johnridley | Recent Entries

I have been somewhat interested in astrophotography in the past, but have only done camera-lens wide field stuff with no mount (30 second exposure type stuff). I just wasn't interested in spending the time or money to get into what can be a VERY expensive hobby.

However, at this year's Astronomy on the Beach, I went to a talk about smart telescopes. I had been only vaguely aware of this new phenomenon, and went to the talk very skeptical. Long story short, about 3 days later I laid down $550 for a Dwarf 3 smart telescope.

The front runners in the $500 class scopes right now are the Dwarf 3 and the Seestar S50. The Dwarf has a newer generation 8 megapixel imaging chip and a wider field of view. The S50 is more telephoto and has a previous generation 2 megapixel chip. I find that a lot of what I'm interested in are larger objects, and I like the newer chip. Those considerations drove my decision.

Also it seems like Dwarf is pushing new features and updates out faster than Seestar is.

Anyway, my first night after the Dwarf arrived was hazy, but at 5:30 the following morning I had a clear window and took a couple of sets after doing some learning on the app.

As I looked out the back door facing south, Orion was right in my field of view, so M42 was to be the first target.

THESE IMAGES ARE CLICKABLE FOR FULL SIZE.

That went well. That's 100x 10 second exposures and a 120 gain, stacked and edited with the "auto" tool on Stellar Studio, a cloud-based simple editor with astrophotography specific tools. I did have dark frames set for this one. Also this has the duo-band (OIII+Ha) filter enabled.

I was inside getting ready to take my shower when this finished, and I thought from where I put the scope on the deck it could probably see M31 from there so I poked M31 in the atlas and let the scope find it. I set it to 100x 10 second exposures again, with a lower gain of I think 60. This one has the "Astro" filter (light pollution) enabled.

I'm pretty happy with this. I'm also happy that the thing is the size of a kid's lunch box, so it's a telescope I can easily bring moto camping on the motorcycle.

I've seen results this good from people using this scope in Tokyo, so light pollution need not be a show stopper. Both the Astro and the Duo-band filter are pretty good at filtering out light pollution.

I put Windows on one of my laptops last night. Why? I "interviewed" for an IT position yesterday.
The township office that Jenn works in is losing their IT guy, he's moving away. It's about an 8 hour a MONTH job. I'm already in their payroll system since I was on standby for elections last year, and I figured "eh, it's something to do that's different, and I can't imagine it's easy to try to hire someone for 2 hours a week of work."
The "interview" was just sitting down with the current guy and giving him a quick history and some war stories.
Interviews are very stress free when you absolutely don't care if you get the job or not.
But of course it's an all Windows office. My primary laptop is a utility machine used to just carry around to troubleshoot, and to provide entertainment while on the road so I don't actually care what OS it's running. I default to Linux simply because it's easier and less headache than Windows.
Surprisingly SO FAR it hasn't been difficult to get Windows installed and up to date without connecting to a Microsoft account. We'll see if that continues; Windows in my experience will just pop up in the morning and say "Time's up no more running without an account for you." at random times, forcing another fight.

Been a while since I've updated.

Jenn went to Interlochen for band camp, I went up on Friday for the Saturday and Sunday concerts. I spent some of Saturday doing the M22 loop up into the pinkie and rode through Sleeping Bear Dunes. Very nice ride.
The concerts were, as expected, very good. I was impressed by Jenn's control over her horn, that horn is great and she's progressed a lot on it in the 2 years she's had it.

On the heels of the trip to the UP, I was looking for a more modern comfortable long distance touring bike. I'd been looking at a Yamaha FJR but had doubts since it's a very powerful bike, which I don't particularly need, and I'd have to get one 10 years old or less to get the features I really wanted (cruise control, traction control). While browsing Marketplace in the hotel in Traverse, I came across a 2007 BMW R1200RT in very good shape with only 11K on it for a good price. I texted the guy, and on Monday went home, hooked up the trailer and went and bought it. Nearly a month on I'm happy with the purchase. I think maybe I've got my keeper bikes now.

I actually stripped the CX down and am running it naked. It's fun in that configuration and I have the BMW as a fully faired highway machine now. The CX is also easier to deal with in the garage without all the stuff on it.

