Archive for March, 2007

I think I’m going to start tracking what all I’ve accomplished around the house. Even though it severly cuts into my available time for building my model, I think it’s worth it.

This last week:

• Replaced bulbs in garage lights. Replaced ballasts in garage lights with high quality electronic ballasts.
• Repaired upstairs air handler unit (new motor control switch).
• Remounted upstairs thermostat because original mounting was loose (cracked drywall around anchors)
• Repaired master bedroom air handler unit (new motor control switch).
• Disinfected master bedroom air handler (had some A/C related mold issues).
• Flushed master bedroom A/C drain pan and lines (try to eliminate standing water and thus mold).
• Last year we upgraded our hot tub circuit to a 220V 50amp circuit and ran new wire to the hot tub. But, it was just laying loose in the crawl space. This week I took the time to properly nail the new wire to the underside of joists and pull it tight up to the point where it passes through the outside wall. Then I unhooked it from the outside electric panel, pulled it all inside the crawl space, drilled out the hole in the outside wall a little larger than it used to be on the inside, pulled the flexible conduit all the way through the inside, put a new end on the flexible conduit that will keep it from being pulled out of the hole in the wall, then rethreaded the electric line through the conduit and back into the panel. Then I pulled all of the slack out of the line, re-cut a new end, and re-wired the panel up from the new end. All in all, removed about 15-20 foot of 6-3 or 8-3 wiring. If anyone needs some heavy amp wiring, let me know, you can have it.
• While in the crawl space already, I spent some time looking for the source of our settling issues. Found one joist that was busted. Otherwise, nothing really jumped out at me. Need to get two people down there with some straight edges and start looking at suspect areas for bowed joists. If we find some that are bowed, then we’ll need to put in a support beam.

I think that covers most of my work this week, on the house anyway.

Well, I *did* overdo his narcotic pain meds yesterday, but that doesn’t appear to be the only reason he was acting so high. Evidently, his lack of eating has been catching up with him. After 24 hours with no additional pain meds at all, he’s still acting stumbly and weak. He’s also not eating, and now when he drinks there is an odd slurping noise from his throat. Not to mention his meows are now sounding a bit muffled. I’m afraid the tumor is starting to actually close off his throat.

My cat is much higher than he should be….and I don’t mean elevation. I missed with his first pain med syringe this morning, so I gave him another. Well, evidently not quite *all* of the first syringe missed. Now, he’s the equivalent of down syndrome kitty. He’s very, very, umm…relaxed…and wobbly…and sedate…and he almost fell over when he batted at a piece of roast beef with his front paw.

So much for trying to be nice while giving syringes. When I’m trying to be nice, and not grab his head, I sometimes miss. For the sake of consistency and avoiding SuperMan on Kryptonite Kitty, I’ll just have to grab his head and hold it firm :-/

Two days ago, Rocky didn’t eat a thing all day long. He hardly even drank any milk. Yesterday, we started him on the narcotic pain meds again to see if that would help. It seemed to, although all we really got him to eat was the roast beef out of an Arby’s roast beef sandwhich (and he ate all of it, although in 3 different sittings). We were really happy to see him eat that much yesterday. Unfortunately, today he’s being finicky again. I tried more raw hamburger. No dice. Sliced pastrami. Nada. I even cooked up a little hamburger (in very tiny pieces, and constantly worked it while it cooked to keep them tiny) spiked with bacon grease and left all the grease with the hamburger when I tried to give it to him. No interest. I’m not sure what I can find around the house to perk his taste buds. I may have to have Jessica stop for another one of those roast beef sandwhiches when she comes home just to see if he’ll eat that again.

So, I’ve decided to sell my R/C truck. Primarily for two reasons. One, to recoup some of the money I’ve got into it to offset what I’m spending on my second airplane. Two, I don’t really have any close areas that are good to run it, so it mainly sits around doing nothing.

That said, I’ve got a good start on my second airplane. My first was a prebuilt kit just to get me flying so I could learn on something that’s easy to learn on, etc. My second is one that I’m building to really *enjoy* flying, and to enjoy building, and to be proud of. It’s a 1/7th scale P-51 Mustang (OK, I know everybody and their brother has a P-51, but the reason I’m building it is that parts are plentiful and it’s easy to customize for that reason, kinda like the only reason to buy a chevy hot rod is because a 350 engine costs all of about $6 at Advanced Auto).

I actually want to start researching what the rules and judgement guidelines for the scale model class area at the AMA (not the medical AMA, the R/C airplane AMA) Nationals. If the competition is about how well you can build the model, how true you can be to life, and how well it works (versus flat out flying ability since I’m so new), then I wouldn’t mind entering it with a model some time. With that in mind, I’m taking a lot of care to get detail items on my plane that most people skip. Lots of extra manual labor ahead for that reason.

Oh, and 7 channels on my remote isn’t near enough for what I want to do. If I actually put all the controls in there that I want to, gonna have to double up some channels. You can do things like set it so that one thing turns off at 20%, the other at 15%, and put them both on the same servo and use the trim function on that channel to control whether one or both turn off, that sort of thing.

Oh well, enough for tonight. I built for about 2 hours, getting sleepy.

Since going on his “eat anything you want” diet, Rocky has been thrilled with something for anywhere from a couple days to a week, but then he gets bored with that special food and moves on. A while back, it was the cat food that our vet friend calls “fish heads” (because it’s litterally made of fish parts, non-processed sometimes even). After that, he wanted the plain turkey meat (we had to boil another carcass to make Delilah’s joint medicine, lot’s of left over meat). But, now he’s getting tired of fish heads, and somewhat tired of normal cat treats even. And he’s slowing down on the turkey. So, today we started a new food option. Raw hamburger. He must have ate two or three loose ping pong ball sized clumps of that stuff just now. He even ate the one I spiked with his pain meds. Hopefully this food choice will last a while.

On the down side, since coming back from Florida, his right cheek is noticably, and I mean very noticably, larger than his left cheek (it was before we left too, but not as pronounced). His face basically looks lopsided. And the tumor is large enough around the corner of his mouth that he’s starting to have a very minor amount of saliva leakage at that corner. Plus, it seems like it’s harder to get the syringe full of meds down his throat. It really seems to me like this tumor is moving *very* fast. They said it would, but until you see it in action, the words and explanation just don’t do the process justice.