Just wondering...

This morning at breakfast I had to load up my weekly pill container. Another 8 days had gone by (wait.. there's seven days in a week!) so it was empty. Like most folks, I suppose that when the time comes to do this task, I count out eight pills each... one for this morning, seven for the pill container. I gain a day that way. I don't do much for drugs... 100 mg of Zoloft that I should have started when I joined the military (except SSRIs hadn't been invented yet), something for my sinuses (I think I may be allergic to the dogs, but I won't give up my sweeties), and a stack of vitamins (which includes one of those memory thingies, whatever they're called).

Maybe I should take two of those.

Among the vitamins is chelated potassium, which does this delightful little thing in my mouth when I take it. A cooling, soothing sensation... maybe every Mexican restaurant should have a bottle of chelated potassium sitting on the table next to the chili sauces. But they won't.

Hell, they don't even have toilet seats in the bathrooms.

The process of counting out eight tablets, capsules, caplets, whatever- makes me think that I'm being efficient ("I gain a day"). And that that is a good thing. But it bothers me to think that many, maybe ALL of my decisions and processes are designed and implemented around the concept of efficiency. And that's a frightening thought. Am I living my life like a @%^$&* business? MxSailor, Inc? If you ask the 1st Mate, though, she would laugh at the idea that I'm living an efficient life. It would be downright hysterical to her.

So maybe I needn't worry about that. I can worry about something else, like,

WHAT'S THE OPPOSITE OF A QUANTA?

Well, maybe that's not important either.

How many coffee beans?

I was wondering about a mental phenomena as I dumped my vitamins on the breakfast table. It is said that we can instantly count up to five objects without actually counting. We KNOW there's five B Complex tablets sitting on the tablecloth. But what if there's six? or seven? I don't know about your brain, but my brain tells me that there's "more than five" with just a glance. Why is this "hardwired" into my brain? Maybe it has to do with having five fingers, I dunno.

How many coffee beans? (No fair counting)

But I wonder about that feeling I get when there's more than five. If there's six, the "more than five" (call it MTF) sensation isn't as strong as if there's seven or eight or nine. Then I wonder, maybe that feeling is a way to sense six objects. If you practiced at it, could you increase the number of objects you could sense? By being sensitive to the amount of MTF feeling you get, could you ramp up the number to something really large, like "How many coffee beans in a kilo of coffee beans.." or something important like that.

Think how efficient your life would be then...

What do you do?

You live in Mexico. They don't sell or service the car you own. You need a special tool.

What do you do?

1) Jump in the car and drive to Arizona. With tolls, fuel, food and the $10 tool you need, you spend about $150 for the tool.

2) Make your own.

I needed to remove the pistons from the motor of the VW Westy so I could replace them. However, there's a steel pin that connects the piston to the rest of the motor, called a wristpin. (If the piston were a hand, then the connecting rod is the arm and this pin is the wrist.) These are supposed to just slide in and out with a little resistance, but is everything were as it was supposed to be with this motor, I wouldn't be taking it apart. A wristpin removal tool is required.

This is the piston (already pulled out so you can see it). The wristpin is the inner circular object you see. The circlip has the two little holes at the ends. It acts like a spring to hold the pin in place.

I managed to find a threaded bolt long enough to go through the pin. Then I found a nut that screws on the end.. large enough it won't go through the wristpin, small enough to get around the circlip. Then I had to have a way to pull on that bolt with enough enough force to remove it.

This is the setup in the engine, the circlip removed.

I took a woodworking clamp and notched it for the bolt.

Then, the clamp fits on the motor like this and the clamp is tightened.

The force on the bolt pulls the wristpin out, and the piston is free to be removed.

High Tech, Low Tech

I spend my days doing different projects... cars, boats, honey do this. Yesterday I bought (at a huge discount) a program for boat design and started learning it and drawing in my latest version of the FLASH. I still have the deck salon, hatches, ports and a number of other things to add. I'll be able to layout the interior using objects in scale to the model... sinks, stoves, bathrooms, etc. That's hard to do with paper and pencil (although I have) because I tend to fudge the size of something if it looks better to me, though it wouldn't work out in reality.

So I'm working on an exterior and an interior model, which, some day I will post up here.

At the other end of the spectrum, the 1st Mate asked me to install an overhead fan in the "family area" of the house. This, dear reader, entails getting involved with Mexican wiring standards, so if you are easily upset or queasy, continue no further.

Mostly, Mexican electricians (ha ha) use metal junction boxes in the walls and ceilings. This box combines all the wiring for half the house, including the kitchen (think refrigerator, electric oven, toaster, juicer, blender, air conditioner, lighting, etc). The two orange wires dangling down aren't connected to anything electrical. They're used to tie the ceiling light fixture to the ceiling... (you just kinda' twist them around any protrusion of the fixture, and you're done).

