Brrrrrr.

Greetings from the frozen north. Not as frozen as some of you are experiencing, I know. We get the moderating influence of the Pacific Ocean here, which helps, but the temperature dropped to about -7° C last night. That’s around 19° F for my American readers. Well below freezing, but I believe parts of the American Midwest have been a lot colder than that lately.

I feel for you.

This is probably the coldest weather I have encountered here in the Vancouver area since we arrived. There was some snow the other day. Not much, and it’s gone now, but we’re told it will return tonight and tomorrow, in significant amounts. Maybe 10–15 cm, or more than 4".

Winter has definitely not lost its grip yet. Not even here on the left coast.

As a result of last week’s post and a different photo of this dog:

two readers asked if Cruzer has cataracts. Here’s the photo that brought it up, for the curious:

The short answer is yes. The longer answer is that the vet is watching them, but so far he can see well enough that there is nothing to be done. I check him occasionally. He tracks movement across the street while looking out the window, and definitely wants to go meet other people and dogs while out on an occasional walk, even if they are pretty far away.

I haven’t yet researched what is to be done about canine cataracts. Maybe nothing, and he is a senior dog so choices might be limited, but for the moment it doesn’t matter because he gets around as well as his little tiny (nearly missing) brain allows.

In summary, he’s basically fine, but thank you for asking after his ocular health!

Another follow up from last week: I mentioned I’d applied for a job as an assistant in the Fine Arts shop at Langara College. I have an interview (through Zoom, of course) scheduled in a couple of weeks. So that’s good news.

Also in the last post I discussed the evils of the user experience (UX) for the cordless telephones we have, and how their seemingly random beeps and lights cause Cruzer grief.

A couple of readers — including one who owns the same phones — followed up. In those conversations some things were revealed:

• The beep the phone makes when you set it down on the charging stand is probably there so blind people are certain they put it back on the charger correctly. It is possible to set the phone down slightly askew, such that the contacts don’t touch and it won’t charge. The lack of a beep might alert the user to that, so perhaps it is useful to some. But design choices like that should include a way to turn them off, and there is no way to disable that beep.
• Similarly, the LED that comes on while the phone is charging might be there to make it easier for visually impaired (but not blind) people to know they put the phone back on the charger correctly. I’m not 100% convinced of this, as that LED is not all that obvious. It does brighten up a completely dark room, but in daylight you must look closely to see that it is on. As a result, it would have been just as effective if the main display backlight turned on instead of a dedicated LED. And that display already changes to read “Charging” when you set the phone down properly, so backlighting that would have been a fine alternative. As with the beep, a way to disable the light would be nice. Having it come on in the middle of the night whenever it decides it needs charging is a bit odd, even for those without a psychotic dog.
• Finally, a very astute reader suggested how to avoid these issues entirely: simply take the phone off the charger before going to bed. The battery will keep it working all night, and it will only make noise or light up if there is an incoming call. In the morning, put it back on the charger. That’s both simple and obvious once you think of it. I should have figured it out on my own, but I’m not that clever.

In news of things that actually got done this week, there was only one real project, and it revolves around this picture:

The issue has to do with the stand mixer in the centre of the image. Note that you can see the top of that mixer just below the black skirt that hangs from the bottom of the cabinets. That’s new.

That mixer gets used quite often. Anne bakes a lot of bread, among other things, so it gets left out on the counter. The problem was that the mixer is tall enough that it just hit the black skirt when you tried to pull it out for use or push it back out of the way. To avoid that you had to tip the mixer to the side slightly, and it is awkward to move in that state.

The fix was to shorten the skirt. It’s there to hide the under cabinet lights, and its exact height doesn’t matter much. It took me a couple of hours, but I removed the skirt all the way around and used my new table saw to shorten it by about 1/4", then I put it all back.

The result is that the mixer can now be accessed easily.

The surprise is that I got a good, clean cut in the material. The skirt is made from melamine (a plastic coated particle board) that has been spray painted black. My table saw blade is still pretty sharp, thankfully, and I managed cut it without flaking off the melamine coating or the paint in the process. Melamine is notoriously difficult to cut cleanly without a specific blade, but it worked out.

