Dank Stank

About a week ago we got the first solid rain of the season. This was good in the sense of "it's nice to see water again," but less than ideal in that I still get some moisture issues in my crawl space.

I'm pretty sure that the flooding won't recur, but when the dirt in the crawl space gets a little bit damp (which it still does) it gives off a pretty musty odour. I don't really make a habit of sticking my nose down in my crawl space, so for the most part this isn't a big issue, but unfortunately there's one or two places where the smell can seep up into the rest of the house.

The major place it comes in is through the bathrooms. The two bathrooms are separated, back to back, by a wet wall. This is basically an extra-wide wall with a gap between, making room for all the plumbing and whatnot that needs to fit in that space. However, all that space, combined with the necessary holes along the bottom that the plumbing goes through, means they quite often end up essentially open to the crawl space. Thus we get musty crawl space air inside that wall. And, naturally, that wall itself is far from airtight due to all the plumbing poking through the drywall to reach the various fixtures.

On a previous project I made some minor improvements to this situation by plastering up around the drain pipe for one of the sinks. However, sealing up all these spots perfectly is a fairly tall order (in fact, one place that the air is leaking in is through some screw holes in the back of the medicine cabinet, which would be quite awkward to seal), so this evening I decided to attack things from the other direction.

Armed with a can of Not-so-great Stuff, I crawled down into the dankness and got to spraying. The plumbing leading up to the sinks was pretty well sealed already, but had a few cracks around it. The plumbing for the toilet stack was, likewise, fairly well sealed. However, the shower drain stack, supply lines for the toilet and supply lines for the shower went through two wide open rectangular cut-outs, and so I did my best to foam them up.

Dispensing spray foam above your head in a crawl space is not the easiest task in the world, but I did nonetheless put in an effort to foam it up. I'm not sure if I managed to completely plug up the two huge holes; the way spray foaming something like this works is that it either falls out about 5-10 minutes after you spray it in due to it being just a little bit too heavy and too soft to support itself, or enough of it stays in place long enough for it to start setting up, and it sticks around long enough to inflate to full size over the next day or so.

I'm hoping that I'll end up with the latter, but if not I can always get another can and go at it again, as annoying as that would be.

No pictures this time, since, well, I was crawling around in the mud under my house with a can of spray foam. Taking my phone down there would be begging for trouble.

Frost Freedom

Old Man Winter has descended on the Bay Area, and with him comes the threat of overnight frosts. Last year these frosts made a mess of the lantana that I planted, but this year I decided to try something new.

I've had these moving boxes collecting dust for a while (ever since I moved, coincidentally), and this seems as good a use as any. I'll just be covering up the lantana overnight when there's a frost warning, and the rest of the time the boxes will be in my car hole drying out from the dew that collects on them overnight.

Guaranteed Waterproof

(Not a guarantee)

When I specced out The Stig, I always had in mind that I wanted a frame with built-in fender mounts, so that I could use the bike in the winter when the rain started to fall. I picked up the fenders a few weeks ago, and this week I finally installed them.

The install went pretty smoothly, though a few modifications were needed here and there, as is tradition.

I had been slightly concerned that there might not be enough clearance to the toolkit in the underslung bottle cage, but luckily there's just enough space to be comfortable.

I took it for a spin this morning and everything seemed to hold up just fine, though as you might expect, the roads were dry as a bone. I'm sure I've single-handedly doomed all of California to another year of drought.

Getting A Handle On Things

So when we last left our bench multimeter, its handle was in a disappointing two pieces.

I had tried using super glue, and that didn't really work at all. Then I realized something.

One of the best ways to glue PVC is to do solvent welding with a slurry of solvent and dissolved PVC. And this just happens to be available off-the-shelf, in the plumbing aisle.

ABS cement is a mix of MEK, ABS resin and acetone, plus natural and artificial flavours and colours.

So let's give it a try.

Not exactly colour matched, but if it works it works, right? Just need to let it set up overnight and then flex it gently onto the bench meter.

Oh well, it was worth a try. It held up better than I expected, but it wasn't quite enough.

Getting Saucy

In making my pastry cream the other day, I found myself getting a little bit of it stuck to the bottom of the pot. This was due to the fact that a pot with a relatively square transition between the side and bottom doesn't allow a standard whisk to reach all the way into the corner.

There is a solution, though.

A very obvious solution.

And it's called a saucier.

And it is a pot that is specifically designed for a whisk to be able to scrape all the way into the edges. Because you mix sauces with a whisk. Thus its name.

The french have blessed the culinary world with a lot of great things, but creative names aren't always their strong point.

Ah well, it's a good pot by any name. Nice and thick, stainless with an aluminum core, and a bit larger than I was expecting. Apparently 3 quarts is a lot of quarts. However, this does fill in a little gap in my current pot sizes, and it's better to have too little food in too big of a pot rather than the other way around, so it all works out in the end.

Notworking

For a while now I've been using a second wifi router as a network switch and access point in my living room, to connect my Mini and Wintendo via ethernet, and to give a bit more wifi goodness to my various mobile devices.

This wasn't especially ideal though, as my primary wifi router was only maybe 12 feet away, and so it wasn't really adding much to my wifi coverage.

With this in mind, I decided to move the router to my craft room, which is a bit further away and on the other side of some walls.

This did, however, leave me without a hard wired connection for my Mini and Wintendo. Or at least it would, if I didn't have an 8 port switch just kicking around collecting dust.

I quickly rediscovered why this 8 port switch was just kicking around collecting dust: when I powered it on, the power LED just blinked and the ports remained lifeless.

I looked up this symptom online, and everything I read said "oh that means the power supply is shite" and despite knowing that power supplies are quite often shite, I somehow didn't believe that was the issue.

Luckily it was easy enough to test: it just needed 12v 1a on a standard sized barrel jack, and I happened to have an extra wall wart kicking around. I plugged it in, and the switch came to life.

But for some reason I was convinced that it still might not be the power supply that was to blame, and so I double checked by switching back to the other power supply, and indeed it just blinked the power LED. Switching to the other supply again resulted in a fully functional switch.

Ok, I guess this wall wart is shite. Problem solved.

Cake and Cream

Following on from our previous experiments using lemon pudding as a pastry cream substitute, this week we embark on making a proper crème pâtissière. Given my previous experiences with food influencer recipes, I went right to the source for this one.

I did, however, opt to make some modifications straight out of the gate. I added two lemons worth of zest to the milk at the start, and two lemons worth of juice to the finished cream at the end. Lemon is a risky ingredient when dairy is involved, but fortune favours the bold. I figured that once the milk was fully custardized there wouldn't be any risk of curdling, and my suspicions were correct. I also added an extra 1/4c of sugar to balance out the tartness of the lemon juice.

The result?

Well, it looks a little lumpy in the photo but I can assure you that it is smooth as silk. It's just a little firm from sitting in the fridge, and I needed to stir it up a bit more before serving it to get it looking a bit more photogenic.

Oddly, the recipe yielded about 4.5c of finished pastry cream, where the recipe claimed to only yield 3c. I find their claim somewhat dubious, as the recipe calls for 3c just for the milk, and so unless there was going to be a lot of loss along the way it wouldn't make sense for the final yield to be only that much.

Anyway, the cream is smooth, rich, just sweet enough and delightfully tart and lemony. A great success all around.