I was planning to take the last couple of months of the year off,
or half-off, just not working on new products to sell. As usual it
didn't quite work out because everything drags on too long, but I
pretty much reached the point yesterday.
But then it's not quite time off because it's really time for doing
all the non-profitable jobs I've been optimistically listing for
completion on weekends. I've got to attempt bodywork on my car
(inc. learning MIG welding), solar power for my house, paint all
the wood on the house where the old paint has flaked off, finish
that backup gravity-fed water supply and satellite dish 4G antenna
platform (the modem's signal has been dropping out from time to
time since the 3G turn-off, though not too bad yet), and the
eternal job of trying to make the rusty guttering on the house and
shed work. Oh and fix the potholes in the (long) driveway _again_,
fix the shed where my parts car lives, get rid of the bees that are
spreading through the roof of my house again, and the ones in my
parts car now. Fix the instrument panel in the ute again because my
last effort failed - the intermittent short must be in the fuse box
itself. etc. etc.
Then there are all my hobby projects, mostly with electronics and
computers. I think I could work myself up to feeling enthusiastic
about resuming some of my electronics tinkerings again, but then
the computer jobs solve actual problems for me. Rationally I should
pick them up, but I can't seem to get into them lately. It's
probably because there's one project that's reached the point of
"oh, I didn't realise this would need to be this complicated" and
although I feel I should finish it before I forget everything, I
really fear the always-hated debugging stage where it's just going
to be tedious as hell. In principle it's not that hard, but it's
web-based and just the grind of putting together all the index
pages is wearing.
I guess it's just another one of my days of apathy. I'm also sort
of annoyed with myself for making a mess of replacing the sway bar
links on the Jag over the last couple of days. Just four bolts, yet
I get the nyloc nut size wrong (assumed metric but it was imperial)
and wrecked the thread on a bolt. New bolt and nylocs worked the
next day, but I also tried out a cordless impact driver that I
bought from a market with a broken battery for $1. I opened up the
NiCd battery pack and tracked down a new replacement assembly of
NiCd cells in the same configuration on Aliexpress for ~$30. Got
that and soldered them to the contacts in the old battery pack, and
was all proud of myself. Except my thinking was that it would help
undo stuck nuts/bolts. Tried it on these nuts, already fairly
easily undone with a regular socket handle, and it wouldn't shift
them. So that's useless. Except at least it does make quick work of
screwing the wheel nuts on before torquing them up. Then at the end
I was checking over the suspension and clattered my head into
something which chipped one of my front teeth, so that's been
uncomfortable since. That might not have happened if I'd finished
building my raised vehicle inspection/mouse-proof-parking platform
- another job to do.
Also I built my bath-tub / satellite dish stand assembly with pipes
for the tractor forks to slide into so it could be lifted on top of
the tank stand behind the house. In my typical way I obsessively
measured the fork diameter and picked out some pipes laying around
the farm, then evidently went back and grabbed the wrong ones to
use, which where too narrow, so the forks only fit about half way
on, which makes things very precarious. They were a lot of work to
mount securely in the frame too, so I'm committed to using them.
These things just piss me off. I want something to just go smoothly
for once, but I'm just not the person for it. I can obsess over
double checking things, and do, but that just makes everything take
ages and then very often my mistakes tend to be things I got right
initially but I confused myself when double-checking them. I'm just
not capable of true consistency. I only eat one of three simple
meals for dinner each night and I even manage to stuff up cooking
those every so often. It just makes me wonder why I bother trying.
So this is another one of my posts that's degenerated into a
whinge, but I feel better for writing it anyway. I do now have a
reprieve in the form of a holiday planned for this time next week.
Not ideal circumstances because it's for the funeral of one of my
uncles, first member of my preceeding generation to kick the
bucket. It's a decent drive away, so I decided to stay for a couple
of nights and make it a short holiday. Now my mother is suggesting
we stay together at a rental house/cabin. She's offered to pay, and
deserves the company, but will this actually be a return to the
strained childhood family holidays with my mother and stepfather
that put me off the whole idea of holidays entirely until last
year? At least now I do have my own car to escape in, which counts
for a lot, and a separate bedroom. Wandering aimlessly around
caravan parks never quite cut it as a substitute for having my own
space.
