Classics:

• Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Moby Dick - Herman Melville
• Steppenwolf - Hermann Hesse
• The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

Japanese:

• The Thief - Fuminori Nakamura
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami

Science Fiction

• Ender’s Game - Orson Scott Card
• Dune - Frank Herbert
• Below the Root - Zilpha Keatley Snyder (pairs well with the video game)

Nonfiction

• Masters of Doom - David Kushner
• Get in the Van - Henry Rollins
• Paddle to the Amazon - Don Starkell
• Ultra marathon man  - Dean Karnazes

Running

• Once a Runner - John Parker

• Checking chemicals daily and adjusting as necessary
• Vacuuming any time piles of collect on the bottom of the pool (which has been daily!)
• Thoroughly brushing almost every day

Despite this epic labor the pool continued to have a layer of green on the bottom every morning. Along the way I discovered three things that I am confident will make next year a breeze.

1. Clean the pool pump impeller once in a while, maybe every month or two (behind the pump filter basket is the pump impeller, which was jammed with pine needles)
2. This isn't directly related to the green pool, but I discovered that the all-important weir has always been missing from the pool skimmer. Replacing that was easy enough and it means that the pool will skim properly.
3. I got a pool robot. There are lots of benefits, it handles brushing and vacuuming, and also it is an entirely separate system from the pump, so even if the other equipment is failing you have the robot to take care of business.
4. Finally, I discovered that I needed to replace the sand in the sand filter. When I got into the sand filter, it was filled with thick nasty murky green water, yuk! Definitely the source of my woes. I think the key here is the sight glass. When backwashing, I recall being told to let it backwash until the sight glass looks clear. I know that lately it never looked clear. Now I realize: that is a problem. And hopefully by replacing the sand every few years, and backwashing until the sight glass is clear, I can avoid ever dealing with this problem again. Of course this time I used a small plastic cup to remove 300 pounds of sand, and eventually vaguely remembered that I previously used the wet/dry vac. Things to remember for next time!

And wouldn't you know it? After an entire summer of battling with getting the pool clean, only twelve hours after replacing the sand in the filter the pool is almost crystal clear. Son of a gun! I always gotta learn the hard way.

Seeing it was a good reminder to investigate the options and decide one way or the other because so far I have not made any choice which is the worst thing to do. In the end, I decided to register. I haven't ever given blood which I feel guilty about. People who give blood are awesome, and as much as I'd like to be awesome too I dunno. I just like my blood where it is for right now. But once I'm dead have at it.

Links
* General Information on Organ, Eye and Tissue Donation
* New York State Donate Life Registry Enrollment Form

2013-09-07

Recently I've been trying to identify berries that I see around the area. Pokeweed is common, including a large plant growing on the side of my house. The bamboo-like stalks grow very tall. As a kid, stick-in-hand, it was always great fun to have at a large patch of the plant. A swung stick slices through the thick stalks like a machete, and a 10-year-old could make quick work of a thousand weeds in a few short minutes.

Dark purple berries grow on the plant, however they are apparently dangerously poisonous. However! Juice from the berries can be made into temporary ink. Fermentation makes the ink permanent. Click here for more details about making the ink.

By basically cutting the metal oven around where it was welded, I was able to free the element from the side of the oven and eventually got it working again. Well sort of.

From then on out if I ran the oven at 400 degrees or hotter for 45 minutes or so, the oven would stop working. I needed to turn it off and let it cool down before it would work again. It operated like this for several years, not a big deal as long as you understand it's limitations. A few weeks ago however, it overheated for the last time. The oven let out an endless beeep that wouldn't stop even after disconnecting the range from power for 24 hours.

No biggie. The oven is an old nasty smelly malfunctioning piece of crap anyway. We'll just buy a new one. Well guess what? For a few short years there was a fad where instead of installing costly overhead ventilation, Modern Maid and a few other (mostly related) companies built the ventilation into the oven itself. In our kitchen we have a beautiful picture window on the outside-facing wall. And of course it wouldn't make sense to put the oven in front of a beautiful few. Instead the kitchen sink is in front of the wall so you can look outside and water the plants while you're at the sink. Makes sense. Except that the stove needs to be on the outside wall so it can ventilate! To get around that, all of our cabinets have a ventilation shaft cut out of them down near the floor.

That fad has since passed. There is one model of oven that we could swap out. It's $3000 and has the most horrendous reviews imaginable. All the reviews talk about needed to repair it 6 times in the first year of ownership for example. So basically people in my boat are getting raked over the coals.

If we bought a normal oven, it would likely mean patching the holes carved in our lower cabinets and carving new holes in the upper cabinet for ventilation. Which probably would mean new cabinets.

Discussions about repairing the oven generally suggested replacing the circuit boards (there are two of them) or the temperature sensor. My temp sensor tested ok. The circuit boards are no longer available for purchase online, not that I could find anyway.

Because I was limited to sketchy alternatives, I was ready to look into some unexpected options. I found fixyourboard.com, which specifically advertises repairs for the circuit boards in my oven. I was skeptical at first, but got some confidence after watching their impressive testing capabilities:

Video of Fix Your Board's automated testing

I sent in my control board. When they received it, they quickly asked me to send in the relay board as well based on the problem I was seeing. I did, and within a few days the boards returned to me. I hooked them back up to the oven, and voila! It's working!

I am very impressed with fixyourboard's professionalism, and their ability to keep my old oven out of the landfill. It really saved the day for me.

* Modern Maid
* Model #: FDU1862B (or FDU186 2B)
* Steady beeeeep, nothing on digital readout. Occurred while temp on 400 for nearly 1 hour. Had trouble in the past running at high temps for a long time. But this time it never returned to normal. After keeping circuit breaker off overnight and turning back on, still beeeeeep.

* Likely candidates for replacement:
# Relay Circuit Board: http://www.repairclinic.com/PartDetail/b1p13/Amana-Range-Stove-Oven-Relay-Board/7428P00560/1988?modelNumber=FDU1862B&ss=a13b1d513202&mr=1

# Temperature sensor (should be 1000-1100 ohms at rm temp). Tested ok.
# Clock/Timer and/or Electronic Range Control. (ERC) - http://www.fixyourboard.com/form.php
** Manufacturer part number: Y0308480

At Albany International Airport random patterns of two-colored brick abound.
If you look closely with the eye of an inquisitive child, there may be magic hiding in those bricks.

Was this an uninhibited random pattern that by coincidence seems to spell out RGS? Or are those the initials of an unscrupulous Albany bricklayer?