We also went up to the bridge walk as we have for years now. It was the nice weekend with friends that it has been in the past, a bit low key compared to some years. Most of us did the 10 mile round trip, two did half way out and back. We had to leave Monday afternoon even though we had the place until Tuesday, Jenn had a work thing in Lansing early Tuesday morning.

I also got around to doing something about fixing the bad job I did on the garage front gutter years ago. I tore all the plastic gutter with leaky joints down and replaced it with aluminum gutter in two 16 foot lengths with hopefully a watertight seal. We'll see.

I've got my annual physical coming up this week. I'm going to try to get the updated booster at that time, if not there I'll go over to CVS, and get the flu shot at the same time.

At the Wednesday motorcycle meetup last night, I got informed of a bike meetup in Milford. I'm terribly uninformed about these things. I had planned to go to the big event at the Gilmore museum on Saturday, but it sounds pretty hectic. I'm probably going to the Milford event instead. It sounds interesting. It's focused on vintage British motorcycles and to some extent cars and European bikes. I had planned on riding the Honda to Gilmore as it's the only > 25 year old bike I have, but for the Milford event I guess the BMW is the choice. I haven't had the BMW more than 30 miles from home yet (Monday rehearsal in Ypsi was the limit)

Speaking of, OLC's new season has started. Just barely, the first Monday is new member night and it's mostly getting people sorted into committees, intros, etc. We got maybe 20 minutes of very light rehearsal in and that was it. We have a new director, he seems good. I'm remaining in baritone.

The CX was feeling a little squirrelly on the way home yesterday, the TPMS read 0 PSI on both tires. The sensors had lost sync.
I got them resynced today and determined that the "low pressure alarm" doesn't actually work. This is integrated into an Android Auto screen.
I'm leaving them on for now but I'm ordering a dedicated TPMS display/alarm.
The yak shaving? I tried putting some air in the tires and was getting no flow through my air chuck. Investigation and partial disassembly revealed some insect cocoons in the pressure side. It took picks and some round wire brushes to get it all out, and some brake cleaner just because no job is complete until you spray some brake cleaner on it.

Yesterday I sold the 1977 Goldwing that I've been working on. It was interesting but in the end the main thing it taught me is that modern bikes are better than old bikes, except for the "interesting" factor. The ride, the performance and the reliability are all miles and miles ahead.
I still have the 1980 CX500 in the garage. I'm unsure what I'm going to do with it. I do like riding it but it does require frequent attention and it's not that it's really that fun to ride specifically, it's just very comfortable.
I think I'm going to put it on Marketplace for a reasonable price and see what happens. I'm OK with selling it, which I guess tells me what I need to know. I wouldn't want to sell the Tracer, at least without something to replace it.
Speaking of, I've been looking at sport tourers. The Tracer technically fits in that category but on longer trips it gets kind of uncomfortable. I've been looking at an FJR, but there are several other options in the category. BMW has a few as does Triumph and Honda. But the FJR seems to be the front runner for comfort and reliability which is kinda what I'm going for. I'd like to get a 2013 or newer to get cruise control and traction control, but man the temptation is there for a 2007 or so, which are going pretty cheap, like $4000 or so. But I guess I should get what I actually want instead of wishing I had. There's no rush, I'm going to watch for stuff. There's one I really like but it's almost 5 hours drive away.