In other news this week I wrote up the results of my CNC work and sent them off to the owner of the machine. We’re still under orders not to gather up here, so I am not yet comfortable returning it to him. One of these days.

I also spent quite a bit of time pondering the headboard that is my next project. I had most of a design figured out, but I needed to confirm what materials were readily available to work with, and what materials had been used in the creation of the shelf unit I am modifying.

Here’s a photo of that mess as it exists now:

As you can see, our bed is wider than the opening in the existing bookcase, so we cannot push it up against the wall. That leaves a gap of about 8.5" at the top of the bed which is plenty to swallow a pillow in the middle of the night if you’re not careful.

The plan is to build a headboard into that wall unit, thus closing the gap and creating a shelf over the bed for the phone and what not. The central opening will remain, and eventually I will make some art to go in there, or I will buy a piece from someone I know that fits.

As I say, I had a design, but a research trip to the local Home Despot has forced me to rethink parts of it. Wait, I hear you exclaim. Why did I have to go to the store to research anything? Why not do the research online?

Well, I tried that and failed. I spent an hour or two on the websites of the local hardware store chains trying to understand the options they sell for the kinds of lumber that might be useful. I learned nothing. They list their dimensional lumber just fine, as well as their sheet goods, like plywood. But when you look for pre-primed, finger jointed pine boards, I couldn’t find them. Maybe I searched for the wrong things, but I tried a lot of combinations and got nowhere. In the end a trip to the store was needed to determine what is actually available and what it costs.

Anyway, it turns out the new shelf (which will cross the central opening at the same level as the shelf with the blue tissue box visible on the left side of the photo) is a simple thing. Whoever made the original used standard 1x8 wood for the shelves, and standard 1x2s for the face frame. That much is easy and obvious. The problem is the front face of the headboard.

There will be a decorative surface on it, probably made from 1x2s assembled in a diamond pattern. The challenge is assembly vs installation. I want to build it in the garage, where I have easy access to my tools, including the new mitre saw. Only when it is complete do I want to bring it in and mount it.

But, the centre opening is about 6' wide. Assembling the pattern and supporting it properly out in the garage and then moving it to the bedroom for installation is difficult. Ideally it would have a single piece of plywood behind it for support and strength, but I don’t own a vehicle that will let me haul a full sheet of plywood around. As a result the construction details matter quite a bit.

It is my plan to revise the design this weekend and go shopping for lumber early next week.

While at the hardware store I also looked into replacing the Roman shades on the living room windows. These things:

They’re blackout shades in a room that needs all the light it can get. And the windows face a fully fenced, heavily wooded, and completely private back yard. The only reason we close them is to keep the room a bit warmer. They provide a layer of insulation and reduce the cold air coming from the windows.

But they are not our style, and we want the light. So we are contemplating replacing them with translucent honeycomb shades.

I got a quote for new blinds while I was out and all I can say is “ouch!” Why are they so expensive? We’re thinking it over, and it turns out there is a 20% off sale for the next two weeks, which takes a bit of the sting out, but it’s still crazy.

Of course, we also don’t know what delivery times look like. The pandemic has messed everything up, so we might order them and discover we can’t get them until spring.

Oh, in that photo you also see the back of the TV on the rack we use for it and the audio gear. That’s another long term thing I want to fix. I hope to build a custom cabinet to hold all of that stuff and get the TV completely out of sight when it’s not in use. That’s a long term thing, though. I have a lot more research to do before I get started on that.

The only other thing I’ve been doing this week is reviewing my friend’s next book. I’ve made detailed comments on something like 170 pages so far.

All in all I am pretty busy for someone who is retired and living through a pandemic that keeps us all from socializing.

I hope you are busy as well, and tracking when you can be vaccinated. Or, even better, maybe you’ve had your first shot already. Canada has a problem with vaccine deliveries at the moment, so I have no clue when I will get my turn. But I read a lot about it every day and the theory is that deliveries will start to catch up next week. I hope that is the case.

That said, I also suspect we are all going to be getting Covid vaccines once a year or so for some time, as they modify the vaccines to handle new variants. It will be something like the annual flu shot. Some articles suggest that will only go on for a few years, while others say it may be annual forever, like the flu itself. Regardless, I’ll do it. I hope you will join me in doing the same.

Keep safe, and I’ll be back in a week with another post.