one monkey typing

We had a few days of exceptionally warm weather, up in the 50s. That was nice, the snow mostly went away, but it seems to have snowed about 2 inches (on a 0.6" forecast) overnight. We'll see how that clears by Monday night when I have rehearsal in Ypsi.

I found and bought an industrial drill press off Marketplace. It was listed as having issues, but the only thing I needed to do to get it working was to replace the control transformer and rewire the motor, it had been wired incorrectly for 120, I rewired it for 240. It's OK as is though it's kind of noisy. I sort of suspect a bad bearing somewhere. There's a knocking that could be a bearing under side load.

I guess Capricon happened since last update. That was nice, my goal at conventions is to catch up and visit with friends and that happened.

I've decided to slack off on the gym a bit, or at least not sweat it if I have something else to do or the weather is bad. I'm making progress there but no need to go crazy.

Planning is proceeding for the Isle Royale trip. There's not THAT much planning to do, just bring a sleep system and food and a way to prepare the food. And of course book passage to and from.

I also have a couple of things I'd like to build for the event afterwards, neither of them terribly difficult, I just need to get going on it but probably not until there's decent weather. One of them is probably a one day build, the other 3 or 4 days. Still, better to finish early.

Over the last couple of weeks I did some wiring and lighting updates on the cargo trailer.

I added a 7 pin trailer connector in parallel with the 4 pin that was already there. That gave me a reverse light and a 12V power circuit in addition to basic lights.

I removed the anemic little single bulb interior light fixture and replaced them with three nice bright LED panels, and added some diodes so that they can be run from either the tail light circuit or +12 volts.

Then I put in two bright white LED floods pointing down at an angle on the top rear of the trailer. These can be switched on manually to power them from either +12 or the tail light circuit, or they automatically come on when the vehicle is in reverse.

The interior lights are nice, and the rear floods make it much easier to back the trailer back up the driveway in the dark.

While I had the interior paneling off I realized that nothing in the side walls of the trailer has any strength whatsoever apart from keeping the weather out, so I moved the e-track from the walls to the floor. There are also six D rings set into the floor so there are a lot of tie-down options.

The choir concert is coming up end of next week. That whole week will be busy, band rehearsal on Monday, tech at the auditorium on Wednesday, dress on Thursday, then concerts Fri/Sat. Also there has been riser transport this past week, and will be again on the last rehearsal space rehearsal, then again to return them to storage (probably week after concert). At least then there's a week off before Capricon.

My calendar popped up to "think about the August solar eclipse" - I did for about 15 seconds and dismissed it. It's a late evening eclipse, only 10 or 15 degrees off the horizon, and only visible from the tip of Spain and southern Iceland. Not a great prospect. 2027 is a LITTLE better - good timing but southern tip of Spain, then through Morocco across northern Africa into Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Also, very unlikely for me. I think probably mainland Europe/UK, maybe Asia, certainly Australia, or South America are candidates for me.

Speaking of travel, at the NYE party, Sam brought up the Isle Royale trip I'd sort of mentioned earlier in the year - can't remember when, either at Windycon or at the summer event. I had half forgotten about it, but he's game and now it seems like >50% likely to happen and discussions and recruitment has started. Which means I need to start training - building up to 30 pound backpacks for 10 miles. I don't think it'll be a problem but we'll see.

Speaking of exercise, the workout app I paid a subscription for continues to work for me. It's keeping me motivated, the goal is 4 days a week. I also put in one or two 10K runs. Probably should be two. When I was doing a 10K every day they got pretty easy. At one a week, not so much.

I'm getting deeper into stuff working for Lyndon Township as IT support. The day to day stuff I have down, now I'm digging in to the task of extracting things from the last guy's accounts. There are many places that send him important things like invoices and notices. I'm slowly unpicking those and getting them documented and moved over. I understand this kind of thing - it took me a year to unpick my OWN stuff when I was approaching retirement, I know how over the years you just set stuff up and don't really write it down or remember it, just deal with it when it happens. My goal is to make this a transparent position that can be transferred easily.

I've been pacing out my platelet donations a bit better. Rather than every week, I'm shooting for every two. Working around holidays and vacations. 2025 was my 3rd year getting on the plaque - 18 or more platelet donations in one year. I think I was at 23 for 2025.

The weather has been one of those weird Januarys - 15 degrees, 60 degrees, 20 degrees, snow, rain etc. I've been able to ride the motorcycle enough to stay sane so it's all good. The warm/cold is actually worse for making ice though.

A couple of weeks ago I had a ride home from rehearsal at 1*F low - the visor at those temps becomes unmanageable and it's a fight with time - eventually it WILL ice up no matter how I crack it or whatever. And even normally there's a battle with fog - especially when it's raining. I heard a podcast talking about a heated visor - but the one they were selling was > $200. I found one on AliExpress for about $45. That came in, I installed it and it works very well. Also it connects to my normal heated gear as an accessory so it's minimal extra dorking about, just one plug in. Very happy with that.

