Getting to the good news from the Kinky D&D game, my Warlock8 has been revived and his head put on the right way so he can again aid the party in fighting the whatevers we have to fight now. I think we have about 3 overlapping quests we are stuck with counting the one we have to fulfill to “pay” for reviving the dead party members. We now have to rescue a effrit princess from a half-fiend, half green dragon, the very same dragon we were supposed to “take care of” to get rid of the monsters that had been harassing the trade routes in and out of the city we had been based in before this round of adventures started. So we have come full circle…
In other news I think I may have found a massage provider I can afford, $25 for a 50 minute massage. The bad part is these are student intern massages so I won’t have any way of selecting a therapist I know works well with my injuries. But if I come every week, I can get the people assigning students to let me work with students specializing in treating people like me. So eventually it will work out and I’ll be able to get what I need at least some of the time.
Continuing the health news, you may remember that I ran my second toe on my right foot over with the dolly while moving furniture Friday night. No broken bones, but the toe has been sore and swollen and has taken a lot of abuse because it sticks out further than the big toe. The same toe on the left foot is also swollen because it got jammed against the inside of my shoe as you can see in this picture.
You can also see the bruised nailbeds from delaying the trip to the nail spa until I injured my toes on the inside of my shoes. I know, I defer maintenance until things get too bad to do otherwise, it is a failing of mine.
On other things I really need and want to finish building the extended stem for Francis/es, but I have worn out all my cutting tools on the CroMo steel I purchased for the task. Well technically I still have a fresh sidemill cutting tool, but as I don’t have the kind of PPE I need to use it given the kind of shavings it throws off, I’m gonna put that one on the back shelf for now. I really don’t want to spend another couple of days using forceps to grab and pull tiny needles out of my skin when they work their way to where I can grab them. The process is as irritating as the little slivers of metal in my skin. The deal now is I need to make the top (outside) edge of the cutout about 3mm deeper in the raw stock, and I need to relieve a lot of material from inside the raw stock so the donor stem fits flush with the edge of the cutout and the top of the donor stem fits flush with the top of the raw stock of the extension.
That’s the hole.
And that’s the Hole Problem. You can see where the top of the donor stem extends past the raw stock of the extension by more than a bit, meaning the hole has to be made larger/longer. You may have also noticed that I went through the side of the donor stem trying to make it fit inside the raw stock. That can be filled or covered when I braze the donor stem into the extension and then filed or ground smooth for painting. NBD. The combination of welded donor stem brazed into the raw stock will be more than strong enough for the forces applied even when standing on the pedals even with the gaps in the donor stem. The donor stem survived the wreck that killed me, it should survive a few trips to the grocery store in its new form. The bottom of the extension fits flush against the top of Francis/es’ steer tube so when the binder bolt is tightened up there is very little stress applied to the bottom of the extension. I’m still looking for the one odd part I need to complete the binder bolt, the “coupling nut” that connects the bolt that fits the top of the donor stem to the hunk of allthread that spans the added space in the extension.
It doesn’t have to be pretty, it just has to work in darkness inside the extension and hold the two threaded pieces together.
So when I go deposit the check to pay for the massages, since I budgeted $60/week and I only need to pay $25, I have a little bit of money to pay for things like coupling nuts and abrasive tools for the Dremel. And I get to do that and the Huge Blog Post all in the same day. 😛
It’s time to go to evening services, and I think I have blathered on enough for one day.
PSA, Opus the Unkillable Badass Poet
Witch on a Bicycle 