Still fornicating hot

It’s so hot that I switched from peanutbutter cups to mints because I don’t like melted chocolate. Mrs. the Poet came to bed naked not because she felt romantic but because it was too hot to wear a nightgown. And also too hot for hanky or panky. Seriously, I tried for a hug and a kiss and failed at both because I adhered to her skin after just touching her. Not a pleasant night.

Current temperature in my office is 84°F, not deadly by any means, but even with a fan it’s still uncomfortable. Probably not good for the laptop, either, but the manual says I still have a few degrees of leeway before thermal shutdown. I decided to move my laptop and myself to the living room with the fan because it’s a portable computer, so why not portage it someplace where there’s a breeze? Also the temperature just hit 85°

In other things, I still do the things to possibly win the Ford engine from Power Nation daily, but I’m still 10 friends shy of my maximum of 10 friends. You have until 8/11/2021 to click the link and help me win. I really can’t do anymore thinking about the Sprint-T, I have to either abandon the project or stop thinking and start doing, but fixing the house is eating my car building budget alive. And in the greater scheme of things having a house that is habitable is more important than having a hot rod.

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[$DEITY] it’s hot in here

Because the AC is intermittent it got to 85°F in my office as indicated by my Atomic Radio Clock. And the AC is intermittent because the installers used the condensation drain that came with the house and it doesn’t drain as fast as the the coil makes condensation. The other reason it’s hot in here is we finally had our first 100°F day outside.

About the first 100° day, usually by now we have had 5 or more days above the century mark, but because of climate change for the first couple of months of Meteorological Summer our usual heat went to the Pacific Northwest, and the cool air was redirected around the Arctic Circle and onto us, leaving our temperatures well below normal, and theirs well above normal. But that flow moved on and we have our normal temperatures and so do they.

Getting back to that condensation drain thing, there is a sensor that controls a relay that turns off the AC when the condensation line gets backed up so the water doesn’t flood the house like when we were living in the apartment when we first moved here back in the 1990s. That one was bad, I lost so many magazines that time.😭 That was the last time we lived in an apartment. Shortly after that we got evicted and bought Casa de El Poeta, but it wasn’t named that at the time. It wasn’t named anything back then. Then a while after I was killed our central heat and air went south to the land of non functioning appliances, and we lived with window units for several years because it was cheaper than replacing the AC and wiring at the time. But our finances changed and we could afford to get the electrical wiring changes and replaced the entire inner and outer systems, but for some reason they didn’t change the condensation drain when they installed the new system and now it’s overwhelmed by the humidity.

I’m still doing the thing for the giveaway Ford engine because it’s my best hope of getting an engine for the Sprint-T. Otherwise I don’t have the budget to keep Mrs. the Poet happy and buy an engine and transmission. The plan is to sell the prize engine or trade it for an LS junkyard engine and transmission. Or see if I could sweet talk the TV production company out of a transmission and controller in exchange for making a program or 3 out of building the Sprint-T. It’s possible but unlikely so I’m not going to put it high on the list of probabilities. The chain of events needed to make that happen is so convoluted as to make living through getting hit by a truck going 60 MPH look like an everyday thing.

Something is wrong with the thermostat

It’s “only” 90°F outside but it’s 80° inside at my computer desk even though the thermostat is set for 76. And I just checked and it’s 80° at the thermostat and the AC still hasn’t come on even though the setting is 4 degrees cooler than the temperature. Something is rotten in Texas, heck with Denmark.

Something else that isn’t working according to spec is my autofill for passwords. I let Google remember all my passwords for sites that require readers be over 18 because they’re a bunch of unrememberable gibberish suggested by either Google or the website, and now I have been dead longer than that. Longer than 18 years that is. I mean seriously this latest update to Windows has messed up a bunch of things, but the thermostat is probably not among them. So I don’t know what the problem is, I mean with the thermostat.