Since Mexican electrical codes don't inform how far into the plaster one should install the junction box, the boxes tend to tilt in on one side, out on another, and never are lined up with anything... and we're talking about just one box. So, getting into the spirit of things, I rummaged around and pulled this metal cover off an old light fixture and set to mounting it in the hole in the ceiling.

Because it's soft metal, the cover molded itself to the opening with a nice tight fit, and within minutes the fan was up and running. The holes around the fixture will be puttied in later.

Engine One, Engine Two, Engine Three, Punt!

I'm halfway through this project and the lines between these engines are starting to blur. What I mean to say is that at the halfway point, the new engine becomes the old engine and vice- versa.*

So I have to name them: Engine One is the old engine I just finished painting and will be the new engine. Engine Two is the engine I'm removing the parts from to complete Engine One. Engine Three is the engine I won't buy if Engine One breaks, hence the "PUNT!"

While I'm at it, I should mention that when I bought the 28 oz size of hand cleaner at the Autozone in Guaymas, they showed me a gallon size container. I laughed. Ha Ha. I'll probably go into Guaymas later today or tomorrow and buy it. This job is so dirty I've got grease under my toenails. Thankfully, no photos of that.

*VICE-VERSA: The phrase has a Latin origin. "Vice" means "in the place of" or "in succession to" as in "The Vice-President would act in place of the President". The root of "vice" is "vix" meaning "change". "Versa" is a form of the Latin verb "vertere" and is a participle. "Vertere" means "to turn". So "vice versa" means "the position being reversed".

from YAHOO ANSWERS in case you've ever wondered...

from Motor Gross to Motor Gleem

Before I start a rebuild, I like to to get everything cleaned up. There's a few good reasons for this:

1) I'm not transferring grit and crud and dead spiders into places in the motor not designed for such things.

2) I can only wash my hands so many times before they fall off, and I don't want to push my luck.

3) It's a psychological thing. It helps my morale and my delusion that if the motor is pretty, it will run pretty darn good.

4) It's a psychological thing II. I'm a little bit obsessive/compulsive/obsessive.

So I started with this engine that had been pulled out of my car and sat in a cardboard box in the desert for about a year.

After hours of scrubbing with harsh chemicals, most mechanics would say, "OK, enough." But not me (see #4 above).

I really like the new ceramic based high temperature paints. A few seconds with a spray can and Gross turns to Gleem, Crud turns to Cleen!

By the way, the heads (the "still dirty parts") are from the old motor and won't be cleaned up 'cause I'm not using them. The ones I'm using are still clean (and painted) from when I installed them last year.

Today I started putting up some shade

and I know they don't look like the picture below, but then, the GREEN FLASH doesn't look like any boat you've seen either.

This is the front 1/4 of the boat... and since they are pointy at that end (usually), I used a triangular sail by itself to cover the triangular shape of the boat... at that end, like I said. Because the sail itself it connected to the boat, I put the sailshade at the top of of the hull and propped up the center to get some air circulation underneath.

Sails are designed to get power from the wind and I don't want that. I want the boat to stay in the position and place that it's in now and not some other place (or position) after a big gust of wind. As I progress with the building of the FLASH, I'll raise the shade to accommodate. But so far, this seems to work OK. The "feels like" temperature was hovering at 112 when I did this today. The afternoon sea breeze helps, and I wanted to install this shade while the wind was blowing so I could see the effects it had on the stability of the boat on its stands.

Also today I stopped by the Yarda Los Calambres (Yard of the Cramps) to pick up some more steel beams for building infrastructure - possibly stuff to hold sails up, or make work tables and such. Picking around in this place is fascinating stuff, but wear old clothes.

Too Much Dinero, Joel. Let's try for Free...

I got the bid last night from Joel to build the metal roof shade over the FLASH and it came in at around $4,000 US. The 1st Mate is balking at that price and so am I. Realistically, putting that money into a temporary structure is not a good idea for us now.

So after applying some thought to the problem, I'm going to try rigging up some of the excess sails we have from our other sailboat (BLISS is still in Barra de Navidad) and see if that can be done. If so, it helps to clears out the 6x9x8 storage room we're renting and puts up shade for free. The sails are dacron and will probably start falling apart in a couple of years (the seams go first, but we have a sailmakers sewing machine and I know how to use it). I remember being on deck in the summer, and how cool and nice it was to get under the hoisted sails while underway.

A few quick looks around the internet confirm my opinion, and I can build the posts using material from the scrapyard one block away... (photos of shameless scrounging to follow soon).