Up On The Roof

As I've mentioned previously, my roof was not installed especially well by the previous owner. I'm pretty sure it's got two layers of shingles, which isn't a good start, and either the shingles themselves are very old or they were the cheapest brand on the shelf. That said, the north side is at least not doing too badly.

At least where "not doing too badly" is a highly relative term. Most of the aggregate is staying put, but there's a lot of places where nails are popping up through the shingle tabs, or where the shingles were just nailed in clear out in the open in the first place.

The south side is, naturally, weathering a bit quicker. It's still basically holding together but also has its share of nail pops and so on. The major issue, however, is the ridge shingles.

A few weeks ago, after a particularly blustery day, I noticed the corner of a shingle on the ground in front of my house. A quick peek at my roof revealed that one of the ridge shingles had become dislodged and the corners of a few of them had snapped off. So, it was time to get up on the roof again.

There wasn't  much I could do about the missing corners, but thankfully ridge shingles are mostly decorative anyway, so the important thing was to just make sure the nails got sealed up. This photo also shows a good example of one of the many misplaced nails on the roof.

I also went down the line and used the cold patch schmoo to glue down the corners of the ridge shingle tabs to hopefully keep them from lifting and snapping off in future wind storms, and to keep them from shifting around in general since they aren't remarkably well secured to begin with.

Eventually I'll just need to get a new roof put on, but this should help keep things from leaking for a little while longer.

A Real Shitty Situation

The chicken manure I bought yesterday wasn't going to do any good just sitting in a pile on my patio, so I decided that this morning would be a good time to spread it out on the lawn.

There we are, another job well done.

I'm kidding of course, laying out the bags like this helps to plan out the spreading. If the bags are evenly placed, then the mounds will be evenly spaced, and the spreading will go smoothly without having to drag a bunch of material from one area to another.

I gotta say, it must be one hell of a big chicken to drop piles of dung this size.

While we're at it with the tips and tricks, the best way to empty bags of material like this is to split it open down the middle, then flip it over and fold it in half. Then you're just basically pulling the plastic bag off the pile, rather than lifting everything up to dump it out.

And of course a garden trowel with a serrated edge is the perfect tool for the job of splitting open the bags.

On the subject of the right tool for the job, it's surprising how many people don't know the difference between the various types of rakes.

This is a garden rake. It is not for raking leaves. It is for spreading materials like mulch and compost, or for cultivating loose soil. If you use the wrong rake for the wrong job, you will have a bad time.

Anyway, the top dressing is complete, and I now have a really shitty patch of lawn in my back yard.

While I wait for the grass to grow, let's take a moment to appreciate this slime mold, which had grown on some mulch nearby and then dried up into a material not unlike hardened spray foam.

Nature is weird.

What A Load Of

Ahem...

So I've decided that, after this wet winter which banished the California mega-drought once and for all, I'd give my little postage stamp of lawn a little TLC. I switched the sprinklers off back in 2021 or so and the lawn basically shrivelled up and died.

It's bounced back a little since then, since grass never truly dies, but it could obviously use a little help. The chicken shit is one part of it, and the other part is giving it a nice hefty overseeding to get things fired up and growing again. The 12 bags should make for a nice 1/2 inch top dressing (though two of the bags will likely go up in the flower bed behind the short retaining wall, because the soil there is truly awful).

I'm also going to turn the sprinkler back on, which brings us to the next topic of discussion.

The sprinkler controller is in the comically oversized grey box at the top, and that little remote box below it is a "Solar Sync" controller. Basically it measures precipitation and sunshine to estimate the evapotranspiration, and uses that estimate to adjust the runtime of the sprinklers automatically.

Or at least it's supposed to. It's never worked since I moved in, and would gleefully let the lawn dry out during the heat of the summer, and soak it down with water in the winter just hours after a rain storm.

I tried poking around at it to try to figure out what's up, and eventually came to the realization that the problem with the Solar Sync box is that it exists.

This model of sprinkler controller has the Solar Sync function built-in. You're just supposed to buy the sensor without the controller and connect it directly to the main box. Luckily it's the same sensor, so I just yanked out the extra controller, wired in the sensor correctly, and for the first time since it was installed the system actually works properly as it was designed.

It really baffles me how someone can install an automatic sprinkler system like this, have it not work, and just shrug and live with it instead of fixing it.

