Tag Archives: ACE Hardware

2014/08/26 (T) Dinner With Kate

Darryll planned to be back on Wednesday morning. He figures two more days to finish everything except the hookups to the gas meter. I figured I needed to have at least one coat of paint on the east garage wall today to stay ahead of him, so my first task after breakfast was to paint the wall.

Madeline being read to by Aunt Meghan with Grandma Linda.

Madeline goes for a ride on her new Radio Flyer tricycle.

When I was done with the morning painting I did a light sanding of the drywall compound on the outside of the utility closet walls. After a cursory inspection, I decided it was good enough and went ahead and painted it and then cleaned up the paint tools. I took care of a couple of minor electrical tasks and then sanded the library side of the former window A-C opening and applied some more drywall compound. I cleaned up my drywall tools and by 11:30 AM was done with construction projects for the day.

I got cleaned up just in time for lunch. We had left over Koshary, after which we sat outside and read. Linda is reading an e-book titled “Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat.” The book is about the intertwined evolution of cooking technique, cookware, and utensils. I started reading the September-October 2014 issue of The Gypsy Journal, which I had downloaded on Sunday and e-mailed to our iPads yesterday.

MEF3 steers the Radio Flyer with a little help from her dad.

We left around 2 PM for our son’s house in Ann Arbor, making a stop at the Whole Foods Market for some dry ingredients. The reason for our visit was to deliver Madeline’s new Radio Flyer convertible tricycle and visit until time to meet Kate for dinner. Madeline started day care yesterday, which is a really big deal. We were curious how the first two days went, and just wanted to see everyone; I think it’s only been a couple of weeks, but it feels much longer. Today was my lucky day as Madeline decided I was the designated book reader. She has let me read to her occasionally in the past, but usually goes to her mom, dad, aunt, or Grandma Linda, all of whom she has spent more time with than she has with me. It made for a very special afternoon for Grandpa Bruce.

The Radio Flyer tricycle even has a sunshade!

We left Brenda and Shawna’s house around 5:45 PM and found ourselves in the middle of the evening traffic jam on eastbound Washtenaw Avenue. We slowly worked our way east towards US-23 and then turned into a strip mall to pick up some disposable paint tray liners at an ACE Hardware store. We got back into the traffic flow using a street at the end of the strip mall that had a traffic signal. Once we were back on Washtenaw Avenue we had more reasonable traffic flow the rest of the way in to Ypsilanti.

After weighing several options, Kate chose the Wurst Bar in Ypsilanti for dinner. Linda had been their once before with Kate but it was my first visit. It was well rated on Yelp and the menu had several vegan options. They also had one of my favorite beers, the Lindeman Framboise, a raspberry lambic ale brewed in Vlezenbeek, Belgium. They were out of the Lindeman but had another lambic from a different producer. It came in something that looked like a large sparkling wine bottle and cost $15, so Linda and I split it. Long before hops were used in beers they were seasoned with fruits and vegetables. I’m not a big fan of hops, but I like fruit. The substitute was OK, but not what I recalled from the last time I had this at a restaurant in Frankenmuth, Michigan.

Grandma Linda’s turn to “drive” the Radio Flyer.

Kate had recently been to Paris, France and to both Venice and Padua in Italy with one of her nieces and nephews. She had printed about 40 photos (8×10) for us to see. While these are inherently beautiful places her photography was, as usual, superb. The Wurst Bar serves “tots” instead of French fries. Linda and I had some as an appetizer with vegan sausage crumbles, vegan cheese, and sliced jalapeños. Not health food, to be sure, but at least no animal products. For dinner Linda had the vegan wurst and I had the Asian tofu burger. Kate had a regular wurst and a dark beer on tap that she had not had before. She really liked it, but I did not catch the name.

It’s finally Grandpa Bruce’s turn to drive the tricycle.

By the time we were done eating the lights had been turned down and the music volume had been turned up, so we moved to Sweetwater Coffee and Tea a couple doors down the street. We all had coffee and to our delight they had a piece of vegan apple pie, which Linda took, and a piece of vegan mixed berry pie, which I took. I really like fruit pies but they have always been a rare treat; all the more so now that we eschew animal products. So tonight I had fruit beer and fruit pie.

I had planned to put a second coat of paint on the garage walls when we got home but the lateness of the hour disabused me of that idea and I went to bed instead.

Madeline shows her new tricycle to he mommy. It’s not a Subaru, but it’s pretty cool.

2014/03/11 (T) End Of Palm?

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I was up early for no particular reason. I worked on blog posts for a while and then decided to search for a User’s Manual for our Sharp Carousel II Convection Microwave oven. We had looked before and not found one. It is not available from Sharp’s website. This time I searched by model number, R-1820, and bingo!, there it was. Someone had scanned it and made it into a PDF, but it was all there and all completely legible. Today was starting to feel like a lucky day.

I do not use my Palm Tungsten T3 much anymore since the Passwords Plus application got corrupted, and as a result I have gotten less attentive about keeping it charged. At home I keep it in a docking cradle so it is always charged, but I have not done this in the bus. I still use the Palm Desktop software for my calendar and name/address/phone records, but mostly because I have not found an easy way to move them to MS Outlook and have not wanted to take the time to do it manually. Besides, I like my Palm. I’ve had it a long time and it has served me well, providing a convenient and portable place to back up my information. I even replaced the battery a couple of years ago—which was no easy feat—to extend its life and uptime.

