USA Always Stamp

I got photoshop in lieu of a scanner, to make my greyed out skewed photos of my art look like my art. I am kind of afraid that if I make anything from scratch it will look like people's deviant art magic the gathering dragon bff playing cards. I feel like I have paid my dues by making really terrible paintings and drawings for years and years, and I don't want to face . But I kind of think no one has fixed the USA/Forever Snape stamp into a USA/Always stamp, so I tried, and I think it worked.

Between the time my car broke down and the time I got it fixed, I got 4 biweekly paychecks, and they won't cover the cost of the repair.

At work I am supposed to be able to tell with  glance whether all the engine fluids in a truck are leaking. Since I started in August, the gritty innards of trucks and cars are starting to resolve into parts I can name, but after I rolled into work with a shuddering, jolting car that couldn't leave under its own power I asked for a refresher. Well, first I called a tow truck and started biking 10 miles to work in winter, and then after I stopped feeling so sorry for myself (or rather, after I became accustomed to feeling extremely sorry for myself), I asked for a refresher. Everyone was nice about it and it turns out that I couldn't've checked the transmission fluid anyway because on a standard transmission there is no dipstick and you have to get underneath the car. As far as I can tell, only $400 of the $2500 bill could have been avoided by taking the car in as soon as I noticed anything wrong, since I imagine the clutch wouldn't have failed if I didn't let the transmission run dry.

I told myself a LOT of mantras when I was waking up in my unheated yurt at 4:00am in December to leave by 4:45 for a 6:30 shift, but they got a lot less positive after the first three weeks. These last two weeks have been more on the grueling side, and the mantra has been "28 degrees is not lethal, so I am fine." Yesterday in particular, I got a flat tire in the morning (my fourth since I started commuting by bike) and had to walk 3/4 of a mile to a gas station, where I found that the air compressor was out of service. Luckily the second gas station on my route was just another quarter mile or so.

Before I was forced by circumstances to get into shape, I would complain about the bike and everyone would say, "That's because you have a horrible bike. If you had a decent bike you wouldn't believe how much better it is." Because I hate the bike, it was easy for me to agree that it is horrible, but actually the quality of the bike is not the reason it is below freezing every morning, or the reason I can't see far enough with the bike light to ride fast after dark, or the reason I have to stuff groceries into my pockets because they are too bulky for my backpack. It's also only kind of the reason riding in the rain leaves me a grubby mess, since some nice bikes have fenders but some don't and would just kick up more water by being faster.

The biking has really been good for my mood, and I got to know my new town a lot more by using side streets instead of the freeway.

Capitol One Security Questions

I don't know the answers to these questions. I couldn't log into my Capitol One account today, so I called their tech support.
"What can I help you with today?"
"I locked myself out of my account by not knowing the name of the hospital where I was born."
"I'm sure it's not a question of not knowing the name, but we're moving from a three question system to a five question system, so it will want you to set new questions."

And he unlocked my account and told me to set five security questions. And I am really trying. But my best friend in high school had a hyphenated last name and only went by one of the names. Just yesterday I was looking at my father's mother's new address label and wondering what the "P" stands for. I don't know how to spell any of my teacher's names before 3rd grade. Luckily, my grandfathers had the same profession. But that still leaves four more security questions to set. I will have to remember (read: won't remember) to not get confused by the present tense, when I go to log into this account in six months, and type "retiree."

Gutenbergs

I've got a birthday trip to Boston coming up. I am going to do a lot of sightseeing! I'm not one for sights, really, I just like to soak up one thing all day and then sleep. This time, though, I've had a year (since Casey moved to Boston) to make a wishlist and there are a lot of things on it! There's an exhibit of fore-edge painting at the public library, which also has a hidden letterbox. There is a Doctor Who letterboxing series with 12 boxes! There is a glass globe of the world of the 1930s. And I was thinking if it was convenient I could check out whatever Gutenberg Bibles are around. But, Casey reports that the public just plain can't look at Harvard's copy. This made me feel really justified in my boycott of Netflixing movies set at Harvard, but it also annoyed me. I told Casey that this interferes with my goal of seeing all of the Gutenberg Bibles. It surprised me to hear myself say that because I actually never set that goal. It just occurred after I kept seeing them accidentally, at the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library main branch. (I am really, really comfortable in libraries and always seek them out.)

