For Lo, I Am One with Pollen...
What a gorgeous weekend it turned out to be. (The weather critters had predicted mostly cloudy and in the 50s today. Nuh uh...)
I rode yesterday, and today I rode the Washington Secondary path. (As an aside, I don't get why it's called Washington Secondary. It's not in Washington County, nor are there are any towns or villages with that name in the state, much less along the path.) I dressed appropriately for both rides, so there were no temperature comfort issues. Yesterday it was in the seventies. Break out the t-shirts.
The good weather seems to have prompted an amazing amount of pollen production amongst the local flora. My nasal allergies seem to have ebbed somewhat over the years, but I could feel it today. What's really killing me now, though, are my eyes. Really itchy and watery. I had a Singulair this morning, but I needed to pop a chlortab when I got home from the ride. Feh.
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I missed a good chunk of the good weather yesterday as I was at work rebuilding our mail server. I'd done most of the work Friday night, so the remaining stuff should've only taken about an hour, but things got messed up thanks to Firefox failing to realize that the server's web interface pages were not exactly the same as the pages it had in the cache, and me failing to realize that I was working with cached pages. Bozhe moi!
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This morning I spent way too much quality time with my table saw. I'd been noticing for a while now that when I ripped a piece of wood on the saw I'd get burn marks on the edge of the wood on the rip fence side of the blade. The marks are from the friction of the spinning blade scorching the wood slightly as it goes past. Now, the teeth of the blade are a just a hair thicker than the body of the blade to prevent the wood from touching the rest of the blade after it's cut. But if the fence and the blade aren't perfectly parallel, the fence can push the wood up against the blade, and friction takes over. It doesn't take much. When I checked, it looked like the rear of the blade was somewhere between 1/32" to 1/64" closer to the fence than the front. Just enough.
Fixing it turned out to be a major undertaking. There were six trunnion bolts to be loosened, three of which were ridiculously inaccessible, plus two set screws to be adjusted. I was having a heck of a time of it because the blade refused to stay in the position where I'd put it. Then I took a closer look at the manual. Turns out that when you're assembling the thing in the first place, the adjustment for parallelism occurs BEFORE you mount the wicked heavy motor on the saw trunnion. Once I removed the motor, things got a little easier. Still, it took me a couple hours of fiddling to get it right. Seems to be fine now. Yay.
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I was going to use the saw later in the day to start my next project. The first step in said project is to cut up a 4' x 8' sheet of ¾" plywood, an incredibly awkward and heavy piece of lumber. After I got back from my ride I started maneuvering one of those sheets around and managed to strain an oblique. I did get it up into position to do the initial cut, but left it there for another day. I will have my revenge, though.
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I have seedlings! In my biodome! Even some of the three year-old seeds sprouted. Now if I can just avoid killing 'em...
I rode yesterday, and today I rode the Washington Secondary path. (As an aside, I don't get why it's called Washington Secondary. It's not in Washington County, nor are there are any towns or villages with that name in the state, much less along the path.) I dressed appropriately for both rides, so there were no temperature comfort issues. Yesterday it was in the seventies. Break out the t-shirts.
The good weather seems to have prompted an amazing amount of pollen production amongst the local flora. My nasal allergies seem to have ebbed somewhat over the years, but I could feel it today. What's really killing me now, though, are my eyes. Really itchy and watery. I had a Singulair this morning, but I needed to pop a chlortab when I got home from the ride. Feh.
---
I missed a good chunk of the good weather yesterday as I was at work rebuilding our mail server. I'd done most of the work Friday night, so the remaining stuff should've only taken about an hour, but things got messed up thanks to Firefox failing to realize that the server's web interface pages were not exactly the same as the pages it had in the cache, and me failing to realize that I was working with cached pages. Bozhe moi!
---
This morning I spent way too much quality time with my table saw. I'd been noticing for a while now that when I ripped a piece of wood on the saw I'd get burn marks on the edge of the wood on the rip fence side of the blade. The marks are from the friction of the spinning blade scorching the wood slightly as it goes past. Now, the teeth of the blade are a just a hair thicker than the body of the blade to prevent the wood from touching the rest of the blade after it's cut. But if the fence and the blade aren't perfectly parallel, the fence can push the wood up against the blade, and friction takes over. It doesn't take much. When I checked, it looked like the rear of the blade was somewhere between 1/32" to 1/64" closer to the fence than the front. Just enough.
Fixing it turned out to be a major undertaking. There were six trunnion bolts to be loosened, three of which were ridiculously inaccessible, plus two set screws to be adjusted. I was having a heck of a time of it because the blade refused to stay in the position where I'd put it. Then I took a closer look at the manual. Turns out that when you're assembling the thing in the first place, the adjustment for parallelism occurs BEFORE you mount the wicked heavy motor on the saw trunnion. Once I removed the motor, things got a little easier. Still, it took me a couple hours of fiddling to get it right. Seems to be fine now. Yay.
---
I was going to use the saw later in the day to start my next project. The first step in said project is to cut up a 4' x 8' sheet of ¾" plywood, an incredibly awkward and heavy piece of lumber. After I got back from my ride I started maneuvering one of those sheets around and managed to strain an oblique. I did get it up into position to do the initial cut, but left it there for another day. I will have my revenge, though.
---
I have seedlings! In my biodome! Even some of the three year-old seeds sprouted. Now if I can just avoid killing 'em...