In late December, I finally bought a Sony RX100 - I'd been wanting one of those cameras for about 3 or 4 years. They are expensive and I've been disappointed by popular tech in the past, so I went with the RX100 Mk1 - it's about 14 years old at this point and resale value is steady, so I could just resell it.
I used it over new year's and within half a day of using it, I knew I wanted to upgrade.
Looking at all 8 of the models that have been released, I decided the Mk6 is the one. The only one newer is the 7 and it's several hundred more and all it really adds is an external microphone jack, which I'm ambivalent about.

They're expensive ($900) so I not only sold the Mk1 (went in an hour for what I paid for it) but started putting other stuff I have not used in years up, and some of that went quickly as well. I'm positioned to buy one now but I'm going to wait for a credit card cycle so I'm not skimming too close to zero in my checking account.

I got rid of all my SLR equipment because even though I like photography, 90% of the time it's just snapshots for memories. I really never have the ambition to lug around an SLR. The RX100 is QUITE compact but they wedge in as close to a pro camera as they can. For travel I think it's about perfect.

I'm not going to finish any more books in the next 2 days so I'm getting this done now.

2025 totals: 103 books, 34,250 pages. Significantly down from some recent years, but this year I set my goal at only 50 and didn't put any thought into reaching any goals, I just read when I felt like it.

Linked here is my 2025 recap.

Looking through the list below, what gets me rollin' is humor, relationships, and, I suppose, romance. Huh. Who'da thought?

And of course a good story.

Stand out reads for the year that I gave 5 stars:
* Chimes at Midnight (Seanan McGuire, October Daye #7)
* Even Though I Knew The End (C.L. Polk)
* When The Moon Hits Your Eye (John Scalzi)
* The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle (T.L. Huchu, Edinburgh Nights #3)
* The Legacy of Arniston House (T.L. Huchu, Edinburgh Nights #4)
* The Brightest Fell (Seanan McGuire, October Daye #11
* This Is How You Lose the Time War (Amal El-Mohtar)
* Lost in the Moment and Found (Seanan McGuire, Wayward Children #8)
* Paladin's Grace (T. Kingfisher, The Saint of Steel #1)
* The House in the Cerulean Sea (T.J. Klune, Cerulean Chronicles #1)
* The Shattering Peace (John Scalzi, Old Man's War #7)
* Paladin's Strength (T. Kingfisher, The Saint of Steel #2)
* Paladin's Hope (T. Kingfisher, The Saint of Steel #3)
* Paladin's Faith (T. Kingfisher, The Saint of Steel #4)
* A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking (T. Kingfisher)
* What Moves the Dead (T. Kingfisher, Sworn Soldier #1)
* Somewhere Beyond the Sea (T.J. Klune, Cerulean Chronicles #2)
* Slayers of Old (Jim C. Hines)
* Brigands and Breadknives (Travis Baldree, Legends & Lattes #2)
* A Jesuit's Guide to the Stars (Guy Consolmagno)
* The Unkindest Tide (Seanan Mcguire, October Daye #13)

I've made good progress on cleaning my room. Heck I can walk through it without stepping over stuff.
I'm also keeping up the pace on scanning old negatives and slides, and tossing them into a box for disposal when they're scanned. There's quite a heap over there in the corner but I'll get through it eventually. I have plans to rearrange slightly when that space is available.

We're going to NC next week. There's a slight urge to bring a small telescope, but honestly I won't have a chance to use it even if I did have it with me so there's not much point. We will be busy the whole time I'm sure. Maybe binoculars...

I chose South Lyon again as the Tuba Christmas event to go to, but when I got there, it was cancelled due to building issues. So an hour driving the truck for no reason.

Yesterday I redid the salt level sensor I built for the water softener a couple of years back. It has been working but not reliably - it stops reporting every day or three at random and needs to be reset, which kind of defeats the purpose. I didn't change the design or parts or anything, I just re-imaged with a 3 year newer version of ESPHome, and I hope that bugs have been fixed such that it doesn't have those problems anymore. Only time will tell.

The weather the last few days has been not the best. It snowed a bunch (maybe 6 inches?) then warmed up to 35, the snow turned to sticky gunk, then it rained but not enough to clear the snow, then it froze hard. In the middle there we tried to clear the snow. That did lead to the rain freezing to a hard cover, but at least it has a chance of clearing in the driveway next time there's good sun or above freezing weather. I find that if the driveway and the road in front of our house is good, I can safely ride a motorcycle, other than a few places where they have gravel parking lots (share house for instance) - they will still be icy.

