[Monty Python]I’m not dead yet![/Monty Python]

I’ve been prepping for the holiday we celebrate today all week so no computer time at all except for web comic sanity breaks. I’m so far behind on my emails I might never get caught up.

I hope you got the good stuff this year, because I certainly did. My daughter that still lives in this country got me a new insulated coffee and tea mug set with my initials masked into the decorative coating, in 12 and 32 fluid ounce capacity. This continues a trend in insulated mugs from this daughter over the years. This is the third insulated mug and the first was 24 ounce, the second was 32 ounce to the brim but somewhat less inside the lid, and this year the capacity was 32 ounces under the lid. The next size up is a 44 ounce mug under the lid but that one is hard to track down and I probably won’t get that one for a while because now that we have the dishwasher back up all the older mugs look almost brand new and I have an actual brand new mug. This year’s mugs have really good insulation, Mrs. the Poet made me a cup of tea in the smaller cup and an hour later I still couldn’t drink it because the tea would still burn my mouth, and the sides of the cup were still only slightly above room temperature. I don’t remember exactly where my daughter found the cup and mug set, but she got good ones.

I’m still working on the frame for the Sprint-T, trying to minimize weight while maintaining stiffness, using wall thickness variation so that in places where I’m not constrained by safety rules I use enough material to carry the load with a safety factor, but only that much. That means 0.120″ in the roll cage, 0.060″ in most other places, and 0.39″ in a couple places that are only carrying a very tiny load to brace another structural member against buckling. The fun part of this is when I run through the loads and reduce wall thickness in places where I don’t need the material I frequently find the loads in those members get less as the weight of the surrounding frame is reduced. It’s strange how when you reduce the weight of something the stress that member has to resist also gets reduced, even if the outside forces don’t change. Stresses at the applied load points don’t change, but somehow some stresses at some intersections are drastically reduced. I use a spreadsheet to do the calculations now because I used to forget some intersections, but with the spreadsheet I don’t lose any intersections. Now the trick is to make sure I enter all the intersections into the spreadsheet.

And I have noticed a sharp decline in my writing ability since I lost the translation cleanup gig, more runon sentences and less holding a coherent thought through a paragraph. I also notice I’m having trouble hitting the keys, leaving letters out of words and missing punctuation. Fortunately I spend time proofing before I hit publish, otherwise these posts would look even worse than they do with the bad writing.

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Happy Day to my fellow vets

Today is Veteran’s Day (observed), so I’m wishing a happy Veteran’s Day to all my green-blooded brothers out there (in joke).

It was cold last night but warmed up this morning enough that I wore my normal next-to-nothing today, which annoyed Mrs. the Poet as she was wearing long pants, t-shirt, and a sweatshirt over it with fuzzy socks on her feet and complaining about the cold. We have vastly different temperature tolerances all year long as I go out and walk or ride my bike in both the summer and winter in weather that has Mrs. the Poet staying indoors or kvetching about the heat/cold as appropriate for the season. I think it’s kinda funny, but that’s because I’m not the one complaining about the cold or heat. My nose does get cold when Mrs. the Poet is complaining about the cold while I’m in a pair of shorts and nothing else, and when I get cold enough to put a shirt on my ears are also getting a bit chilly while Mrs. the Poet is busy putting on everything in the closet and dresser. And I’m not as cold-tolerant as I used to be back when I wore shorts and t-shirt in freezing weather, scaring the rubes when I walked home from work. I saw people tossing liquor bottles out of car windows after seeing me walk home in shorts and T-shirt with heavy frost on the ground. This was back when I was in my 30s, long before I got hit with the truck. I can’t quite do that these days, one of the downsides of years of conditioning myself to be able to ride in ridiculously hot and humid weather.

I’m still stymied at trying to get something moving on the TGS2 build, beyond getting the spindles installed on the axle, which also hasn’t happened yet. I mean I don’t even actually have the donor vehicle in my hands yet, just a car cover for it when I get it so it doesn’t get towed for not having registration since it can’t pass inspection. Since the registration sticker is on the inside of the windshield if you park under a car cover they can’t check to see if your vehicle has current tags. I guess I should be doing something with the parts I have to work with just to be doing something that moves the car build forward, but it is very hard to become inspired for building when you will still have next to nothing to show for it when you get finished except a few more parts not in separate piles. I guess this is another symptom of my depression, the inability to inspire myself to do things. Writing I don’t consider “doing something”, it’s more of a way to avoid doing things. It’s much easier to write about doing something than to actually drag myself into a situation where things are getting done. Also I write when I’m depressed, the “the Poet” in my name came from writing free verse during depressive episodes. I even got some song lyrics down from some of my depressive episodes. Some were good, others were scary bad. Bad as song lyrics, but passable as free verse.