On our way home, we decided to swing by Lincoln Park Zoo. Given the cold and the outdoor nature of the zoo, we decided to park and go for a bit of a stroll.
Translation: we wanted to go see the seals. And by we, I mean Liz.
Liz and I are both on vacation, and we’ve been doing this one day on one day off kind of thing. One day focusing on the house, another day relaxing and doing our own stuff.
Turns out what I needed to do was use vase mode, which doesn’t fill the object completely. Attempt #2 printed in markedly less time, and I was able to go slightly bigger in size (I think the actual model is maybe twice as big as what I did here).
We had a lot of drywall and plywood, which had been stored in the kitchen while we got our first floor installed. Moved all this out so I could actually get to the wall itself.
Several hours in the bath is just the start of the work. After each grate is taken out of the bath it’s scrubbed clean in the sink, brushed again in the basement with a steel brush (in all the nooks and crannies), then given some oil, then the whole grate is heated on the grill, then brought back inside brushedit’s heated (out on the grill), then brought inside to have a layer of wax applied, and then baked again.
he whole process for prepping and cleaning each grate is actually incredibly time-intensive.
Liz remarked: “You’re going to have a desk full of tchotchkes,” and I really can’t argue with that.
Guess what I got for Christmas? I’ll give you 3D guesses.
It was a tough decision for us, but Liz and I decided to visit Valparaiso for a brief Christmas evening with Bob and Julie.
As part of our errands a few days ago, Liz stocked up on several items from Home Depot to try her hand at removing rust via electrolysis. We’ve got several items to clean, and one of the bigger ones are the cast iron vent covers from the first floor.
Apparently, the color was due to the shellac used, and has required several rounds of cleaning to get to this point. I think Liz mentioned that she stripped this three times, and there was still shellac seeping up through the pours (and eventually she just had to stop).
The COVID vaccine currently being shipped around the country—manufactured by Pfizer and BioNTech and granted an emergency use authorization on Friday—needs to be stored at -94 degrees Fahrenheit, or else important components can degrade.
[…]
Keeping millions of doses that chilly is no easy task, and necessitates what manufacturers call a “cold chain”: an infrastructure that standardizes temperature throughout every step of shipping and delivery.
On first viewing, I thought the story was a kind of time travel thing, where the older man in the video was present day… and the couple was from an earlier time. When I realized they were different people, I thought “Oh, you bastards.”
At times, I found myself getting bored and being done with being around people. At other times, I remembered why everyone had on a mask and got even more uncomfortable being around people. Even after all this isolation, I don’t find myself craving crowds; it’s the same feeling: get away, get home.
I’ve tried to do some of these in my spare time, outside of work. Sadly, I’m a bit behind and it’s been harder to keep motiviated the further behind I get. I also realize that my “outside of work” relaxation involves code for imaginary problems that don’t exist. It’s technically me “unwinding from work,” but kinda not?
I recently thought about a song I really liked, that I hadn’t heard in a long while: “On the Edge of Morning,” by The Wallings Jr.