The same thing happened to me with the license plate game (you try to see one from each of the 50 states). I was driving in Santa Cruz and I saw a license plate from Hawaii and I thought well, I guess I am playing the license plate game now. Anyway I don't care to see all of the Gutenberg Bibles so I am striking that as a life goal. Maybe I will just see the one in Tokyo and the one at the Hogwarts library. Because I will be there anyway.

Specimen Keyboard

My new specimen keyboard is all-consuming. Each key is going to have a specimen corresponding to the output letter. It was such a simple and compelling idea (similar to a periodic table composed of element specimens) but it is overtaxing my measuring and planning skills so I've had to redo loads of things.

 I measured my new keyboard and made a box that size. But that is not how containing works. So I took it out of its housing and used the grinder to make it smaller. Each key had a little silicone cup underneath it for a spring, and those all fell out, but I put them back. But when I was building a brace to hold all the cups in without the underside of the keyboard I got glue on the plastic sheets with circuits printed on them and it wouldn't scrape off and then the whole thing was broken. So I got a new keyboard and made a new wooden box.

Right now I am test fitting the keys. The test fitting stage is very long. I planned for the top to be removable for repairs, and so each dowel post is fastened to the keypad with a pinch of swimmer's earplug, but it is not holding very well so I think I will glue them down.

Here is how it handles so far:

wjee//////////////////////////////. taxtilke llllllleyboaes''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''

Dala Horse Bed

I made a piece of furniture from scratch! I just went to home depot and got five 3x1x6es and some plywood pieces and sawed them all apart and screwed them together. When I took up floor sleeping I wanted to do it like in my special friend Japan, but really Americans cannot handle having bedding on the floor. I was looking on pinterest for how other people handle floor beds and I found that Montessori thought indicates floor beds for very young children (since they can crawl in and out, it mitigates their anxiety about bed) but American moms can't face putting their kid's mattress actually on the floor without comment, so there are headboard decals available. This shows that the child is well loved and well tended, but also shows the aforementioned anxiety.

I myself gave up mattresses in principle in 2005 when I was pushing a California King mattress up the front steps of my parents' victorian (also couches), and in practice when I finished college and got rid of my secretly mildewing mattress. I handled my transition to floor sleeping by doing my lying-on-the-floor-breathing-into-the-pain-in-my-back exercise before I went to sleep, and then doing it as I fell asleep. Now I am totally acclimated, but I do still feel the anxiety that Montessori moms display- the floor is not a sleeping surface! A functional adult does not floor sleep! I just ignored these feelings until an actual impetus arrived for building this little platform in the form of the return of fall, which made my nearly weatherproof yurt a really terrible floor sleeping location.

As soon as I realized my woodworking skills were poor enough that there was no way for me to do anything imaginative with the form, I got excited about painting it like a dala horse, which it somewhat resembled due to stockiness and what I thought would be four leggedness (see: woodworking skills). I had a plan involving gesso and diluting one ounce of cadmium red paint in two cups of varnish, but then in a super-exciting coincidence, Dawn had a GALLON of cadmium red. (If you aren't familiar with artists' paints, this is like going to someone's house and finding that the peanut butter they have is the half-crunchy roasted kind you prefer. Oh also a bathtubful, but that's not the part I was analogizing.)

As for the blue and white detailing, I spent a little bit of time on youtube despairing of my kurbits (Swedish folk painting) skills, but honestly I think this came out fine.

U Haul Training Course

At U Haul new employees have to do an online training course. My manager said I could do it on the clock if I don't have a computer at home, but most people do it at home and that's the best way to do it. That is exploiting, but because I was almost certain I was going to get to drive a truck, I said I would be happy to. I was tearing up at the thought and my heart was full. So I was indifferent to the particulars. But then the training course took 8 hours.

The exam question at the top of this post is something I was really asked. I got it wrong.