Monday 9/7/2020
Only “moderate” air quality and an early-morning temperature of 74º persuaded me to walk my normal jogging route. Still, thanks to the temperature, I managed to work up a sweat.
Following house recommendations I kept my curtains closed, which makes for a lot of gloom. I had a second go at the airbrush with much better success. It came with two sets of orifices, 0.04mm and 0.15mm. The 0.04 was installed out of the box, and it was that one that was so hard to use. I switched to the 0.15, and with properly thinned paint, it sprayed a nice, even pattern. I’m sure I can use that to apply smooth primers, color coats, and clear coats to a model.
I checked in with the meal delivery volunteers both at lunch and dinner to make sure they understood we have to use the freight elevator. One lady at dinner decided that she could not hack the heavy fire doors and she got a serious “danger” vibe (“I can sense danger, you know”) from the freight elevator, so she just said, “Sorry, I’m using the regular elevator and if the power goes out, too bad.” OK then.
Managed to get X-Plane properly installed and tried it out. The demo is quite impressive. I haven’t made up my mind if I would get $60 worth of entertainment out of it.
Marcia sent along an instruction sheet for using the house emergency radios that another resident had made, with a rather crude diagram. I was able to find online a Motorola manual for our (long discontinued) model of radio, as a PDF. From it I pulled a nicer diagram of the radio. I couldn’t actually get into the PDF, so I just zoomed it up to fill the screen of the laptop and took two screen shots, one of the top half and one of the bottom. Took those into a graphics program and rejoined them and tidied it up and put it into the document in place of the bad one. No big deal really (casually blows dust off fingernails).
Tomorrow is the writers’ group and I feel I have to produce something after dodging for the last 3 sessions. The cue is “September”. Here’s my piece. Short, but it makes up for it by being heavily over-written.
September, for me, is not a month, which is an arbitrary numbering of days, but rather an odor. The odor that means September and the onset of a new season can snag my nose in the first week of the formal month or as late as October. It always comes as a surprise, although as clear, as sudden, and almost as shocking as a fire alarm.
I used to encounter it first while cycling, long ago on my Schwinn after school, in middle age cycling for exercise around the Stanford “loop”. Now that I no longer bike, it has to come when walking or driving slow with the windows down. In any case, I will be out of doors, passing a place that has a ditch with standing water, and brown, dying vegetation, and there it comes: sharp, chemical, complex as brandy, the scent of leaves beginning to compost themselves — the aroma of autumn. It legitimizes the bureaucratic numerology of the calendar and makes autumn official.
Codgerville 