Edit to add: The thermostat has gone out completely for a couple of hours, and my autofill for passwords works some times and not others. I’m going to call the people who installed the AC system tomorrow and have them take a look at it, but I don’t know what I can do about the autofill.

Still hot but bearable

I knocked the thermostat down a couple of degrees F and it is much better. The current temperature in the office is 77°F which feels much better than the temperature of 79°F from before. It’s amazing how much just 2° makes in comfort level.

I’m still mostly on a daywalker sleep schedule. I say mostly because I need to be up before noon, but I haven’t been. I need to get up earlier to go to sleep earlier. Also, I need to take my sleep meds earlier to fall asleep earlier. But things are still not working up to tolerances, never mind working up to specifications, and I don’t know how to get up to tolerances.

The end of next month is the 20th anniversary of my death by murder by motor vehicle. It is weird for me to think about it, but I was dead 20 years ago. I still have nightmares about it that I didn’t have right after the wreck because I was still having nightmares about the horrible abuse I had growing up. But the statute of limitations expired a long time ago on that and on the guy trying to kill me (because it was a misdemeanor when it happened and the SoL was only 4 years) basically the ship on that one sailed and sank before Obama’s first administration. Hell Obama hadn’t even run when the SoL expired at the beginning of the second Bush term. Not right at the beginning, the wreck was 12 days before Bush was interrupted reading an age-appropriate book to elementary school children to get told about the first plane striking the Twin Towers so the SoL expired well into the first year of the second term of the Bush administration.

But in less than 60 days it will be two decades since one life ended and a different life started and I’m still trying to grasp the significance of the event.

I’m still uncomfortable, but at least I know why now

Turns out the room I spend most of my time in is hotter than the rest of the house because it doesn’t get the same amount of AC, and that same thing means there is no airflow over my body to take away excess heat. Basically I’m sitting on top of a giant heat source and no airflow to remove the heat. Also, all my chocolate has been melting because the temperature has been regularly exceeding the lower melting point of chocolate.

The temperature in the office has been rising to just under 80°F with the digital thermometer just flipping back and forth between 79 and 80 for a few seconds in the heat of the day. This is just about the melting point of milk chocolate. This is a temperature that is the top of my comfort level, not where I actually start sweating, but right where I get damp. Without a fan to make a breeze I’m not a happy camper.

I’m kinda fixating on this because it is interfering with thinking…

Edit to add that as I was composing that sentence I got really ill and had to go take a laydown under the ceiling fan not in the office and not really eat very much for dinner and went to bed early and missed Stephen Colbert. So yeah got hot, don’t know why it affected me so much but it did, and I had to cut the post short.

After melting running errands yesterday, blessed coolness today

Yesterday I was depositing checks and picking up my pulls from the comic shop and basically melting in the sun as the temperature again approached the triple digits. I also got my toes done as I was snagging the sheets again when I didn’t wear socks to bed, then walked the 0.9 mile from the nail salon to Casa de El Poeta for a full limit on my Sweatcoin collecting. Speaking of Sweatcoin, I still don’t have enough to cash out any, but I’m getting there, almost $15 right now. I need to get a bunch more to have enough to cash out at $50.

One thing that is hard for me to get used to is the thought of actually having money to spend on days I’m not doing the lab rat thing. My mentality has been when I’m out and not visiting the LRK I don’t have any money unless this is a trip to actually spend money on something specific. And that I wouldn’t have a couple of bucks to spend on a cold drink and a snack if the urge took me. So I stopped at Jack in the Box and got a Cherry Coke Zero Sugar™ and a slice of half-price cheesecake one because I needed it and the other because I could. Well I didn’t need the Cherry Coke Zero Sugar™ specifically, just something cold and wet, but the cheesecake was definitely because I could.