I've been back from the picnic (in the Keweenaw) for a few days. Here's a quick recap.
Since I was on my own, I took the motorcycle. It's a nice drive but it's an even nicer ride. Highly recommended. Also being on the bike keeps my packing tighter. I actually still packed twice as much clothing and much more kitchen stuff than I actually used. I can tighten that up more next time.
The bike only has about a 180 mile range at highway speeds (80ish on some of the roads) so I had to stop at Claire, St Ignace and Marquette up and down.
I have mostly convinced myself to replace my entire stable, or at least most of it. I'm feeling like I'm pretty much over the older bikes. The Tracer is fantastic as a local bike; it's super versatile and agile. It's capable of long distances but it's not ideal; it gets uncomfortable after 5 hours or so and the range is a bit low. I'm sorta looking at an FJR1300. When I get rid of the Goldwing I'll start looking seriously. They're not hard to find for sale.
Lunch was at Hiawatha Pasties both up and down. It's about 45 minutes west of St Ignace in Naubinway. No bathrooms so I finally stuck my nose into the Snowmobile Museum for their bathroom, but I also browsed the gift shop and found a nice sticker for the bike. I really have no interest in snowmobiles so I didn't go in.
On the way up, on the approach to Munising, suddenly there was a slowdown and when I got closer there was a motorcycle down. I pulled into a driveway a few feet away and went to help. A woman on a beautiful Indian bagger was down. She was OK with just some scraping on her arms. The bike was just scraped a bit, it was a low speed incident. Her husband was on a matching (black instead of white) Indian. I helped him lift it (it was on its right side, I reminded him to put the side stand down before we lifted) and moved on. As I went into Munising a minute later there was a state cop and an ambulance on the way back.
I stopped at the Shrine of the Snowshoe Priest - dozens of times past there and I've never stopped before. There is a pile of markers there on HMDB so I got those as well, though I seem to have missed one.

I stayed at a friend's house in Laurium Mon-Wed evenings, going out during the day to hit some local historic markers and a couple of museums - the firefighter's museum in Calumet and the Houghton County Historical Museum in Lake Linden. The latter has a steam train but they only run it on Saturdays, so we were unable to ride that though we did ride a smaller gas powered train around the tracks.
I also finally visited the Italian Hall memorial site. I really should have gotten there earlier. The firefighter museum in town has the doors from the hall. I think they were the outer doors, not the inner, but touching them was still emotional.

I had planned to hit the site, set up my camp and help set up infrastructure on Wednesday, but it was raining steadily all day and the word was the porta potties were not yet on site, so I opted out. Thankfully everyone who was on site also decided to just sit it out.
Wednesday evening was at the house on the ridge, BYO takeout food and hang out.
Thursday I finally got to the site (it had stopped raining) and we got nearly everything set up - everything but the showers.

Thursday evening was pizza and hanging out on Mt Horace Greeley.

Friday morning we got the showers set up - wanting to TAKE a shower is a good motivation to work on it. There were some issues, there always are, mainly from trying to assemble a somewhat complex bit of random bits into something working before any of us were properly caffeinated, but in the end we got our showers.
My contribution was mainly wrangling.
Friday afternoon I went up and built the new sink platform from leftover plastic decking contributed by SK. When done I was reminded that plastic lumber is HEAVY and a 4x4 foot object does not fit in a passenger car. It was transported down Saturday morning by an attendee with a pickup, and we drilled the last few holes to bolt down the sink and manifold and put it in place.

Also, Kevin redid the entire filter and manifold assembly so in total, that area was much improved.

Friday afternoon and Saturday morning was more rain but nothing terrible. We sat it out and had a good Saturday for most of the day. There was a dawn double rainbow on Saturday.

Besides the aforementioned offsite food events, we had liquid nitrogen ice cream, carried in pasties, and a new addition, Sandy brought in a double pot deep fryer so we got on-site fresh french fries, experimental funnel cake things and jalapeno poppers.
The usual events had about the usual amount of unplanned but usually interesting or even exciting failures which are fun to look back on anyway and nobody required significant first aid. So it was a successful event!
One unfortunate thing was that JH's truck needed to be flat bedded out. While towing the trailer down, he noticed his steering felt wrong, and when investigated it turns out the tie rod was barely attached to the Pitman arm. He attempted to buy parts for an on-site repair but that didn't work out so he lined up a repair shop and a rental car.

The pavilion takedown is now MUCH easier - we do it as normal Saturday night but we have the trailer there so everything goes straight in and we never have to touch it until next year.
Sunday was as per normal. We announced water cutoff at 9AM, shut everything down and drained and put it away in the trailer. Everyone packed up the last of their stuff and we were off. Until next year...

