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Thursday, August 25, 2011

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

met the orthopedic surgeon today

next meeting TBD, and it will be in an OR at United Hospital.  so we are going to have to kick ass and take names this weekend in the basement.  plan is to demo, rewall, insulate, and drywall the basement bedroom, so Shawn won't be discommoded more than a handful of days.  it's doable..  minor wiring to be done.  after that, I really need to make the bathroom vanity for the basement.  need some fresh glue and 1x2 red oak for the face frame.

that should probably take me to the surgery date, whenever it will be.  I'm guessing about 2 weeks out, time to line things up and time to get my pre-op physical and stop the anticoagulants.

took tonight off.  sawed off an open fitting on the sump pump drain line that looked to be 1-1/2 inch, so I could fix a break.  hey, what you know, turns out the outside pipe is 2 inch.  so get that at the yard as well.

got another parts cabinet in the new style yesterday, and started reconfiguring the parts shelves tonight.  geez, I wish I could still get the Akro-Mils steel framed 20- cabinets of the 70s and 80s.

Monday, August 22, 2011

the old garage door tried to kill me!

ahh, but that's been tried before, 5 times at least, and failed.  booyah!

actually, what happened was I was trying to get a locknut off a track of the old one, and it snapped the drill around hard, the torque whacking my left hand square on the back with the battery.  after which, grip lost, the drill started tumbling down.  managed to direct it onto some sacks of lawn fertilizer, saving the $180 drill.  hand is still quite swollen two days later, but it's working.  yesterday it was a red as Kremlin Square on May Day used to be.

the new door is up, the new opener is installed, and we have moved the crap back into the garage.  had to haul 35 sheets of drywall into the back entry.  good place for it.  glad it's out of the garage.

tonight we hit a 48 hour sale at OfficeMax, and Cheryl finally has a laptop.  acer core processor 2 GHz, wide screen, HDMI out and all the media wonders of WinSlows 7.  running recovery backup generator right now, before DeCrapifying the computer.  and that's probably going to be it for tonight.

update:  first of 3 recovery disks failed verify.  hope this doesn't need DVD +, as a Mac house, all we have are DVD -.

still going to see the orthopedic surgeon Wednesday for my knee, although I can take a flight of stairs OK today.

Thursday, August 18, 2011

diagnosis: crud, holes, and a funny growth

in a nutshell, words of one syllable, the knee has to go to the mechanic.  it's broke.  so there.

got the MRIs to give to the orthopedist next Wednesday, and could not resist a peek.  mind you, I am not a trained radiologist, although I can find 8-3-0 in bad weather.  what I get out of them... I see horsies, duckies, bunnies... and the Hounds of Hell, fangs dripping, leaping off the page.

methinks I could use some other medical help... .

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

our little rain forest

forgot to mention... neighbors sump pump kicked off last night for the first time in 7 years.  ours hasn't really stopped since we got 3.7 inches of rain in under 4 hours last night.

been a wet year, and it started the day after I fixed all the sources of infiltration into the basement from the east side of the house.

creepy right knee: this won't hurt a bit. nurse, the walletectomy kit.

missed the phone call from the doctor tonight as I was walking to the car... but got the gist of it on MyChart.  the words "probably" "orthopedist" and "arthroscopy" were there in that order.

so got to call him tomorrow before he takes off for a couple weeks.

Monday, August 15, 2011

creepy blown knee and Superman's Noisy Magnet

MRI today on the knee, after a really sleepless night.  40 minutes listening to the whacking and whining, and between adjustments to the MRI, the vacuum pump wheezing and clanking.  an occasional bubbling sound, probably of boiling bubbles in the cooling oil.  to me, the thing is basically a calutron magnet with an X-ray in the middle, with really pretty plastic skins on it.  it was an Open MRI unit, so I wasn't jammed in a plastic drainpipe with that gabble of funny noises around me.

not only was the knee bothering me overnight, but I'd been back and forth from garage to basement cutting lumber, and up and down a little 2-step ladder framing a door we all forgot about.  that meant my feet kept trying to cramp up all night.

-0-

a little bit of a liars' contest on the Lileks blog while he's away for a week, and it veered into the direction of what would YOU, a time traveller, go back and "fix."  comments started coming down of the variety of "went back to kill the Kaiser, and only crippled his arm" and "went back to kill the Fuhrer, but some guy named Hitler got the job."

so I'm going for honorable mention, at least, with "so, you mean my little "vacation" to bring freedom and democracy to the world, giving a copy of the Declaration of Independence to some guy called Lucifer, was a bust?  bummer."

-0-

TV night, and then we rest from the sleepless night.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

creepy blown knee

well, I'm not leaving a trail of metal shavings, springs, and wires behind me... but my right knee swelled and seized up again for the second time since snow melt this year.  doctor has me scheduled for an MRI next Monday.

meantime, I'm getting value from the crutches I got the first time, and didn't need after the second night.

-0-

we're making good progress on the HW-100 rebuild... don't have a power supply up yet, and had to order some 20 gauge wire to make the umbilical cable from, but found a screaming shitload of dead and out of tolerance resistors, replaced same.  in a couple cases, had to massively uprate or do a parallel combo to meet the spec.  ordered, and binned today, those common values and ratings that I didn't have.  replacement electrolytics are in.  creepy ugly IEC/Elmenco/Mullard tubes, mostly 6EA8s, are replaced with NOS from eBaying.  rest of the tubes are good.  have the controls cleaned up.

so we're getting fairly close to the smoke test... how much, and what color.  checked the signal monitor scope I got a couple years ago, and that has all sorts of ugly inside, have replacement caps on the way for that.  and a couple of next-to-impossible to get compactron tubes.

probably have sanding on the basement to do this weekend, and we have water in old carpet and sheetrock we need to replace in the basement from overflow of the a/c coil's drain pan.  weasels installed that with a iron elbow next to the pan which is probably not going to come off, so poking the drain clean might be intriguing.

never a dull day at Chez Swschrad.  dull folks, perhaps, but never a dull day.

Friday, August 5, 2011

didn't read correctly... it's a HW-100

but the dial is in good shape.  lot of resistors bad on the audio board, replacing as I go.  it's all here.

Tuesday, August 2, 2011