Our garbage disposal stopped working recently and my first reaction was that I might have to call someone to repair or replace it. I know nothing about garbage disposals, after all. But after a YouTube video and just looking at the thing, I learned enough about garbage disposal to take it apart and fix it …
Monthly Archives: September 2020
The weakness of cement
I usually think of cement as very hard and as the type of thing that breaks other things, rather than the type of thing that breaks. But everything has its weakness. Or its downside. Or its particular way that it can go wrong. Worth thinking about before you pour the cement. What will you do …
Talk to one person
One of my friends convinced me to build a storage shed using wood as the base, rather than concrete. It sounds a lot easier to work with and easier to fix than a cracked piece of concrete done wrong. Another one of my friends changed my mind about which image to use for the main …
Boiling a swimming pool
I was using an electric air pump to blow up an inflatable pool today and the sections that I needed to inflate were different sizes. Some were small and inflated really quickly. Others were so large that I wasn’t sure that they were inflating at all, because the initial evidence of progress was so hard …
300 years
Greenland sharks live 300 to 500 years. If I knew that I would live that long, then I’d likely still be procrastinating. As it is, I hope to live to be 100. That probably still causes some procrastination. We should probably do the opposite. How would you live if you knew you had 5-10 years …
The biggest fish
Whale sharks are the biggest fish in the sea. You might think they eat the second biggest fish or the large fish or at least the medium sized fish of the sea, to get so big. But if you thought that, you’d be wrong. The biggest fish in the sea eat plankton, which are some …
Little efforts
I have been working on a mini series of blog posts but it’s a bigger effort to organize than single blog posts and it’s not ready yet. So what ends up happening is that it keeps getting pushed back because it’s bigger, and the smaller single posts, like this one, get posted before it. This …
Follow through
I watched an interview of a man who invented a plastic plate that holds a drink. He said it was an idea that many people had had before. When he went to file a patent, he said there were 1,700 provisional patents filed before but they had all expired without being converted into a non-provisional …
How much time do you have left?
The other day my friend asked me how much longer I had left on my year-long blog project. I said, “Four months.” And then I had a mix of emotions. Am I waiting for it to be over because it takes some time and effort every day? Or am I wishing it were longer, so …
The day is long, the baguette is not
Fresh baguettes are always good on the day they are baked. I try to buy ones that will be okay the next day too, in case I don’t finish it all on the first day. Yesterday, I was eating a day-old baguette. I made a sandwich with part of it for lunch and it was …