The 2025 Erie Canal bicycle trip is in the books. It went quite well, the worst thing that happened was one of us slipped on a corner on sand and got a significant bruise on his calf requiring an ace wrap.
We skipped about 30 miles of it to make it manageable to finish Sunday - Monday was forecast to be in the 90s. We got by with only getting to about the mid 80s which was really just fine between moving and consuming a large quantity of water with LiquidIV in it (I've found this makes a huge difference in how I feel later in the day).
It's now 5 days on from getting home. Everything is put away, the bills are settled (everything went on my credit card and we settled after the trip).
I managed to mow the lawn on Wednesday - it was far too hot earlier and also raining periodically. Wednesday I found a window when it wasn't terribly hot and finished just in time for it to start raining again.
Now I need to start prepping for the UP trip. I pulled all of our camp chairs and tents out yesterday and today and set them up to confirm they are all OK (mice get to them sometimes). One repair was done, the rest are OK.
It's raining as I type this, the cold front is coming through, tomorrow should be much cooler (the temp already dropped nearly 20 degrees since the front moved in).
I found a video on a common problem with Goldwing carburetors, and did that fix yesterday. Today I tried starting it up and it does seem to run much more smoothly now though there's still a miss. I think the heads really should come off and the valves lapped - I will do a leak down test once I get the thing hot again; hopefully it's the heads/valves and not the rings.
I've converted it to mostly stock without the fairing up front, I like the look. It was originally in a blue/green color, I haven't decided if I'm going to repaint it. Official colors for 1977 were a blue/green, a candy red, and black. The year before there was a Sulfur Yellow which I quite like.

Wow it's been a while since I posted an update.
The motorcycle that I had just acquired in the last post is running, but not well. It needs some work. Either a valve or a ring job. I'll be getting to that in a few weeks probably. I did a TON of stuff to it; there are photos and writeups on dragonflydiy.com though I doubt anyone cares.
This is concert week for Out Loud Chorus which I sing in. Monday is band rehearsal, plus load out of the risers from our rehearsal space and a bass sectional, so quite busy (and a late night) for me.
Those risers need to get out of my trailer sometime that week because I need the trailer for something else Saturday/Sunday (the church's rummage sale will finish Saturday and the leftovers need to be dispersed to Goodwill or whatever). That's not scheduled but will probably have to happen during the day at some point. Saturday morning may very well be the only chance since most people will be unable to do it during the day and evenings are full.
Tuesday evening is a going-away party for a former coworker-then-boss who is taking a new job.
Wednesday is tech rehearsal with the choir, which is usually a long slog.
Thursday is dress rehearsal, then Friday and Saturday are concert evenings.
Sunday is a lawn mowing day (I HOPE it doesn't rain) because on Monday I drive, picking up some friends, to Albany where we will overnight then start the 380 miles of the Erie Canal bike path. We're expecting to spend 8 days on that.
I have been doing SOME training on the bike, though probably not enough. I'm not concerned though, we're only shooting for 50 mile days and I'm confident I can hammer those out for 8 days. If not, this time we will have my truck tagging along in case someone has a bad day or an injury.
Things around the house are ticking along. Of course there's always a bunch of stuff to do, a bunch that doesn't get done, etc. I have some deck projects that I need to get to. We have been doing some plant moving, since the removal of the giant cottonwood trees a couple of years ago really rearranged what parts of the yard get sun, so some plants do worse, but also some plants that had not been doing all that well can now be moved to sunnier areas.

So the GL1500 Goldwing came and went. It was just too much everything. Too heavy, too big, way too much plastic. I mean it did all the things but I just didn't like it.
But I still had this itch and yesterday I connected with what will hopefully be a good travel companion, a 1977 Goldwing GL1000.
It's much smaller (about 600 pounds versus 850 for the GL1500), and it's more of a classic motorcycle than the plastic barge that the previous one was.
It needs a lot of attention. The primary one is that the starter clutch is (apparently) not functional. This isn't a big deal to change other than the engine needs to come out and the rear case opened. Again, not a big deal just time consuming.
Also every single cable is stuck, the front brakes are sticky, the rear brake pedal doesn't move at all.
Honestly I'm happy. I don't think anything on it is actually badly broken, just in need of TLC.

I've been doing a lot of reading, and a lot of working on my old motorcycle.

The latter is at a reasonable stopping point, the only things remaining are that I have new mufflers to install, for which I'm waiting for parts on Monday, and I have a cruise control to install. The only holdup there is trying to do a decent job of hiding the ugly bits and fitting everything into a pretty small space. The bike is running otherwise.

