Trying to think straight through the fog

My new meds are starting to kick in, I didn’t have any neuropathy kicks or twitches last night and my tinnitus is getting quieter. But my sleeping is seriously borked because of the meds. I overslept and missed taking my laptop to get the bloatware removed because this med just knocks me out. Normally when I’m not getting sleep I’m not thinking too good, but for some reason when I get my coffee on this med I’m rarin’ to go, even though I’m still walking like an extra in a zombie movie. It’s the craziest thing, I’m thinking clear as a bell, but my legs and feet and fingers are acting like they never got out of the bed. I have been spending almost as much time fixing typos as writing because the fingers are only about 90% accurate in hitting the keys. And if you’re thinking “well that’s not too bad” just remember it takes a minimum of 3 keystrokes to fix a typo I catch immediately, and I’m averaging one mistake in 10 keystrokes. So, average of every 7 letters I have to fix something.

On a similar but not entirely related note, I love the verb “bork” when used in it’s non-sexual meaning of seriously SNAFUed. This is one of the few contributions to the English language from a SCOTUS confirmation that has survived longer than a couple of years.

On a brighter note, the cooling fans are going to fit the fan shroud nicely. One will fit in the upper right side next to the inlet for maximum heat transfer from the water coming from the engine, and the other will fit on the lower left to get as much as physics will allow from the second pass across the radiator. The idea here is to keep the coolant going into the engine as cool as possible to keep the combustion chambers cool for either best power or best fuel economy depending on which mode the engine is in. Don’t you just love thermodynamics working for you for once? And in case you don’t understand how this works, the formula for heat transfer from a radiator has the fluid temperature in the top half of the equation, meaning the hotter it is the more heat it transfers to the airflow. Which means most of the heat comes from the first pass across the double pass radiator, and by careful fan placement I can maximize that transfer for the lowest possible outlet temperature.

Going off on a tangent, current writing jam is “Dear Mr. Fantasy” by Traffic. There is an interesting dynamic that is peculiar to depressed people in the lyrics, how we use comedy to hide our depression. “You are the one that can make us all laugh, but doing it you break down in tears.” This was me for decades, “Laugh, clown, laugh!” while hiding my depression with comedy. “I love how your poetry makes me laugh,” for years.

Anywho, while I’m waiting on the parts to arrive I’m figuring out how they will be installed in the car, because what else can I do except write about it?

So, how was your day?

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Things are “normal”

And you know when I put a word in quotes I don’t mean it in the accepted dictionary form. In this case “Normal” means “at right angles to reality”.

First the good news. I filled the prescription and so far the gabapentin works against the leg jerking from the neuropathy. I haven’t been taking it long enough to affect the tinnitus, so the jury is still out on that. The negative news on the gabapentin is it took several hours to get my brain to go into sleep mode.

I’m constantly thinking about something all the time, last night was a battery-powered A-Mod SCCA autocross car using a 16 gauge steel monocoque as proof of concept for a carbon fiber tub car. I checked the weight of a high-performance motor that I’m familiar with its dimensions, about 160 pounds, checked the weight per square foot of 16 gauge steel, a smidge over 2.5 pounds per square foot and estimated the surface area of the monocoque. Then I did a quick SWAG about the weight of the rest of the running gear besides the motor including the wheels and tires and myself in safety gear, and subtracted that from the minimum weight of 900 pounds with driver and came up with a battery and BMS weight of 160 pounds to bring the car right to the minimum weight.

Speaking of my weight I weighed in at 192.5 with everything including my phone and supplemental battery pack that weighs more than my phone and several dollars in change in my bag Friday at the doctor that I have to pay for, not at the lab rat keeper. That’s the one that is more than a mile from the nearest bus stop and takes forever to get home from unless I take a Lyft. So that’s real close to the 188 I measured when I was naked on my bathroom scale before breakfast last week.

In other news I’m taking this laptop in to remove the bloatware that was installed at the factory but quit functioning except for constant annoying pop-ups that get in the way of doing things several times a day. My training in removing unwanted software was for Win 98se and Win ME when Win XP came out, and this laptop runs Win10. So I need someone familiar with 10 to know how to remove unwanted software. The methods I know are no longer applicable. I don’t even know how to find them on Win 10.

And I really need to get off this computer and get in bed, because I have to get up in the morning to get my computer fixed.