don't follow me there:
Fave sign: "let us pause for a moment of science."
Also: "Losing Nemo. "
And: sad polar bear saying, "all my friends are dead."

Crossposts: https://nosrednayduj.livejournal.com/309900.html

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Entries tagged with random

today's adventure

package misplacement

We saw the comet

Tribute

I had a birthday

Conjunction!

Delivery fails

Weirdest marketing campaign ever?

Failing to stimulate the economy

Two road trips in one day

BLM signs galore

Local Pride

All the stuff going on around us.

have I been pwned?

bummer, x-posting to LJ is scrod again

I had a party!

I got a valentine's card from Ken

funny money

Well, this is annoying

Climate strike