Author: doug

Interesting dog walk

Interesting dog walk – lovely spring weather. Lots of people fishing on the beach, then run into Pedro cleaning up his yard, Uruguayan who tells me in detail of their recent trip to Oregon: Diamond Lake, Crater Lake, Cape Disappointment, Washington, Cannon Beach, then north into Washington and Yakima, Leavenworth. (Made me miss it a little; we lived almost ten years in Oregon.)

Then the local park, absolutely bustling.

The as I round the corner of our block, one of my son’s friends and girlfriend and more visiting and catching up. He and the guys from Australia making tentative plans to visit our son in the USA in 2023.

So is spring finally here? ¡Ya veremos!

UPS dissection

From one day to the next, a UPS unit died. I charged it up, checked battery output – only 8 volts where there should be 12. Meanwhile, no electricity passing through, meaning it doesn’t even have any use as a surge protector. So, tear it apart. Nothing too challenging,

the exception being the outlets, which appear to have been snapped in place and soldered. No big deal; happy to leave it at that. Nowhere near as much fun as tearing apart other things, like a laser printer.

No no no no no.

Just as I was heading upstairs to wash up, a faint clapping (the way of summoning attention here) and saw a long-haired 10-11 year old boy with his bicycle in our driveway. This is unusual.

He was selling raffle tickets for Colegio Pinares (a few blocks from here) and he had a nice jacket with the emblem of the school, so I gave him 50 pesos (~USD 1.25) for one. He awkwardly wrote the ticket number with his pencil – his fifth customer, I noted – then squatted to try to write on the concrete in the driveway, finally retreating to the bicycle seat as backing where he managed to complete his data collection – my first name and telephone number.

Only back inside did I look at what I had bought a raffle ticket for: a basket of candies.

For once I am grateful that I never win these things.

Hornero nests

The other day I saw a hornero nest, broken, on the railing of a walkway through the dunes to the beach. You can see pieces on the ground. Probably broken by a human being of the juvenile variety, it begs a question: how could the hornero birds who built it think this was a good location?

Today I saw this: two hornero nests, side by side. Years ago I was told that horneros used to build their nests with the opening facing east for the morning sun, but with the increase in electromagnetic pollution, they had lost that sense of direction. I don’t know if it’s true, but the opening of the upper nest is pointing north.

El descubrimiento del día

 Discovery of the day (after almost 13 years!): when you refill your
CIEMSA peaje “chip” at Abitab, it specifies the expiration date (F.VTO. =
Fecha de vencimiento). No more embarrassing backing out of a toll booth
whose gate won’t open because time has run out. Not that I would know anything about that, of
course.

Code, schmode

I saw this on the Faceborg recently and saw this in an Uruguay Expat Group.

Later I was standing near a house on the dog walk where I usually spend about ten minutes, and have hundreds of times, noticing its outdoor wiring for the first time.

Sure, just bring the current into the house through a wire lying on the lawn. Just pass over it with the lawn mower when you need to. No problem!

Awesome!

After 12 years, I decided it was time for a new table saw blade. Little did I know that the holes in the middle of blades are not uniform. The washer (arendela) / spacer from the old blade was too big for the new one. While in Maldonado a couple weeks ago with some free time, I wandered into a hardware store and entertained five bored employees for a while, none apparently aware this was an issue, so I didn’t bother to go back to the local hardware store where I bought it. A few blocks away, for some reason, we have a tornillería, a shop that specializes in screws and bolts (seriously, how is that a viable business outside the bowels of Montevideo?). The guy had an almost-but-not-quite washer, and referred me to a nearby tornero, who I could find by looking for two blue doors on the frontage road of the Ruta Interbalnearia opposite Maudy, the electric-stuff shop. No sign, of course.

Long story short, a few hours later I stopped by and picked up the freshly-manufactured spacer that made the new blade functional with my saw. It cost 300 pesos, which is significant compared to the cost of the blade (990 pesos), but begs the question (I being from North America): where in North America could you waltz into a machine shop and get a precision metal part fabricated the same day for just over seven dollars?