Pirates Day

Argh, I am a disabled PIRATE! Heh, yeah eye patch, plastic hook, plastic peg leg, but I'm still smiling! No, it's not the rum.

Spent a few minutes setting up the RFID kit from parallax.com. It works and works with processing. It hooks up through a FTDI usb thingamabob and processing reads the serial input and prints it on a window. I will have to figure out what I want it to do. I really don't know processing but will learn, probably.
One small step at a time. Peg leg you know.



Had my impacted wisdom tooth cracked out of my mouth Friday. I'm feeling the ever loving pain of mortality. 2 more to go, but the Doc says they should be easy. Especially after this one. I ask him if the roots were twisted, he say "No, real heavy though." Actually I thought it went much better than the last, a lot less twisting and tugging this time. More grinding and cutting and chipping, I was brushing tooth pieces off my shirt after the surgery when I was getting ready to go.

On the bright side when the Nurse took my vitals my BP was 122/70. I asked her if they had the vitals from the last time, from a few years ago and they did it was 140/90 or somewhere like that. I had borderline high BP a few years ago but since I have fit up I am much better.

I asked the Doctor if I should cut back on any activities after the surgery. I was thinking of biking and uni cycling and generally beating the crap out of myself. His reply stuck me as funny, he said to use common sense. I pressed for details. He opined that I would not be going to the gym. After the Nurse was briefing me on the medications and was more specific that I not do any physical activity for the next couple days as it could cause the clot to loosen and make the healing slower and the pain greater. I did take the rest of Friday and Saturday off on physical activities, and stuck to watching movies and playing with legos. Though I did rassle a few tag sale deals that required me to move and such. The big one was I got a commercial Singer Sewing Machine. It is a double stitching machine. I have to get a manual for it. I was hoping to find a free online copy of the manual but no luck so far.

Was unhappy about the rain this morning but dragged myself out to do some yard cleanup, busted up some old picket fence for garbage collection, and the sun did break out, and stayed out. So with that the N and S and I did something we like to do but have not done recently, we took things apart. Usually they are broken but sometimes they are just obsolete. We took a tv/vcr apart, N had the idea that the plastic case would make a nice "box" to tote his stuff in. Mostly stuff from a lexmark printer and the insides of a keyboard we/he took apart. S took a free mountain bike apart, and spent a lot of time making jokes about "hey there is something wrong with my bike" while play riding the frame.

I learned how not to remove the cotters from a rusty old bike, (if you want to use them again" Fortunatey the bottom bracket was pretty crudded up so no great loss.

Oh I also got around to using the oxy acetylene cutting torch on the bolts holding the cab of the dodge to the frame. It was fun using fire and oxygen to burn away the bolts, molten steel is exciting. Turns out gravity and rust are big parts of holding the cab on also. Didn't get around to ripping it off with power equipment. I will try to gently remove it with large crowbars and breaker bars later, or at least loosen it. Small but continuous progress will prevail, eventually.