A few weeks ago I got the rose bush ripped out from around the deck. The project there is to replace the skirting. I need to decide how I'm going to anchor all that stuff. I'm going to use a tighter mesh than last time, and hopefully anchor it better, to keep critters (skunks, raccoons, cats, etc) from going under there. I think the big problem will be anchoring it at the bottom. I'll probably have to bury something then run rails, but unless it goes a way into the ground critters will just dig under it.

I need to start doing regular bike rides, I have the Erie Canal trip coming up in mid June and I need to be in shape for consecutive 80 mile days. The plan is for less than that, but things happen and sometimes you have long days, and I'd rather train for a bit more than is needed.

I'm also itching to restart the historical marker rambles; for both that and bike riding I'm just waiting for warmer days, but that's just me being lazy, it's not really a problem to do either of these on 50+ degree days.

I also need to move the strawberry beds; they don't get enough sun and with the big cottonwoods gone there's now a much better spot farther down the hill. I'll probably use new lumber and will definitely get a fresh batch of compost. The beds in front of the house could use some new compost as well. The west bed isn't much of a problem since it has large plants in it and I can just shovel compost in around them. The east bed though is largely ground cover and mosses and short of inventing a method of lifting the whole bed in the air and inserting compost underneath, there's not a lot I can do.

I've been badly negligent in posting. Here's a quick recap

Back in February I bought a very cheap Honda Goldwing motorcycle, a 1997 model with 150,000 miles on it. 150K isn't bad at all for a Goldwing, they easily do 300K and more. I spent 6 or so weeks on it, replacing a ton of dodgy hack jobs and some worn out stuff. I got it rideable, rode about 400 miles on it, and determined that I don't like big bikes. It's in excess of 800 pounds without a rider. So I'm putting it up for sale for what I have into it. It'll probably go pretty quickly.
I'm not sad about this, there was an even chance it would go this way and I have it out of my system.

I'm getting ready for an 8 day bicycle ride in June. A few friends and I are going to ride the Erie Canal, about 400 miles between Buffalo and Albany. The plan is to have one chase driver in my pickup, who will be enjoying the sights on her own and meeting up with us end of day and possibly for lunch, whatever she likes. The rest of us will be on the trail. Since it's a canal path, it should be extremely flat, moreso even than rail-trails. We're meeting up in Buffalo with a couple from PA, leaving their car, piling into the pickup, going to Albany, then the next morning starting the ride.

My project/hobby of visiting historical markers (a thinly-disguised excuse to ride my motorcycle around to random places) got unmanageable the way I was doing it, so I'm currently spending hours moving everything to a blog. The idea is to also incorporate days out at museums, probably natural attractions, and anything else that I can in some way claim are 'historic'.

In the unlikely event that you're interested, or if you need help falling asleep, it's at historicrides.blogspot.com

I'm still singing with Out Loud Chorus, an LGBTQ+/allies choir in Ann Arbor. They outgrew their rehearsal space on the west side of Ann Arbor and are now in Ypsi, so I have about twice as far to go. Gives me an excuse to ride the bike a bit farther though honestly buzzing 70 MPH down the expressway for 30 miles at night isn't a particular treat.

We still have two cats. Jiji is pushing 18 years old now and is still in relatively good health. He has hyperthyroidism which is under control with meds. His weight is lower than I'd like but it's stable and he seems fine there so I don't worry about it much. He sleeps a whole lot, but he's a cat and it's still cold out. He still gets the rips from time to time and an occasional frolic isn't unheard-of.

I've been pushing on divesting myself of stuff I haven't used in a long time. Some amount of DSLR camera gear has gone though I still have the 80D.

There is, of course, an unending list of little things that need doing around the house and grounds. And because there's no end to them, there's sometimes little urge to start. But I do try to get to a couple a week especially if it is nice out.

Here's where I make a pledge to update here more often. It's a dirty lie.

TTFN y'all.

So in no particular order:
I spent a chunk of the last week working on the Yamaha. The story goes on forever, so I've moved it to my blog here: http://www.dragonflydiy.com/2024/12/yamaha-valve-adjustment-horror.html

Yesterday I went to the public Messiah sing in Ann Arbor, which was fun. I saw a couple of people from Out Loud, and it turns out the president of the group is an Out Loud alumni from way back.

