Another day of selling

I met two buyers this evening in the Sonic parking lot and sold a watch and another trail cam.

Woo-hoo!

Fourth sale!

I just sold this humane animal trap to a couple who recently bought a 110-acre farm and have raccoons eating their corn crop. They paid the asking price of $25. This is almost like having a real job.

Third sale!

This is fun. And profitable.

We sold Maria's old 22" Dell monitor this evening to a guy named Jesus for $45. We met him in the Chik-fil-A parking lot. We were the only car there since the restaurant is closed on Sundays.

Second sale

I made my second Jonesboro Facebook Yard Sale deal this evening - a Moultrie trail camera for $40.

First sale

We're offering some stuff for sale on the Jonesboro Facebook Yard Sale page and just made our first sale.

It's a 50-gallon Rubbermaid tank - 12 inches deep and 31 inches wide - that we bought a year or two ago for the dogs to use as a swimming pool in hot weather. They refused to get into it and it sat in the back yard being unused and in the way.

I started getting queries within minutes of the listing going live and Maria and I just returned from the Brookland Sonic parking lot where we sold it to a guy for $35.

I much prefer doing business in a well-lit public space rather than have people I don't know come to our home in a secluded wooded subdivision.

Maria is home

Maria is home!

She rolled into the driveway at 11:25 a.m., way earlier than I expected.

I'm able to track her whereabouts with the iPhone "Find Friends" app and when I checked first thing this morning I was startled to see she was already in southern Illinois. I called her and found her in the Cracker Barrel at Mount Vernon, having left Austin's house in Speedway, Ind. a little after 4 a.m.

I set to getting the house tidied up and in the process discovered the dishwasher that was worked on yesterday would not start. I called the repair folks and they sent the same technician out, which was convenient because he already knew the background. He got it running with instructions to call if it craps out again. I will.

One of the first things I did after she got home was to put her wedding ring back onto her finger after if went missing eight long years ago and finally turned up yesterday.

Fixing stuff

My day started with a run down to our downtown Jonesboro office building to oversee the repair of the asphalt parking lot. We had one monstrous crater that took up a whole parking space. I've been worried about it for a couple of years, but this is the first time we were able to get a paving company to pay attention to us. Thank you Doug Barker and Barker Brothers Paving. They also resurfaced a few small spots and filled a couple of smaller potholes.

I had to leave before they finished in order to be home when the dishwasher repair guy came to complete the heating element changeout that I started Monday and bungled. It turned out that my diagnosis was correct - it was the heating element - and I had a replacement part on hand that I got from Amazon.com for about $23. It would have cost me about $70 from the appliance repair folks.

But the high point of my day came when I unpacked and tried on the Walls Men's Amarillo barn coat that I got from the Amazon Vine Program to review. It was offered in 2XL and I worried that it would be baggy, but they sent me an XL that fits perfectly. It's very well made and has a cool looking red-and-black plaid fleece lining. The exterior fabric is what they call "Heritage cotton duck colth, sanded and stone-washed for a warm, soft feel."

Now, all I need is some cool weather. The 10-day forecast calls for highs in the low to mid 70s.

Home again, home again

I received a medical/honorable discharge from the U.S. Air Force on this date in 1965.

Here I am a day or so later in my parents' back yard with their dog Snoopy and still sporting a basic training haircut.

I'm calling it a miracle

Maria's wedding ring vanished eight years ago, about the time that she took it off to refinish my great-grandmother's kitchen table.

We worked through several scenarios - she put it into the cardboard box holding the refinishing chemicals and tools, she had it in her change purse when she gave a handful of coins (and maybe the ring) to a homeless woman, she put it into the silverware drawer in the kitchen, and on and on.

Fast forward to this afternoon when the UPS driver delivered the heating element for our Kenmore dishwasher. I struggled to get it out from under the countertop - never did get it all the way out and finally gave up and called the appliance repair people to help me finish the job - but I got it far enough out to find Maria's ring on top of the dishwasher at the very back.

Maria is in Indiana visiting her family and meeting her new granddaughter, so I called her with the news. There is a small gap in the cabinet wall between the silverware drawer and the dishwasher and we think something happened - like closing the drawer abruptly - that made it hop through that gap. What is doubly surprising is that the appliance guy who replaced the heating element in May, 2015 never noticed it when he had the dishwasher pulled out.

I always knew it would turn up someday. Today was the day.

Happy Birthday, Steve!

My son Steve is 46 today. He makes me proud.

Scary news on Halloween

I woke up this morning to find this in my Facebook news feed.

Am I worried? Hell, yes I'm worried.

*****************
Later: It seems that the authorities at the pipeline protests are checking Facebook check-ins to target protesters and folks sympathetic to the protest are doing fake check-ins to confuse the authorities. Sean just posted a video of the gas range at his new residence in Portland.

Phew!

My K1200GT needs a new battery

The BMW motorcycle battery that I paid $227 (battery and labor) for on May 21, 2012 at Bloodworth BMW Motorcycles in Nashville, Tenn., is on its last legs.

I was mildly surprised when I checked just now to see how old it is - I thought it was a bit newer than 5½ years. That's a reasonable expectation for a battery, so it looks like I'll have to bite the bullet and ride down to Memphis and have the dealer there install a new battery.