Now today it was much cooler as the first of two cold fronts passed through leaving temperatures in the mid-80s most of the day. It’s only 91° as I get ready to get the lottery with the $15.25 million jackpot. Back from the store. And just for giggles I also bought a ticket for the Powerball $223 million jackpot, which the first year payout will have more than enough money for us to live on the rest of our lives. I suppose we could move to a small town without internet and set them up with Gigabit internet just because we want it and letting everyone else have access just makes sense. Seriously, I have so little experience spending money in large sums that after setting up a retirement account to take care of my financial needs for the rest of my life I have no idea what to do with the rest of the first year payment.

Well if tomorrow’s post doesn’t make much sense, I’m still drunk from celebrating winning.

The heat is taking a break and Mrs. the Poet returns

The forecast high for today is was “only” 103 104°F getting down to 75° in the AM. And to welcome Mrs. the Poet back Tuesday the forecast high is just 99°. Mrs. the Poet is strongly considering staying in Upstate NY, except that her ticket is only transferable if her flight is cancelled. I know the cats will be glad to see her, they wander the house calling for her like they expect her to appear from the air or something. And I’m missing her, too.

On the Sprint-t project I have simplified the body mount somewhat. Instead of welding a box structure with a complex flange and dozens of holes in the top that would allow water intrusion, I moved the face between the floor and the filler over to the other side of the mounting nuts with a simple bend to carry the flange up close to the nuts through the cowl pinch which won’t affect the mount stiffness since there won’t be any bolts except next to the firewall. This would have almost the same effective stiffness as the more complex mount with all the fiddly out-of-position welds I would need to do standing on my head. Most of the welds I could do outside the car on a bench, but there would still be some yoga welding in the car, only about a third as much as the other design. This design leaves the nuts and bolts inside the body and exposed for maintenance. And there would literally be a line of bedliner caulking the bottom of the body outside in the joint between the body and the frame.

Like I posted earlier the design is getting to the fiddly bits like body mounts and making sure the floor doesn’t oilcan when I get in and out of the car, without disturbing the smoothness of the belly pan that is the other side of the floor. This excludes running beads on the floor because that also is either a bump or a depression on the belly pan. This leaves welding light angle sections or just vertical flanges on top of the floor like for the body mount. And I forgot to reiterate the floor/belly pan is a structural part of the center bay to prevent distortion of the roll cage in a wreck and also act as a transmission mount. I decided the trans/driveshaft tunnel will be removable from the inside of the car for installation and maintenance of the drivetrain. This solves a ton of issues with keeping water out of the interior and also keeping the belly pan smooth, and makes the floor a better structural component for the frame. Otherwise I would have to figure out how to route the shear loads around the hole in the floor to get the transmission in and out, and make a removable cover for the hole. This would be a weak point in the frame that would be a bear to fix without adding a bunch of extra weight.

And I have to get the clean sheets out of the dryer and put them on the bed. I had some bug bites that bled a little on the sheets, plus there was the matter of sweating making the bottom sheet dingy looking, so I got some bleach at the store and tried to whiten them. And it doesn’t matter if I succeeded or not, they go on the bed tonight so Mrs. the Poet has a clean place to sleep tomorrow night.

It’s getting hot in here, again

“… so take off all your clothes.”

Current office temperature is 85°F with the AC going. I really need to use the extra $$ from the insurance payment withdrawal to get a new AC unit for the office, or the bedroom. I don’t want to be selfish, because I can live with an office temperature below 90°F as long as I have a fan going and the old AC unit does blow up a storm. And moving the clock with the thermometer to the bedroom has shown a drop of a full degree in about 10 minutes, and 2 degrees in about a half an hour. Knowing the response time for this particular thermometer I can safely say that the bedroom is roughly 80°F at the hottest part of the day, and high 70s at night. Mrs. the Poet and I can sleep when it’s like that, but the electronics in my office don’t perform well with sustained 85° temperatures. So, Mrs. the Poet says put the new AC in my office instead of our bedroom.

And I’m running out of cold water, and the laptop is warning about overheating. That’s my cue to cut this one short.