06 September 2004 13:59
Tuesday 18 Maythis day was the type of day that was fun and long, but tends to come out as a rather long list of "then we did this" when you try to communicate your new found joy to someoen who was not there to experience it.
we started out by trying (and eventually succeeding...safely) to remove the rover from blocks. judging from the fact that several of the cinder blocks came out from under the rover in multiple pieces, the assembly would not have with stood a 4.0 earthquake (or its equivalent--kids). but it was all good, and made me thankful that rovers have high clearance (ie, no nasty tendencies to squash people if they drop). oh yeah, why it was up in the first place. well. we never did quite figure out what was wrong with it, what was causing the vibration and jerking etc etc. we eventually came to the obvious conclusion, that is, ignore what you don't understand.
that in mind, a "test drive" was in order.. 20-30 minutes up the road for lumber and back. kyle and i piled on board and danny drove. the lumber yard was up in santa cruz, where we picked up US$45 worth of cedar and plunked it in the back. it was all rough cut stuff, generally about 1 3/4" thick and 8' long. from there it was lunch and groceries and back home. we spent the afternoon in the woodshop, planing down the boards and glueing together some table tops. i really enjoyed getting a chance to work with wood again, it's been a while what with school and all.
kyle and i goofed off for a while, and eventually broke out a jigsaw puzzle, which we put a fair hurting on that night. philip (my friend from va) came in after a while, and we talked for an hour or two--i learned a lot from him about the deaf. he and kyle both left and for some dumb reason i stayed up til after one working on the puzzle. before he left, kyle had done us the favor of trapping an errant cockroach under the puzzle lid, so i was without a picture to go by. all the more challenging that way.
Wednesday 19 May
kyle ended up finishing the puzzle during/after breakfast this morning. i meanwhile was hard at work doing the laundry (right, so they had a regular washing machine, all i had to do was load it). then we had the "privelege" of participating in a skit during chapel, with k and i performing as good and bad angels trying to convince shirley in a little object lesson.
we tore into things after chapel, kyle taking the planer apart and i taking the belt sander apart. kyle was actually being constructive, the planer blades had some bad nicks, so he was sharpening them. i meanwhile had been attempting to sand some picture frames when the whole thing went up in smoke. i took the motor apart and found some suspicious looking windings, but it was hard to tell through the half inch layer of sawdust. the shop didn't have compressed air, so k and i hopped in the rover and went down to the local gas station. we got a run around for a bit, and waited for a guy to finish filling up a truck tire, before finally getting the windings all blown out. turned out there were a couple opens, what with drops of ex-molten metal all around them.
side note, oddly enough, the rover didn't want to start when we headed back. liketa stranded us in the middle of everybody's way.
i hot wired the motor real quick to see if it would work without the sawdust, but was rewarded with more sparks and smoke, so we gave it up for dead and strapped a portable beltsander upside down on the bench and went to town with that. (dennis later ended up getting the armature rewound, i think it worked after that).
after lunch we helped dennis out with the afternoon shop class. had six kids (all deaf) running around in there. they of course had no issues communicating with a planner and table saw running at the same time. dennis and k and i were a differnet story. dennis actually was gone about half the time (kyle and i were less than enthused about that, for it put us in charge), but everythign got along fine. "fine" so long as you don't ask how productive it was :).
after class we continued on the table tops, cutting to length and routing. dennis was usally ready to close up shop around four, so kyle and i had the late afternoon hours to kill. today we started off by beginning and finishing puzzle number two, which wasn't a difficult feat being only a 100 pieces or something. after finishing that we busted out a third puzzle, this one was a 1000, and ended up taking us a good while (that might or might not have had something to do with the fact that it was without a picture on the cover). here, be yea not fooled, the picture on the cover is nothing like the actual puzzle. okay, that's a lie. they both have coffee grounds in them, but that's where the similarities end.
at five though, we broke off and headed for a place called "treasure beach" with danny shirley philip and omar. we ordered a couple three pizzas there (they were very edible) and watched the sunset out over the ocean. it was a nice quiet social evening.
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