I've been working on my old 3D printer for a couple of months.

I let the pond waterfall pump go too long, at least twice, and paid for it yesterday when I had to hook up a hose to the water heater, pull it out to the pond and use it to melt through several inches of ice to get the pump out before it froze and broke.

I got around to fixing the shower door a few days ago. One of the glass clips had a bunch of corrosion under it and it rust jacked the clip to where it was hitting other hardware, and broke the clip. I 3D printed a replacement clip, then had to excise a bunch of corrosion and rotten metal under where the clip was, and replace that with JB Kwik epoxy. One of the spring rollers was rusted solid and the other was very stiff. I got those both freed up, cleaned and dumped a bunch of silicone grease inside to try to stave off corrosion in the future.

I've come to the conclusion that I really will not ever be carrying an SLR around in the future. My purpose for photography is saving memories, and I can do that just fine with a phone or point and shoot camera. When I get back from the upcoming trip I'm going to start parting out my SLR gear. I also have some other stuff that I need to move - a Fender amp/speaker and some other stuff. I MIGHT get a new point and shoot camera; I was reasonably happy with Jenn's that I borrowed for the UK trip but it's 10 years old and the output shows it, particularly in the video recordings.

I really need to start cranking on memorization of the pieces for the Out Loud concert coming up. Especially the pieces that include choreography.

Oh right. I'm trying to move my social media presence towards BlueSky. A bunch of friends have established presences there. The lack of friends on a site is the reason I've not gone to several of them. Hopes high for BlueSky - quite a few prominent folks have already been there for a long time and post frequently so I'm hopeful.
Install the app or go to bsky.app to get started.

johnridley

Last week was entirely consumed with fighting my 3D printer. It's been working well for 3 or 4 years since I got it but last week (of course when I had a printing deadline) it just wouldn't co-operate. I had ruined prints one after another. Just couldn't figure it out. In the end I wasn't able to fulfill the order, took what I had to the con and promised to ship the rest later.
When I got back, I decided it was time for a new printer. I have a new Creality K1C in the shop and I'm very pleased with it. It prints about 2 or 3 times faster than the old one and produces much higher quality prints.
I also did some work on the old printer; determined after a LOT of headache that the electronics board was faulty in some minor but irritating way. I ripped its brains out and put in some old RAMPS/Arduino stuff I had lying in the junkbox, and now it's printing happily. It's going to be my test bed for future experiments. I hadn't really paid attention to the 3D printing world for the last 5 years and I missed a LOT. There's some really cool stuff that's all open source that I can experiment with.
Anyway, Windycon was pretty good but short. Seems like we barely got there and we were going back home.

On the computer front, between the new printer software and Zoom and some other resource-hungry applications, the 10 year old tower PC just ain't cutting it anymore. Yesterday I swapped it out for the new laptop that I bought last month, which is an 8th gen i5. Should be good enough. I dug around in the junk boxes and found the old USB C hub I used when working from home, and a 150 watt USB C power supply I rescued from the trash at work, and I have an extension cable and a 10 port hub on the way from Amazon, so I can just plug into the USB C port and charging and everything else run through that. So far it's looking OK - though my old slicing software, Cura, isn't happy; it won't load models. But I did get the new Creality software to export a usable print file for the old machine so maybe I don't care.

Our water here destroys the anodes in water heaters, making a hydrogen sulfide smell while it's at it. I think we got past that with the old water heater because the anode was eventually completely eaten away. With the new one, a few weeks on and suddenly we have a TERRIBLE sulfur smell.

Normal anodes are zinc, they create a small dielectric current that eats away at them instead of the tank. They're sometimes called "sacrificial" anodes. They're technically meant to be replaced occasionally because they get chewed up. This is all by design.

The problem is that there's a bacteria that thrives in the conditions caused by the zinc anode along with sulfur and iron in the water.

I did a bit of research and the best solution seems to be a powered anode. It's a short piece of titanium, and a small power supply. The idea is that the titanium does NOT get eaten up, but the power supply creates the same protective effect but does not give the bacteria a place to thrive.

