I was busy this afternoon

I had to take a pretty long trip to pick up some raw stock from the Lowe’s in the next town over. This required a bus trip of about 3 hours round trip, not counting waiting for transfers or missing a schedule that never showed up.

The real fun was carrying the raw stock in my hand from the Lowe’s to the bus stop 0.3 mi away and then the 0.4 mi from the bus stop home. Since I need my right hand to drive the cane that means I had to use my non-dominant hand to carry this.

That’s between 13 and 14 pounds of 2″ by 2″ by 0.25″ thick according to my bathroom scale, that I carried over three quarters of a mile in my left hand. And let me tell you, my left hand did not appreciate the exercise! My arthritis is really complaining about it, and the tendonitis from pinching bicycle fenders into shape back in the Naughties is making its displeasure known as well. I used the proven technique of holding the object to be weighed as I stepped on the scale, noting the weight, and then putting the object down where I’m not supporting it and noting the weight again and subtracting. This avoids the well-known problems with weighing light things like angle iron and cats on a bathroom scale.

A small part of that stock, about 8″ long, will become the steering arm that the drag link will connect to the pitman arm. I have no idea what I’m going to do with the rest of the stock, but I’m sure there will be something that needs bracing from a heavy-ass piece of steel and that for some yet-to-be-determined reason light tubing won’t work. Now let me do some sums and this steering arm will weigh something in the neighborhood of 2 ± pounds. That’s pretty heavy for a steering arm.

Now I need to take some precise measurements and lay out my dimensions before I start cutting stock, I mean I only have enough stock to make 5 plus of this part, so I can only screw up 4 times before I have to buy more stock and make another 4 hour trip to the next town over that I could get to in about 20 minutes if I could still ride my bike. Speaking of which I wore my “All-Powerful Bicycle Lobby” T-shirt, but it was in Latin, so nobody knew I was buying stuff to make a car while wearing a “Cars Suck” T-shirt.😇

Advertisement

Just a tiny bandwidth to work with, so no Feed today.

I’m sitting next to Mrs. the Poet blogging on a moving bus. I have done this before, but this time there are so many other people using laptops and tablets on board that there is almost no bandwidth available. In fact the compose page for creating this blog post took forever to load and I keep losing connection when the system tries to autosave my progress. the wi-fi in the terminals is even worse if you can believe that. Of the two stations I have tried to log on at, one would not let me connect and he other the sign-up page timed out…

Getting ready to go had some amusing moments. I had to go to the local haircutting establishment because I was very shaggy and while I was getting my hair cut the stylist asked if I was busy that evening, which sounded a bit like she was asking for a date. When I told her I was preparing to take a trip to NY she got very interested. We conversed some including some on the changing terminology of haircutting (what we used to call a “high and tight” is now a “military taper” for instance, and what used to be “military taper” is now a “low taper”) then when we got done with my hair I went to pay and it happened again, I got another unsolicited senior discount. Apparently she likes older men?

The trip so far has been a struggle to get sleep against an army of crying babies. The babies were winning for a while but exhaustion has a way of overcoming that after a while. Eventually you will get some sleep, no matter what.

We had a pleasant surprise in Nashville. First when we asked for condiments for our packaged sandwiches instead of little packets we were given single-serving Serv-a-paks of mustard and mayo. Second pleasant surprise was those packaged sandwiches were pretty good and tasty. We were hoping for edible, tasty was beyond our expectations.

The AC on this trip has been interesting so far. The big thing has been too much AC either overall or on particular body parts. Right now, for instance, everything is fine except my right knee, which is in the direct blast from the AC vent for this row of seats and is turning blue…

And it turns out I do have enough bandwidth for a couple of links today. for instance, did you know that when you have more bicycles on the roads you get fewer car wrecks? More bicyclists on road means fewer collisions, study shows Gee, whodathunkit? more bikes = fewer car wrecks, specifically wrecks with bicycles, but fewer wrecks overall as well. 5 guess it turns out that when you have a finite number of vehicle operators and you swap out light armored vehicles for vehicles that totally expose the operator to all impacts those operators start having fewer impacts.

And now there is a new kind of warning device that falls between the traditional bell and the new standard of alerting drivers the air horn. Ring MyBell The programmable light and sound show can be customized to your environment to alert pedestrians and drivers alike.

OK it’s getting dark now, so I guess this is a good stopping point for this Live Blog of A Boring Bus Trip.

PSA, Opus