Song: “Venus” by Shocking Blue
Mood: 7.5
Nightmares: 0
Ghosts: Few
Just a quick post tonight – I’ve got to be up early tomorrow.
I didn’t sleep all that well again last night but made up for part of it by sleeping through both of my alarms this morning. Fortunately, I didn’t sleep in too much so I was still able to get everything done that I’d planned.
FA came over in the afternoon with printing filament and sweet, delicious burritos. We had lunch and started in on another conversation that, over the afternoon, covered all kinds of things. FA is working on a project and asked if I wouldn’t mind printing some stuff up for her, so once we were done lunch I set the new filament to dry and we started pondering and working.
One thing I really like about working on stuff with FA is that we often look at problems from different angles and have different approaches to try and solve them. Then, we sit there and poke holes in each other’s plans until what’s left of both ideas either fits together or completely collapses (in which case we start over). You’d think that this would lead to loud arguments or burrito wrappers and glasses being thrown, but it’s worked for close to 25 years.
25 years… holy crap…
Anyway, FA did some tweaking of the 3D model and we bantered back and forth about scaling, then we started up a test print. Unfortunately, while trying to get the test done as quickly as possible, I set the speed to high and the temperature too low, so it ended up missing… things. Fortunately, it was good enough for FA to use as a test once she got home.
After everything was running, she showed me some tricks with Fusion 360 which (if I remember them correctly) will save me a lot of time and let me do some pretty neat stuff I’ve never been able to do before. Thanks, FA! 🙂
Then we wandered into the living room and sat and gabbed about all kinds of stuff again. J got home from work a little while later and the three of us talked for a while before FA needed to hit the road. We pried the test print off the print bed and she headed for home, while J left for an appointment.
You know that feeling you get when you’re done, say, a three-hour physics exam? Not the “oh thank Jeebus that’s over” feeling, but the feeling where it’s almost like you can hear your brain ticking as it cools down, like a car engine after a good long stint on the highway. I like that feeling – it reminds me I’ve been concentrating on something (or multiple things) and progress has been made and I’m not feeling any frustration or angst. It’s really quite pleasant.
A parcel arrived today. In it was mostly pretty boring stuff but three things stood out: I now have the parts to make custom short USB cables for my Pi power plans, I got a great new antenna for my SDR (which I am now listening to), and I got several pieces of the Adafruit DIY HDMI cable parts, which, after hooking them up properly (not backwards – bad Mark, bad!) work like a charm:
And it’s a touchscreen, too!
Note the absence of a three-foot thick white cable with large ends.
Later after J got back from her appointment, we hung out for a while and watched a very frustrating episode of Diagnosis. Yes, some doctors are jerks, and when your illness forces you to visit a lot of them, you’re much more likely to run into one of those jerks. But when you have a port at your skin that leads directly to your heart AND you have a diagnosis, don’t ignore the diagnosis because the first dweeb doctor that told you about it. My official diagnosis as to why this poor girl has had her problems is old fashioned Bad Mom Disease (BMD, sometimes seen as IBMD, where the I stands for “Insufferable”). The sadness I have about her condition is hammered pretty flat every time her mother talked and made the whole discussion about her. Here’s an answer. Here’s a treatment. You’ve talked to someone else with the same thing and he says it works great. Want to try? No? Why not? Because you don’t feel like that’s the diagnosis? They did the test and it came back strongly positive, so no problem, we’ll let your daughter feel like crap and live alone until you decide you stop hating the diagnosis and start getting her fixed. There are people on this show who are being told there’s no treatment and no cure, but they’re just so happy to be able to put a name to it and that there were other people out there who were like them. Then there’s this family who, after having a bad experience with a terrible doctor, decides that whatever he told them has to be wrong, regardless of how many other doctors come up with the same diagnosis. Arrrrgh.
Okay, I spent way too much time talking about that. FA checked the fit of the test print before it crumbled away to nothing, and confirmed that it was the right size so I took the filament out of the dryer, loaded it up with some desiccant bags, and then turned on the printer.
BRAWWWAWWAWWAWWAWWAWWAWWAWWAWWAWWAWWAWWAWW
Not a good sound, so I looked around and found it was a fan inside the control box. I’ll need to replace it soon but a few sharp raps on the box and it settled down nicely. I purged the rest of the previous filament and started up a print. It’s going to take a while but it seems to be going well so far. Hopefully that’ll keep up!
Nothing further about the volunteer opportunity for J and I, we’ll just sit and wait. If it doesn’t work out, that’s just fine.
Tomorrow I have my cardiac stress test tomorrow morning, and a Dr C appointment in the afternoon. I have a lot of new stuff to talk to Dr C about, and even more questions, so I’m glad she’s back. I will be glad to get the stress test done because this will be a great way to tell if I’ll be able to start in on some other exercises that will get me all sweaty and gross. Plus, I’d really like to know that I’m not one sneeze away from a giant MI.
Stay safe.