An alternative method is to shock chlorinate the water but this is a huge pain in the butt and has to be done at least once a year on average. It involves dumping bleach down the well, running every faucet and toilet and shower until you smell chlorine, then leaving the water system unused for 24 hours (you can't use water during this time), and then flushing that all out again. For $150 I think the powered anode is a better idea.

With a normal water heater doing the replacement is super easy. With the hybrid, a bit less so but still not terrible. I had to cut power, disconnect the wiring, drain the hot water, remove the steel top, then spin the old anode out and install the new anode. There's a bit of force involved, it's a big threaded thing. 1/2" drive socket, a long extension and a breaker bar got the job done.

I put a valve in the hot water outlet side as well. It's not required but I decided I wanted one there.

The product:

The old anode rod:

The new one installed:

I did a full write-up of the laundry room project here:
http://www.dragonflydiy.com/2024/10/laundry-room-refresh.html

It's time for computer musical chairs again. My brother's laptop finally died - it's like 13 years old and is physically wrecked and super slow anyway. I gave him the Inspiron that I had been using as a travel laptop - which gets used maybe 2 hours a year. And I found the newer version of that which is new enough to run Win11, with USB C and m.2 slots, for about $200 refurbed with a year warranty on eBay. So that's showing up today.
But I still have a few things I need Windows on my main desktop for, and I have an old laptop running Win10 for the security cameras, so I decided to combine the two. Jenn's old desktop is sitting unused, so why not that. While grabbing it, I realized that my day-to-day usage is much less intensive than running the security cams, and running Insta360. And also if I'm shuffling things anyway the machine that runs Windows should be Win11 capable, to keep getting updates.
So Jenn's 10 year old desktop is now running Linux Mint and is my primary desktop that I'm typing on now. The newish Dell that I've been running will be running Windows 11 with security cams plus the scanner, printer, and Insta360.
I had to do some creative stuff to get the monitors working with the old machine, starting with griping that I'd JUST thrown away my last VGA cable, and now I could use it. But I did find a combo of cables that got both monitors working.

The laundry room is in "operational" status - drywall and painting, flooring are done, machines and sink are operational. What is left to do is the cabinetry. We know what we want, I just need to do measurements and then put together a buy list and get to the store, pick up all the bits and assemble them.

Also, the air return from the 2nd floor needs to be finished. The sheet metal brake came in on Saturday. It's huge and I need to go and pick up a table for it to sit on. Again, I know exactly what I'm doing to do with it, I just need to get it done. Then the air return is about a day's work - some sheet metal work in the upstairs, and some cutting and metalwork in the basement.

I went to a funeral on Saturday. We're getting a lot of those lately but at least most of them are people in their 80s and 90s so not really tragic, just inevitable.

I had a smallish project turn into a laundry room remodel.
Step one is nearly finished - getting the 30 year old gas water heater out of the first floor laundry room and putting a heat pump heater in the basement.
There were no unexpected incidents. I had one solder joint leak that I had a hard time fixing - somehow there was water in the pipe even though it had a clear drain. I finally jacked the pipe up a bit to make the water flow away and got it fixed.
I bought the tools and used PEX for this. Damn I should have switched from copper to PEX decades ago. SO much better. I see why plumbers don't use copper anymore unless the job specification requires it - and I don't know why anyone would ask for it. So much easier to work with, basically zero chance of a installation failure that are more common with copper, and easy to rework without having to drain the whole system.
Anyway it's in and working. Couple of little things - condensate drain and overheat relief valve need piping on them. And of course I made a gigantic mess. And the rest of the project is yet to come.

Gotta find out when the county recycling event is so I can get rid of that water heater.

Slightly light crew for the walk. Jenn waived off due to back trouble. I rode up with Clark and Margaret, Gabe drove up by himself, all on Friday. Bill showed up on Sunday afternoon.

We did a little less eating out in the mornings; I made pancakes, sausage and eggs to general acclaim (of others not having to cook :) ) But we did get to Darrow's twice and Step Inn after the walks, then Noka Cafe in Topinabee Tuesday morning on our way out.

The walk itself held no surprises. Everyone did the out and back 10 miles. It was good to see Gabe able to walk distances again.

2/3 of the vehicles parked at the lodge this year were electric. There is a pretty fast charger in Cheboygan and on the way up we used one in Mt Pleasant at Pizza King, which also has amazing subs.