The Beast Stirs

As we all know from years of experience, decades even in some cases, the best way to deal with a problem is to ignore it and hope it goes away on its own.

Well, the problem of the bike parts accreting in my house, though seemingly halted for a while, has resumed agglomerating once more.

Oh, it's just a dropper post and lever. Yes, that might be what it appears to be on the surface, but to the trained eye this is the first crack in the dam breaking once more.

And wouldn't you know it: brake parts! Two rotors and a caliper spacer. This is starting to look very dire indeed. However, it's possible we might still have a chance of holding back the tide, just so long as...

Oh no. No. It can't be!

There's no denying it. That's a cassette, and look at the size of it! At least 50 teeth on the big ring. There's no hope of fending off a mature specimen like this. This is the thin end of the wedge, soon all hell will break loose, and before you know it...

Oh, this is it; this is the end times. These are juvenile parts, not even fully fledged. These poor little wheels don't even have their spokes yet, and it'll be weeks before they grow a rim!

I think my only hope is to return these two to their nest and hope that their mother doesn't reject them. Once they're fully grown, well, we'll just have to cross that bridge when the time comes.

Better Living Through Chemistry

So my challah experiment has run into a minor speedbump.

Yes, the ugly spectre of food spoilage has descended upon my kitchen. The bread lasted a good solid week on my counter before these microscopic interlopers showed up, so it didn't do too bad, but the bread was clearly lacking the extra natural preservative qualities of the cakes I had previously been baking. All that extra sugar really does do wonders to suck the life out of microbes.

So, I plucked this little blue speck of fouling from the loaf and ensconced the remainder in the refrigerator. This is a risky move; not necessarily from a food safety perspective, but rather from a freshness and palatability one.

You see, as soon as bread is done baking, the starches within begin a process of retrogradation. They try to revert from their soft, fluffy cooked form into a hard, chewy crystalline form. This process happens rather slowly at counter temperature, but gets absolutely turbocharged at refrigeration temperature. This is the same process that turns leftover rice into buckshot and day-old mashed potatoes into half-set drywall compound.

Luckily there is one sure fire way to reverse this process: cook the starch again.

The good news here is that challah toast is really quite tasty, even if it wasn't exactly what I had initially signed up for. Tasty or not, though, it does leave me with a puzzle for what to do with the next batch of bread to avoid this tragedy recurring.

Thankfully, science has an answer in the form of calcium propionate, which is mixed into the dough at a ratio of approximately 0.1% of the flour weight, or about a quarter teaspoon for the 2-loaf recipe I'm making.

I may have obtained a lifetime supply of it. Also it does amuse me that a concentrated food preservative has a best-by date. Something tells me that's more of a liability thing than an actual risk of spoilage.

Will it work, though? Only time will tell.

The Short End of the Wrench

One of the troublesome things about having a gas generator is that the fuel in the carb tends to go bad pretty quickly. This means that, after weeks to months in storage, it will be almost impossible to start without a great deal of difficulty and adult language.

The cure to this problem is simple: one must always make sure to drain the carb bowl before putting the generator back in storage. Simple enough in theory, but it's easy to make excuses when the tools aren't conveniently at hand.

So, I decided to keep the tools at hand. A quick trip to The House of Bezos and a day or two later, this arrives.

A wrench to use on the drain plug, and a silicone measuring cup to catch the fuel.

Of course, there's something about these that may not be apparent in this photo, so here's a second shot.

Working around a generator can be very tight quarters, and having small tools really pays dividends.

And I can assure you that you've never seen a cuter 10mm wrench in your life.

But what do these look like in action?

Well there's plenty of room to swing a wrench this size, to start with.

And not a drop of fuel will poison the soil with how well this measuring cup fits in the space below.

But draining the fuel out of the carb is only one part of keeping a generator running in tip-top shape. The most important thing one must always do is, well, fill it with oil when you buy it. They ship them dry. But the second most important thing is to change the oil frequently because there's no oil filter and less than a quart of the dino-honey in the oil pan. But the THIRD most important thing... wait, the third is draining the carb bowl, we already covered that.

