I feel guilty about not posting

But I just don’t have anything new to say. Nothing has really changed, I’m still crippled, Mrs. the Poet is still pushing her walker around, trees are still having sex and I’m still in the splash radius of it causing my allergies to flare up, and all the other things that are normally not right.

The one thing new is that the elder daughter is visiting from Scotland now that Trump is out and the pandemic restrictions on travel have been lifted. She works for the NHS in Scotland so she’s totally up to date on all the boosters because it’s required by her employer. And of course free because she lives in a civilized country. She hasn’t been back since 2016 because of Trump &co. screwing up the country. But Biden is marginally acceptable so she came back to see us and Alex specifically. She’s very fond of her little (or not so little as he is now) nephew. She brought cookies (or as they are called there “biscuits”) and candies from Scotland to share with us. They are vegan, of course.

But other than that I don’t have anything new to relate. It’s just the same thing over and over and over. Just a little worse than it used to be.

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Allergies are kicking everyone’s butts here

I’m up way early because I ended up going to bed at 1930 and waking up about 0200 ±. Mrs. the Poet is also having an allergy attack that made her face swell until she couldn’t see past her swollen cheeks and it was painful to her eyes. That’s why I was so off on going to bed, I had to stay up to get her to the doctor, then I took a nap from 1200 to about 1600 to go grocery shopping, then fell asleep during the Cup race last night. I managed to last until the end of the first stage, but was too zonked to last any longer so I went to bed early, or late depending on your time orientation. My normal “day” I get to bed about 0600 and get up about 1200-1400 depending on if I have anything to do that day that requires getting up before noon.

And I was looking at the dyno charts for the various engines that can be built from that 4.2″ bore LS block and I think the best one for the Sprint-T is the 4.2″ bore with the 4″ stroke. Compared with the 3.26″ stroke engine with the same cam the difference in torque below 5000 RPM where the Sprint-T will spend most of a lap around an autocross course is enormous. Which proves the adage “There’s no replacement for displacement”. And with a good flowing head I can spin up past 6500 RPM without losing power. So when I’m bucks up I’m making the 443 cubic inch LS with the LS7 heads that maybe are ported to breathe at 7K RPM.

In a few hours we play Shadowrun again if the GM has replenished his supply of medications that allow him to function, but we won’t know until time to play.

And speaking of “functioning” I need to take another nap.

Brief but seriously painful allergy (or something) attack

First of all because of a sliding sleep schedule I was basically out of it except to roll over from 0930 to 1830, then it was too painful to move until 2200, but I got up and got some coffee to drink and took my meds. Then about 0100 I started to feel like eating the plate of dinner Mrs. the Poet prepared. That’s after I consumed about half of the volume of my coffee cup (my cup holds about 800 ml). I’m still getting some joint pain, but greatly reduced from what I was experiencing when I woke up. What was also a problem is I had a case of allergy eyes obstructing my vision, for the first hour or so after I woke up. That has also reduced significantly.

I have been reading an author new to me, and because it’s a female name writing porn (yes, I read text porn, so sue me) I have come to the conclusion the author is a man (or penis owning person). The reason I mention this is because every encounter is from the penis-owning character’s point of view, even if that person wasn’t born with a penis. And I started thinking about how I would write those scenes from the point of view of the other characters who don’t have penises, and I don’t have a clue about how to do that, because I lack the experiences needed to write from that point of view on several levels. All the heterosexual porn I read is written by men, and most of the lesbian porn I read is also probably written by men, for men. It just has the feel of how males see lesbians, including the conquering of one partner by the more dominant one. The porn I know was written by a female author because she gave it to me with her name on it had less conquering and more cooperation. It was very hot, but different, because the women were more into making each other feel good, and also because it described the physicality of sex very differently from people who don’t experience penetration as a normal part of their sexuality. But still this brought home how bad I am at putting myself in another person’s shoes, figuratively.