I went to the gym yesterday and did not do so well. In hindsight I guess it could be because of the platelet donation the previous day, but it also could be that it had been 4 or 5 days since the last upper body day. I need to not take that long of a break. I dropped back to 4 days a week in the gym on the recommendation of the app I'm using, partly because December is busy enough that shooting for 5 days a week is difficult some weeks, but I'm planning to go back to 5 days when we get back from NC.

I got my old/experimental 3D printer back on its feet. It's still not printing quite as well as the Creality right out of the box but I'm getting it better. The last thing I did was to have it re-home the Z axis after warmup - if it homed cold then heated up, the print bed was too high and the head was dragging on the bed. Apparently the bed swells enough during heating to make a significant difference, because adding that final Z home just before printing fixed that issue.

I'm also in the process of trying to clean up the video and stuff on my storage devices. I'm recoding the archival copies of full runs of TV shows and stuff into x.265 - it saves space, sometimes a lot of space - I've seen 2GB video files go down to 500MB and still look about as good.

I'm currently powering through DS9 - I haven't seen all the shows, probably about half across the whole run, maybe less. First season was all re-watches but it's been so long that I needed it. I'm also behind on Strange New Worlds and Discovery. Discovery I honestly don't like all that much, and I'm afraid I'm in the "I think I'm just going to forget this series ever happened" camp to some extent. Or treat it as a non-canon type thing.

Since my early October post:

I've been getting up to speed working as (very) part time IT and website support for Lyndon Township. It's interesting and pretty straightforward. I did need to call their paid support a couple of times to get the admin rights on their domain that I'm supposed to have. I had a couple of things I didn't do correctly, but I think I'm on track now.

I'm working on a pretty large project for the choir I'm in; scanning the entire music library. J.S. is working on this as well. I've dragged out an old Epson Workforce printer that only really works as a scanner, and have been using that - it's a lot faster than my old flatbed.

I've got probably something like 40 to 60 hours of scanning in by now and am just over half done. I am probably underestimating that time, I'm putting in 4+ hours a day and have been for weeks.

I've been going a bit overboard on the astronomy front. First I bought a mount for the Maksutov that I've had for years. It shipped on a little table-top mount, I wanted something a bit nicer. I found this mount for $300, which is a heck of a deal. It connects via wifi to a tablet and not only tracks but does full go-to.


The Makustov optical tube is very sharp. I had it out last night, again the seeing was terrible, but it was getting stars to pin sharp focus, and Jupiter was sharp as well. Little maks are known for good stellar/planetary views.

Windycon 2025 marked the 50th anniversary of the accepted "formation" of General Technics. I spent the weeks leading up to it prepping a couple of decor items for the GT room. First, the beach ball monster/pet from Dark Star, which hung out on the bed in the suite:


And secondly, a cake topper. It has all the circuitry for 24 LEDs on a circuit board that spins around at about 10 to 15 times per second and displays the GT logo, the phrase "50 YEARS!" and a graphic of a ray gun, rendered in glorious 96x24 resolution. It's also nearly impossible to take a good photo of. But a whole lot of people tried, so I call that a success.


On the 12th I found a first-generation Meade 8 inch LX200 telescope over in Grand Rapids for a reasonable price. Generally the guidance on this is to not pay more for the whole telescope than you would for just the optical tube, since the mounts are at this point 30+ years old electronics and are not known for super reliability. I got it for just about the right price I think. About 20% of what they sold for new and that's not accounting for inflation.

I've gotten it out once and though the seeing was terrible that night (turbulent atmosphere) I was pretty pleased with the view of the Orion nebula that I got. The optics, at least, are good and the electronics seem to work well. All I really did to it was to replace the capacitors in the hand controller (a known failure point) and buy some stuff - a new diagonal and a dew shield - and made a way to power it off a USB power bank.

Finally, just a few days ago, I caved on a telescope that's been on marketplace for weeks. I've been watching it for 6 weeks. It's the telescope that I was thinking of building. But this scope went for less than I'd have to pay for just the mirror. An 18" f/4.2 mirror is in the $6000 range. I paid less than that for this whole scope.
The mirror does show signs of being 15 years old - lots of little pinholes in the coatings. I can get it recoated, but honestly I don't think the coatings are bad enough to merit that for now. Probably in a year or so.
It looks a bit manky in this photo, but that's because I just pulled it out of the truck when I got home and tossed it together enough to roll it into the garage.


It needs some cleaning up. It's got some accessories that I'm not sure I really want. There's a wifi box that allows it to connect to a phone for navigation. It's got every dew heater known to science. I'm starting by pretty much removing all that stuff; when I had my 15" I had a navigation box, and I honestly never used it.

One thing that's clear to me having gotten most of these scopes out, is that I need to refamiliarize myself with the sky. I have a heck of a time finding alignment stars for these. Particularly the LX200, it has a VERY small number of alignment stars.

Also I need to get a better optical finder on the LX200, the stock one is pretty bad. And I need to get a red dot on there as well.

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.

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.

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...

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.