Day 329, Printer, TSA, Repair Cafe, smoke

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.

smoky_sunset

Day 147, repair cafe

Sunday, 4/28/2019

Woke up early, too early to go to the coffee shop. They bake their own pastries and the good stuff doesn’t start coming out of the oven until 7:30 and later. So I did the NYT crossword puzzle at home, as in the old days. Then to coffee and read the rest of the paper.

Back home it was soon time to head out to a day of work at the Palo Alto Repair Cafe, one of my favorite volunteer activities. I and my apprentice, Ritchie, had some quick successes. Box fan that doesn’t work: take off the grille so we can see the inside and very obviously one wire of the power cord was dangling free of the switch. That was easy.

I must say, Ritchie has a degree from Stanford, a doctorate in astrophysics from CMU, and is working at NASA, yet he was ridiculously deferential to me and my vaunted repair knowledge. A couple of other easy fixes seemed to cement my reputation, but then we got the microwave from hell that used up two hours with no fix.

The youngish client had picked this microwave up where it had been abandoned in a school dormitory. It behaved oddly in the following way: plug it in and all seems fine, it beeps and the clock waits to be set. But now, open the door. The interior light comes on, that’s ok, but also the rotator motor in the base, that rotates the glass plate inside, starts when the door opens, as does the cooling fan in the back that cools the thyratron or whatever that tube is. When you close the door the light goes out and the rotator dish stops and so does the cooling fan — and they remain off, even if you start the oven heating. So they are just backwards, on when they should be off, and off when they should be on.

We screwed around with it and then I called in Lawrence who is the main organizer of the event and a veritable God of appliance repair. He fiddled with it for half an hour, which is a lot because he is in constant demand for consultations during these events, and didn’t make any progress. Finally we decided that very likely, somebody had messed with the wiring, there was a wiring error somewhere, and nobody wanted to take on the job of finding a wiring diagram online and tracing all the connections to see what was wrong. So button it up and give it back.

When I got home at 4pm I texted Chuck to see when I needed to vacate so he could show the house as he thought he would, and he texted back, not today, they didn’t call back to confirm.

So I relaxed, made a little food — my eating habits are getting more and more casual, this time it was bacon and an egg and a protein shake — and chilled.

Day 58, Repair Café

The play was well done, lots of clever stagecraft, complicated blocking and dance routines, all very skillfully done. The lead part, Shakespeare, was very well played. I like the female lead less well. Whatever.

Sunday, 1/27/2019

For the first time in a long time, I stayed home on a Sunday morning, breakfasting on a meal replacement shake. I don’t mean to establish a new pattern. It was that I needed to leave by 10am to attend the Repair Café. I enjoy these events in part because I like fixing things, and in part because as a “fixer” I am also a “mentor” of some college student “apprentice”. My apprentice this time was a pleasant young woman named Leela who has a Master’s in electrical engineering but felt she lacked hands-on experience. She was eager to get those hands on, so I mostly just stood back and advised. She had never soldered before, and one fix involved soldering some wires that had broken off a battery holder. I showed her one joint before handing it over to her. She was delighted with the way solder melts then instantly freezes when you take the iron away.

During our lunch break, Leela mentioned how her mother was a seamstress, and she’d like to do sewing herself, but didn’t have a sewing machine. I said, you want one? And ended up giving her Marian’s. Nobody else I had asked was interested; I was planning to give it to Goodwill. Leela was very grateful and I’m sure she will put it to good use.

In the evening I caught up on some of the TV that has been stacking up on the DVR. In particular I wanted to watch the US Skating Championship, where the Ladies competition was won by a new phenom, 13-year-old Alyssa Liu. This is a show I would have watched with Marian, and she would have been delighted to see a new skating star emerge.