Also I finally got some chips to let me experience a brand of guacamole that was not familiar to me. We had a coupon for Wholly Guacamole brand and we also bought a brand of chip that we see locally that we didn’t see in either NY or TN, Calidad. I have been scarfing down the chips for years, but Wholly Guacamole was new to me. I don’t buy guac all that often and mostly I get the deli guac from my local grocery, which isn’t bad. I mean it’s nothing special but it isn’t bad. Now I had some guac years ago that was awful, but that was more than 45 years ago in Logan UT. Wholly Guacamole was pretty good. I’m not sure it’s enough better than the deli guac to justify the price difference, but it is better.

And veering on another tangent, I watched a video from Engine Masters that basically proved that for an LS engine at low loads it doesn’t matter what you put in the tank as long as it is gasoline. The combustion chamber in LS heads is highly octane tolerant, you can drive around on an optimized tune for 87 regular and it works The Same, it falls into the range of run-to-run variation on the dyno used as 91, 110, 116, so long as you get the tune right. But if you need that last little bit of power E85 is where you go for the LS engine, which validates my decision to get to and from the races on 87 and race on E85.

And, that’s about all I have to say as I can feel the pollen levels starting to rise now that the sun is up and things are getting uncomfortable again.

Allergies and PTSD kept me from having the energy to write

Short post to explain the sudden lack of posts. The headline pretty much explains everything, but for the record trees and grass have been been having an orgy and my head is caught in the cross-fire. I can breathe, but at the cost of not having energy to do much else beyond that. Part of that is allergies, part of that is the deep funk I fell into after Chauvin was convicted of the murder we all watched repeatedly on TV and social media most of last year after every protest against a cop killing a BIPOC which seemed like every other day. I mean nonchalantly kneeling on the neck of a Black man with his hands in his pockets like this was a normal thing for him to be doing, murdering a Black man in the street with dozens of people filming it and recording the sounds of it as Floyd’s life left his body.

I get that he is going to prison and unless he spends the rest of his life in solitary the rest of his life will be short and violent. But this still does not feel like a victory. The closest thing I can compare it to was that one hill in Vietnam we “won” like 3 times, only to abandon it and the VC were back on it firing on our troops in a couple of weeks at most. To “win” this one we have to eliminate White Supremacists from all branches and forms of LEO and make ever being a part of any racist organization disqualifying for having a firearm and from working for law enforcement. We not only have to “take the hill” of each individual LEO who kills a BIPOC, we have to “win the war” against White Supremacy. And that looks like a very long and costly battle.

I have had PTSD longer than PTSD existed as a diagnosis, and for most of my life it has been untreated, even after I was diagnosed. It is now known that untreated PTSD results in depression that is extremely hard to treat, because after a while depression becomes less like a mental problem and more like a personality trait. It burrows down into your soul, and takes up permanent residence there. And while I can live with it like this since I don’t seem to have the option of suicide, I would prefer to be actually happy sometimes, instead of just “almost not depressed” which is what passes for “happiness” for me. And to understand what depression as a personality trait looks like, I present Eeyore. Eeyore is so depressed suicide is too much of a bother because it will put others out cleaning up the mess. I passed that milestone decades ago. And the recent circus about the White Supremacist who murdered a man with his hands in his pockets did my depression no favors. I’m still not in any way suicidal because I don’t want to make anyone have to clean up the mess. And I still haven’t forgotten what may have been the hallucination of getting put inside a body bag, so suicide is right out.

Still feels like I’m getting punched in the face

Like, seriously, I wish the trees would keep their sexual activity to themselves. If there are any genetic engineers out there reading this, could you genetically engineer a less-messy reproduction process for the trees I’m allergic to? Seriously, trees, keep it private.

Also, showing my age here, but am I the only person getting Fireball XL5 vibes off the SpaceX Starship?

Seriously I know it’s not exactly the same, and the XL5 launched horizontally from a track while the Starship launches vertically, but I’m catching a serious XL5 vibe from the Starship. Or maybe just some of those paperback book covers from the ’60s, but old school SF.

