Sunday, 10/27/2019
Went out for coffee and to read the paper at Verve. Talked to Dennis on the phone while waiting for my cappuccino. Back at CH, I had an hour to kill and put it to good use. First I tested the new printer by printing an 8×10 of one of my Greek pictures on good quality paper. Screen on the right, paper on the left. It did pretty darn well.
It could be a little more contrasty and more blue, but for a first try with default settings, not bad at all. Certainly every bit of detail was there.
I had time remaining so I did what I’ve meant to do for some time, went to the TSA site and applied for Global Entry. This is a superset of TSA Precheck which supposedly makes it faster to return to the US from abroad.
Now it was 10am (gosh but I am productive in the mornings), so I took one of the house shopping carts from the garage and used it to roll my toolbox three blocks up Homer street to the Museum of the American Heritage, for the quarterly Repair Cafe. I was teamed with apprentice fixer Daniel and we had a pretty successful day. We repaired an old calculator quite easily, and a wooden floor vent with somewhat more effort. Then we got a stand mixer that turned into the Job from Hell. Spent at least an hour figuring out how to get it apart. Quickly identified the broken part, a worm gear, and showed the client how to order a new one on Amazon. Then spent half an hour trying to reassemble the goddam thing before, with the client’s encouragement, giving up on the whole job.
Finally we had another easy one, an electric jigsaw where the user had cut into the cord. The break was only a foot from the handle, so we opened it up, discarded the short piece of cord, stripped and reattached the good part of the cord inside the device. Fixed!
We were working outdoors under canvas marquees and several times the gusty wind in the courtyard threatened to blow our marquee away like a kite. “Grab a pole!” was the shout and people would rush to hold them down. It was all fun and games until you realized, every such gust up in Sonoma county was spreading the Kincade fire…
Due to the wind shift, the smoke from that fire finally came down to us, and by late afternoon the sky was yellow and the air smelled like an old cigar. At sunset I saw the color and took some shots with the Nikon from my west-facing balcony.
Codgerville 