I noticed it isn't holding a charge a couple of weeks ago when I rode it to the post office and it seemed to strain to start the bike again for the ride home. I put it on a charger and it seemed ok, but three days later it was flat again.

Thinking the battery was newer than 5½ years, I suspected the new starter relay I had installed about a month ago. Could it possibly be draining the battery? It seemed unlikely, but stranger things have happened. Now that I know the true age of the battery, I think I can rule out the starter relay as the problem.

Wikileaks summarized and made easy

http://www.mostdamagingwikileaks.com/

D4 and more

I've digitized about 35 vinyl albums since I set up my Numark TTusb turntable next to the desk in my office three weeks ago.

I retrieved my 30-year-old Discwasher system from a box in the garage a couple of weeks ago and have just about exhausted the 1.24 fluid ounce bottle of D4 fluid that was about a third full when I opened it for the first time in three decades. I was happy to discover that D4 Discwasher fluid is still available, the company having been taken over by RCA, and I ordered three bottles of the stuff from Amazon.com. I just got a text message informing me that my purchase has been shipped.

I also got a little deeper into the features of Audacity, the free software that I use to digitize my albums and turn them into mp3 files.

I digitized a crude little six-song album by the Delphi High School swing choir, recorded sometime in 1962. The name of the ensemble was the Top 20 because we (I was in it for my junior and senior years) were presumably the top 20 voices in the school choir. The recording is monaural and very low quality, but I dutifully sent mp3 copies to all of the Top 20 alums who expressed an interest.

I revisited the project this morning and achieved a dramatic improvement in sound quality using the noise reduction feature of Audacity. The I tried a trick my recording engineer son Sean taught me years ago: I copied the single mono track to create a second channel. Then I selected the right channel and inverted the sound waves. The effect is a simulation of stereophonic sound. Pretty cool, huh?

I emailed the cleaned up and stereo-ified tracks to my friends, noting that this is undoubtedly the best that recording ever sounded. I won't rule out further tweaks, but I'd done fiddling with it for now.

Keys

I found myself standing behind a guy with a white shirt and tie at the pharmacy today.

He had what looked like an old-style pager and this wad of keys on his belt and it got me thinking and noticing that I don't think it's especially cool to hang a bunch of keys on your belt.

I suppose some guys think it's a status symbol, announcing to the world that they are important because they have been entrusted with keys to a lot of important doors.

I, on the other hand, am not impressed.

It made this guy look like a white collar janitor.

Digitized

Digitized this two-record set yesterday. I'd forgotten how good they were.

Fixed

I was quite chagrined last night when Maria announced that our dishwasher had crapped out.

I checked my records and found we had identical symptoms - flashing green "clean" light and couldn't make it start - a year ago in May and paid serious money to replace the heating element.

I was all set to try to effect repairs myself when I came across a simple fix. By pressing a particular set of buttons, I made the green light go out and restored the full function of the dishwasher. Now I wonder if I really needed to pay for a new heating element and installation in May, 2015.

No thanks

I can remember when it was a big deal when the new phone books came out.

Not so much now.

Here's a stack of them that were rejected by folks who found them in their post office boxes (me included). I haven't looked up a phone number in a telephone directory for years. We have an unlisted number, so we're not in it anyway.

Ruthie - five years gone

We lost our beloved Ruthie five years ago today. She was a rescue from Crawfordsville, Ind. and she was a funny, sweet dog. Here she is waiting for Austin Dunbar to come home from school in Thorntown.

K bikes

BMW motorcycles come in lots of styles and engine types. I happen to favor the K series that was introduced around 1985. It was a radical departure from the horizontally opposed twin cylinder engine that was BMW's standard design since the Bavarian Motor Works began making motorcycles in 1923.

The horizontal twin - known as R bikes - continues to dominate BMW motorcycle sales, however, going through continual refinements. The GS series of R bikes (Gruenwald/Strasse, or Forest/Street) is widely recognized as the Swiss Army Knife of motorcycles - a go anywhere, do anything bike made for global adventuring.

The K bike niche is narrower, embracing sport, touring, and sport-touring with limited off-road appeal.

My first two BMWs were R bikes - a 1971 R50/5 and a 1981 R100RS. I was seduced by the powerful, responsive K bike engine in the spring of 1991 and bought a '91 K100RS that carried me more than 160,000 miles before it developed a terminally expensive engine problem and had to be parted out on Ebay.

I replaced it in 2003 with an '03 K1200GT - a 1,200cc luxury sport touring bike that is about to turn 79,000 miles. In autumn of 2000, I bought a 1994 K75S for Maria. Her enthusiasm for riding has waned so it has fallen to me to keep the battery up and ride it often on local errands.

Fellow K bike enthusiast Jack Riepe, who write humorous columns for the BMW Motorcycle Owners of America's monthly magazine, decided to champion the cause of the (we believe) underappreciated K bike by creating the Secret K Bike Rider's Club, complete with club t-shirts.

I ordered one from him and it came this week. He asked that I send him a photo of myself wearing the shirt next to my K bike(s), so here it is.