And while I’m doing a lot of pictures, here is a picture of the front of a truck LS architecture engine with the picture of my proposed belt routing underneath so you can get a better idea of where things go.

Allergies still kicking my butt

And something is making my joints hurt also. My hypothesis is I’m getting some kind of inflammation from the allergies and that is having a negative effect on the joints that are bothering me. If so, this is another fine mess, to quote Oliver Hardy.

If you clicked the link to the parts catalog I posted day before yesterday you might have noticed something missing, prices. This is a common thing for auto parts sold through multiple channels. Depending on volume and how close to the customer the vendor works there were color-coded price sheets issued that had wildly different prices on them. When I was selling auto parts there were sheets for to the warehouse, from the warehouse, to the mechanic, and to the public. Most of what we sold used the to the public sheet, but we did get a steady mechanics business so we had to have that sheet as well. There used to be an industry standard for the color code, and 40 years ago to the public was lemon or goldenrod, to the mechanic was mint or green. I think, like I said this was 40 years ago, and at least one TBI, so I might be hallucinating all this. I also might have the colors mixed up, but anyway, this is why there are no prices in the GM Performance Parts catalog either in print or on the web.

And as an example of my random access mind, when I posted the quote from Oliver Hardy I remembered watching Laurel and Hardy shorts in the mid-60s from a station in Tacoma that was showing the pre-code L&H shorts that had gone into public domain. They were a little racy, but didn’t actually show anything that you couldn’t show on TV of the period, particularly after they had been cut for “commercials”. One scene in particular I remember was the boys sitting in their underwear after having to get cleaned up after something made their outer clothes too dirty to be seen in public, and they were waiting in a woman’s apartment. Their wives showed up with guns and yelled about the boys being “cheating scoundrels” and firing off a shot. Cut to an external shot of men jumping out the windows of the apartment building, by the dozens. Stuff like that from more than 50 years ago I can remember clearly, but more recent things I need to remember?

I was considering changing that massive front axle to drillium, but I’m having trouble figuring out the safest places to apply the tramsmogrifier to change it from steel to drillium so it doesn’t fail in use. Or in this case where do I use the drill and how big a drill do I use? I want enough strength to not bend from severe bumps but weigh as little as possible.

And from just a few minutes ago, I have an appointment for my second Moderna shot on the 12th, at the Dallas Fair Park FEMA vaccination site. I’m 16 days away from 99% immunity!

The plants have given me a bloody nose

Well for a little while, and my nose still hurts more than 8 hours later. Basically what happened is my nose was itchy and irritated and I kept rubbing it absent-mindedly until it bled, and now my nose is still itchy and irritated, but also sore and bleeds if I touch it wrong. I don’t know what I did to the plants, but I’m sorry so could they please leave me alone? I missed game, and all the races on TV because of my nose and the rest of my face being tender, itchy, and slightly bruised.

And that’s it, nothing new to report here aside from the allergy report.

Ow, just fracking ow!

Oh, one more thing. If someone actually made it my preferred tire for the Sprint-T is 255/25-r15, in both a sticky slick and a 200 treadwear rating treaded street tire. That would cover just about all the series I want to run. In old money that would be a 20-10x15r on a 15″X10″ wheel.

Things have been much worse

That’s the good part of the story, I’m starting from someplace other than rock bottom. The bad part is I got another late start because allergies, and I also had a bad situation because after I did some shopping near the house I just missed catching the bus to the next stop of my shopping trip, and had a 40 minute wait at least until the next bus. Since by that point I had been standing around trying to find the item I was looking for without success for about a half hour, I really didn’t want to stand around for 40 minutes. So since the choices were wait another 40 minutes or go home for dinner, I went home for dinner.