Ok, so the fourth most important thing is periodically checking and adjusting the valve lash, done while the engine is cold. The valves need a little bit of clearance between the rocker arm and the valve stem in order to allow for the valve to expand when the engine warms up to operating temperature. On an engine like this, it's about 0.008 inches on the exhaust valve, since it gets quite hot, and 0.006 inches on the intake valve. As the engine ages, this gap tends to shrink as the valve stems stretch and the valve seats wear, and eventually you get to a point where, when the engine is hot, the valves no longer fully close. This results in combustion gasses bypassing the valves, which then burns the valves and seats, and suddenly you're looking at a full rebuild (or tossing the entire engine).

So, let's dive right in. The valve cover comes off, and there's the rockers right there.

The valves are up top, with the adjustment screws and the jam nuts, and the pushrods are below.

It's a good thing I've got a nice short wrench for loosening off the jam nuts.

Then all we need to do is go in with the feeler gauges to set the gap.

Making sure to do this while the engine is cold, of course. I've skipped detailing some steps here, so look up some tutorials online if you're about to embark on this task yourself, and check the manufacturer's specs for the valve lash for your particular engine model.

Anyway, I buttoned everything back up, started it up, and it purred like a kitten. Another successful job done.

An Enriching Experience

While bread may seem, at first glance, to be a commodity product, it takes on an almost unlimited variety of different forms. However, these forms can be divided into main families: those made with a lean dough, which generally contains only water, flour, salt and yeast; and those made with an enriched dough which contain additions such as sugar, oil/butter, eggs, milk and so on.

Though I fully acknowledge that lean dough breads have their place, I am not, personally, overly fond of them. The enriched dough breads bring so much more to the party that they can stand on their own without being constructed into a sandwich, smothered in jams and nut butters, battered and fried into french toast, and so on. I delight in a bread that has a soft, moist crumb that you can enjoy with nothing more than a kiss of butter, if even that.

Possibly the most recognizable enriched bread these days would be brioche. Truly, brioche is a delight. To eat. To prepare, it is tedium and toil. Unlike most breads, even most enriched breads, where all the dough ingredients are assembled up-front, the high butter content of brioche requires that the dough, minus the butter, be mixed and kneaded first, after which the butter is kneaded in a little at a time.

Rubbish to that.

Instead, consider challah. Religious tradition aside, it is a much more manageable bread to prepare. The use of oil rather than butter means we're back to just dumping everything into a bowl and then mixing and kneading like any other bread dough. The resulting loaf is hardly a compromise, still having a delightfully moist and chewy texture with a rich sweetness that avoids descending into the territory of cakes while solidly establishing itself as a pastry-style bread.

And so it is that I chose that style of bread to bake.

Now some would argue that a proper challah would be braided rather than rolled into a plain rectangular loaf. To those people, I invite you to spend your time however you see fit, as I do as I please with mine.

The resulting bread is every bit as delicious as I had hoped, and the preparation was no more difficult than any other style I've ever made.

Spring is Sprung

The superbloom has arrived in my yard. Rather than trying to babble on about these flowers, I'll just share the photos and let them speak for themselves.

The irises aren't blooming yet, nor is the rose, but they're getting quite close and should be showing their colours in a week or two.

Some Like It Hot

I'm not a huge fan of freezing to death, and so I figured it was high time to make sure I could run my furnace during our inconveniently frequent power outages.

Normally, a furnace is hard wired to a circuit by way of a cut-off switch, like this.

Convenient for safely servicing the unit, but not so hot (quite literally) if you want to power it another way. Luckily, there is a solution.

These generator inlet kits are not especially cheap, considering the parts list, but they at least come with fancy looking printing and a nice paint job.

So, the first step of installation is ridding ourselves of that switch and handy-box screwed to the wall.

Oh, ok. Turns out it wasn't a handy-box, but actually a box extension. Interesting. So, slight change in plans: I'll need to modify the new box a little to act as a box extension, which mostly involves measuring and drilling two new holes.

Thankfully, drilling holes is not particularly difficult. It does look a little weird with unjacketed wires coming in through the grommet but oh well, nobody will ever see this once I'm done.

Let's get the MC from the furnace stuck in here.

If you've ever struggled with a conduit locknut before, you really owe it to yourself to get one of these tools. It will save you a lot of frustration.

Speaking of frustration, nothing will ever make packing wires back into an electrical box easy or fun. It's always a struggle, no matter what you do. Thankfully persistence pays off, eventually.

And the all important question: does it work?

Yes, it absolutely does.