My Miata blew a radiator hose and dumped out all its coolant,
so I needed to do a radiator flush and fill.
Turns out that's kind of a nasty job on an NB (second-gen) Miata.
The radiator drain plug is accessed through a hole in the tray under
the engine. Once you get it loose enough that coolant has started to
drip out, if the screwdriver slips, it's impossible to get it back on
without getting coolant all over the screwdriver, flashlight, your
arm, your face and hair, etc. And once you do manage to loosen it
enough, it pops out,
sending coolant gushing everywhere onto the engine undertray,
from which it comes out the back and sides and it's impossible to
catch it all in a drain pan.
So that left me with quite a mess to clean up afterward. I started by
pouring the used coolant into a container with a secure cap: I've
always heard warnings about how kids and pets will try to drink
the poisonous stuff because it tastes and smells sweet.
We don't have kids or pets, but there are plenty of wild critters
and we want them to stay healthy too.
Can you follow Lower Water Canyon (in the DOE open space lands south of
White Rock, NM) all the way to the Rio Grande?
In the decade we've lived here, we've heard that question and
asked it ourselves, and have heard a few anecdotal reports.
You can follow it down most of the way, but there's a pour-off near
the end that you won't want to do without a rope. Or there was a
pour-off fifteen years ago that wasn't that big a deal, but it's
changed since then and isn't passable now.
Or ... well, anyway, the story kept changing
depending on who we asked, and nobody seemed to have tried it in many years.
Now I've done it. It's a beautiful hike, and right now there's
an abundance of wildflowers in bloom along the canyon.
On a mountain bike ride on the White Rock Canyon Rim trail yesterday,
we stopped at one of the overlooks to admire the view, and turned to
see three bighorn sheep crossing the trail behind us.
I stumbled onto the page for this year's Asimov's Magazine
Readers'
Award Finalists. They offer all the stories right there --
but only as PDF. I prefer reading fiction on my ebook reader (a Kobo
Clara with 6" screen), away from the computer. I spend too much time
sitting at the computer as it is. But trying to read a PDF on a 6" screen
is just painful.
The open-source ebook program Calibre has a command-line program called
ebook-convert that can convert some PDF to epub. It did an
okay job in this case — except that the PDFs had the wrong
author name (they all have the same author, so I'm guessing it's the
name of the person who prepared the PDFs for Asimov's), and the wrong
title information (or maybe just no title), and ebook-convert
compounded that error by generating cover images for each work that had
the wrong title and author.
I went through the files and fixed each one's title and author metadata
using my
epubtag.py
Python script. But what about the cover images? I wasn't eager to spend
the time GIMPing up a cover image by hand for each of the stories.
My new binocular came! And something curious came with them:
a "tactical pen".
It seems to be quite a nice gel pen, with an aluminum body and a
locking retractor. But the "tactical" part is less clear.
Me
What makes it tactical?
Dave
Maybe that it's black?
Me
Tactical is the new black?
And of course, my mind couldn't help wandering off to explore what might
make the difference between a tactical pen and a strategic pen.
Maybe something about how long the ink reserve lasts?
Or how long it takes to click the clicky retractor thing?
Oh, well, it was free when buying the binocular from B&H,
and it really is a pretty nice pen.
I mentioned last month that I'm learning guitar. It's been going well
and I'm having fun. But I've gotten to the point where I sometimes get
chords confused: a song is listed as using E major and I play D major
instead.
Also, it's important to practice transitions between chords,
which is easy when you only know three chords; but with eight or so,
I had stopped practicing transitions in general and was only practicing
the ones that occur in songs I like to play.
I found myself wishing I had something like flash cards for guitar chords.
Someone must have already written that, right? But I couldn't find
anything promising with a web search. And besides, it's more fun to
write programs than to flail at unhelpful search engines, and you
always end up learning something new.
I'm sorry, but I have no eclipse photos to share. I messed that up.
But I did get to see totality.
For the April 8, 2024 eclipse, Dave and I committed early to Texas.
Seemed like that was where the best long-range forecasts were.
In the last week before the eclipse, the forecasts were no longer
looking so good. But I've heard so many stories of people driving around
trying to chase holes in the clouds, only to be skunked,
while people who stayed put got a better view.
We decided to stick with our plan, which was to stay in San Angelo
(some 190 miles off the centerline) the night before,
get up fairly early and drive to somewhere near the centerline.