I was looking for the sleep aid I had been taking that had been preventing the worst of the allergy eyes, that I had found at the Dollar General last time. But I didn’t even find a slot for it to be, and the slots for the other sleep aids that didn’t have pain relievers I can’t take because I’m already having the side effects before I even take one, were all empty. I’ll let you guess as to what kinds of sleep aids they did have. You guessed it the sleep aids with the pain relievers that I can’t take because I’m already having the side effects. Before the wreck caused brain damage I could take those pain relievers until I started having the side effects, and they worked up to and through the point the side effects began.

On other things, I have been thinking about the panhard rod for the front axle of the Sprint-T. It will have to cross over the frame from the point it mounts to the front bulkhead to the point it mounts on the axle, which means I need to put a bend in the tube almost in the exact middle to clear the frame at full droop. The axle droops about 1.5″ from normal ride height, and the frame mount is about another 1.5″ below the top of the bottom frame rail, so I need to make about a 3″ bend in the tube that makes up the panhard rod so that it just touches the frame at full droop. I’m still trying to figure out exactly how much bend is involved but the bungs I bought for the heim joints are made to install on a 1.25″ X 0.125″ wall tube which has enough bending resistance to survive getting the required amount with minimal flexing under load. The panhard rod is a big jump in rod end size and tube size from the watts link kit for the rear end, and it’s not like I don’t have a pattern to follow. The one I need has to cross about 3″ of tubes horizontally as well as clear the same amount vertically sooo.

And it’s late again and we have weather rolling in, so I’m going to take this as a good time to put this post to bed, and maybe me also. And maybe it’s just me, but I’m noticing my spell checker lacks some application-critical words from its dictionary, like panhard, and heim, that I use on a regular basis in this blog.

Allergies are kicking my backside yesterday

I slept 14 hours yesterday because of tree bukakke as the VP of my church used to put it. Most people call it a pollen bloom, but it’s actually tree sperm sprayed into the atmosphere and landing on us. Anywho, there was some of that, that I was especially allergic to, that gave me aches and pains and just made me miserable. I would wake up and not be able to open my eyes because of how swollen my eyelids were. Yay, me! And just go back to sleep.

Things here in my state are getting pretty bad as far as government services go. The new UI applications are about 630 TIMES usual volume. This is like all the other states and all of Europe decided to run their UI through TX phones and computers. This is the worst it has been since the 1930s as far as people out of work is concerned, they didn’t have unemployment back then but they still counted how many people were working compared to how many were looking. And it wasn’t as bad as what we are dealing with now. Now if people don’t get crazy greedy about getting paid NOW! and we can just let things ride a bit until this blows over everybody can just pick up where we left off and no big thing, especially if the GOP decides to give most of the bailout to people instead of companies. Granted companies are going to need some cashflow to keep the doors open and pay the mortgage, or we could just put everything on pause until after the lockdown is over. Banks aren’t paying for much, so use the bailout money to cover their costs but only just their costs, no profits. Let the stimulus money pay for the things that have to be bought while everybody is out of work and also pay “hazard pay” for the people keeping us alive.

Enough of the ranting about political stuff, I also have been thinking about making things while I couldn’t open my eyes. I mean like how to stuff an LS engine into a sprint or midget chassis, or a shaft drive motorcycle into a live axle frame of some kind, or some kind of independent rear suspension thing for SCCA A-Mod (all of those for A-Mod), and riffed off of those to do mutants that were some of A and a little of B and a whole bunch from out in left field. As I was mostly asleep this was fun, but not recordable or shareable.

And I have basically run out of things to say. I’ll post something again when I have something more to say.

Update on my messed-up face

I don’t hurt as much, and tears are no longer rolling down my face involuntarily. I’m about halfway through a half-gallon of ice cream that I have been using as an internal ice-pack on the broken and infected teeth, and things are much improved, although it still hurts to use the shaver I got for Christmas. Sleep is still broken, but dreams are returning to typical instead of the nightmares caused by the pain. The trees had better be glad my chainsaw is broken and too small to use against them. I’m almost positive the Japanese Maple is the one most responsible for my other anguish.

As I said my sleep schedule is totally broken because of having to take short naps through the day and night. So this seems like a good place to stop.