Category: Stuff

Mind boggling

A couple days ago, a homemade extension cord ceased functioning. So, obvious first step before taking it apart, was a quick continuity test (resistance) with the voltmeter.

But it didn’t work — the needle’s movement was almost imperceptible.

I don’t know when or where I got this voltmeter, but it was decades ago at least. And for the first time in all those years, a thought occurred to me: in order to measure resistance, it must have a power source. I swear, I had never thought of that before.

It took all of thirty seconds to discover and remove the battery cover, and sure enough, on the bottom of the AA battery was its expiration date. Usually they’re guaranteed to retain 80% of their charge 10 years from manufacture. This one only died after 27 years and four months….can’t complain!

Changing of the guard

I can’t begin to tell you how long we’ve used the dish detergent container in the foreground, but it must be at least ten years. The new, blue stuff seems to be pretty good quality (some here is really watered down), but I bought it based on one criterion: the apparent solidness of the container. What else matters?

Missing letters

No idea why a sign maker would dump styrofoam boards in our locale, but fascinating to see – at least a little – how signs are made. As a lover of letter forms, I saved them “just because.” But I expect they’ll go back in the trash when the current collectors’ strike is over…this is the only container I saw yesterday that wasn’t overflowing.

When I grow old

Black t-shirts. How did I end up with so many black t-shirts? When I was younger, I hated wearing anything black. When I searched search for men’s t-shirts on Amazon, these were my first, dull choices:

But, willing to dig, I found a set of 12 bright t-shirts – no choice of colors! No need to wonder, will this color look good on me? And even after shipping here, barely more expensive than buying locally. So there we are.

And yes, I do have a couple of purple t-shirts as well.

El pico

Off and on over the last few months, I’ve been doing maintenance at our little country place. It becomes a little inconvenient, such as today when I needed the pressure washer and realized I never brought it back after cleaning out there. Off we go!

But at least I knew where it was. The pick was different. It’s my weapon of choice for uprooting thistles, and it had disappeared. Not in the house, not in the galpón (shed/barn). I sometimes leave it in the middle of the yard when cutting grass, but I hadn’t seen it anywhere. Would someone have stolen it? Hard to imagine.

So, after washing frog turds off the kitchen sink, I grabbed the power washer, turned to leave, and voilá.

Almost like I’m playing tricks on myself.

A very, very small thing

My favorite note-taking pen broke the other day – sad! 🙂 But wait—it broke exactly as it ran out of ink! Hmmm.

It says “Courtyard” (by Marriott). I remember them as a nice place, but having gone nowhere in over 5-1/2 years, we haven’t been near one. And before that, we didn’t stay in one after what, early 2000s? I have no idea.

In September 2012 we traveled to Connecticut for my niece’s wedding. Since freebie pens were not a thing in Uruguay (and still aren’t really), I noticed the “junk drawer” in my sister’s kitchen, and asked if she could spare some pens. We came back to Uruguay with a handful, secured with a couple rubber bands.

Which gives me an idea. Yes! Some of those pens from 2012 are still in my collection. Grab a sheet of paper to test, and results:

  • 3 put into service;
  • 5 retired.

The cute little plastic container was one of several gifted by our neighbors Wayne and Janet, who left Uruguay for British Columbia in May 2023.

Small things.

Orgonics

It looks like I tossed a perfectly good Orgreenics omelet pan. Fact is, it was a perfectly good Ogreenics omelet pan for eight or nine years. Until it wasn’t. No matter how many “surefire” Youtube videos I watched and how many times I tried to season it, it just got stickier and stickier.

I cashed in some Disco (supermarket) points for a replacement, which isn’t perfect, but isn’t bad.

It’s been several weeks since I dumped this. I have almost no doubt it’s in somebody’s kitchen as I write this.

The hard drive case

Our neighbors are moving back to Canada, and in a box of old computer junk I offered to make go away, there were a couple of external drives. Wayne wasn’t sure if they had data on them. I offered to find out, if possible, and sanitize them.

The smaller had a long-deprecated Mini-AB USB port. It’s been a while since I had a cable that would fit the early-2000s USB port, so I pulled out the 2.5″ 160 GB drive, clamped it in the vice, and gave it a couple of smacks with a hammer. Ta.

The other was a monster by comparison, a 5.25″ drive manufactured in 2003 with a capacity of (drum roll, please) 5 GB! It looked like an old Apple Firewire connection–again, nothing like that lying around. I was unable or unwilling to completely disassemble the hard drive assembly, so I drilled a few holes through the drive. Ta.

The case was an aluminum wonder which I planned to recycle, but after mentioning to a couple of people that you could probably run over it with a car without hurting it, I knew what I had to do.

Yup.

That would have been a very well protected 5 GB of data!