I checked it today and it was dead so I plugged it in to charge it up as I have done many times before. This time, however, it asked me to install the Palm software from the CD and then configure the device. I checked my calendar and my appointments were all gone. Ditto for the N/A/P records. The Passwords Plus app had also disappeared. It was a new day with a clean device. I pondered whether to set the Hotsync Manager to “desktop overwrites handheld” for all functions and see if it would restore the information to the handheld and decided to defer this project until later.

The dishwasher water leak at home was unexpected, but a conversation with Linda gave me confidence that the source of the problem had been identified and the situation was under control. At the bus I had dumped our waste tanks on Sunday as the gray water tank was indicating full. I had also topped off our fresh water tank. Later I noticed a wet spot on the concrete pad under the center of the water bay. Further investigation revealed a drip. Ugh.

We have two water valves on our coach where the fresh water hose gets connected. Our valves leak around the stems when the fresh water system is pressurized. When the first valve is opened it allows water to flow into the on board fresh water tank. The second valve connects an air hose fitting to the fresh water plumbing. This allows the use of compressed air to “blow out” the water pipes when winterizing the coach. These are the same kind of multi-turn gate valves used for shutoff valves on sinks and toilets. They have a packing nut that tightens around the valve stem and compresses a packing material around the stem to keep water from leaking out. They always need to be re-packed at some point. Ours have needed to be re-packed for a while, and seem to be getting worse of late, so I decided to play plumber today.

I bought some Teflon packing material at ACE Hardware. It is like a long piece of angel hair pasta. ACE also had the more traditional graphite rope, but the guy who helped me recommended the stuff I bought.

The handles have a center hole that is fluted to match corresponding flutes on the valve stem. The handle slips onto the stem and is retained by a small center screw. To remove the packing nut you must first remove handle. Easy in concept; impossible in fact. They probably have not been removed since the bus was converted in 1990/91, and they were not interested in coming off today. I think there is a special tool for pulling these handles, and I think I have one back at the house, but I don’t think it is going to help in this case. When working on a bus conversion away from its home base follow the physician’s credo, “First, do no harm.” This was a repair that did not have to be made at this time, and should not be made in this place, so I put my tools away and found something else to do.

We also have a 1.5″ knife valve on our fresh water tank to drain it rapidly. These valves, in various sizes, are normally used to drain RV waste tanks. They eventually develop leaks and need to be serviced or replaced, and that is the case with ours. With a mostly full fresh water tank, however, that was also not a task for this time and place.

John knocked on the door around 4 PM to let me know that folks were gathering at Jack and Shirley’s rig for happy hour followed by a pot luck dinner. There were 10 people there and we had a nice conversation. Jeff had prepared his highly acclaimed pork ribs and they were very popular with everyone (but me, of course). I had a chopped vegetable salad that Ali made the other day and set aside a portion for me. It was quite good, and very refreshing on a slightly warm, sunny afternoon.

When I returned to the coach I dealt with some e-mail and then uploaded my featured bus article on Frank and Phyfi Morrison’s Cool Cruiser to Bus Conversions Magazine. I put on PBS and watched a special fund-raiser concert featuring Steve Martin playing the banjo with the Steve Canyon bluegrass group. My Palm Tungsten T3 was fully charged, so I set the Hotsync Manager to have the Desktop Overwrite The Handheld. It took quite a while but it restored all of my applications and databases except for the old version of Passwords Plus. That was an acceptable outcome as we migrated our passwords some weeks ago to a newer application that automatically syncs multiple devices via the “cloud.” My anti-virus program notified me that my operating system was not up to date so I ran Microsoft Update. Even though support for Windows XP ends on April 8th there were a half dozen updates just released.

2014/02/25 (T) Bus Project

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Photos for today’s post follow the text in a photo gallery. Maximum dimension is ~300 pixels.

I don’t think I’m obsessive or compulsive, but I can only sit and relax so much before I have to do something. Linda likes to walk, and I like to walk with her, but I am less inclined to do that on my own just for the doing of it. Still, I walked to the local ACE Hardware store today for some parts for a “project” and stopped at the Grocery Depot for some supplies on the way back. It was probably a mile round trip; not enough to really promote cardiovascular fitness, but better than taking the car.

Yesterday I put some water in the garbage disposal opening. (Yes, our bus has a residential garbage disposal.) The disposal has never worked since we bought the bus and it occurred to me that the trap in the drain might not have any water in it, which would permit orders from the gray tank to come up into the house portion of the coach. Not to worry as it turns out; the water did not drain from the In-Sink-Erator. I left it for a few hours and it eventually drained out. Examination with a flashlight revealed that the inside was complete rusted, so badly that I could not even see the two pieces that are free to rotate when the disposal is spinning. I tried scraping the inside, but to free it up, but it was beyond hope.

I also finally understood why the switch which we assumed was for the disposal did not do anything. At some point in the past someone turned it “on” and the breaker on the bottom of the unit immediately tripped and never got reset. There would not have been any purpose in resetting it anyway.The only reasonably solution (from my point of view) was to replace the disposer, even though we did not intend to use it very much. I am not aware of a product that is sold for sealing up the hole where the disposer goes. (I could have plumbed it into the drain for the main sink basin, but given how small that section of the sink is, that would also serve no practical purpose.) I did not remove the old unit, but I had a good look at it as I needed to find one of similar size and shape given the space where it had to fit.

Late morning I was getting ready to head to Lowe’s in Gainesville when John (next door neighbor) invited me to join he and Ali and group of folks from the fire pit to go out to the Blue Highway Pizzeria for dinner, so I deferred my shopping trip until later. (Linda and I had a pizza at the Blue Highway in Micanopy a week or so ago and it was OK. The staff was great and was very helpful in getting us a vegan pizza, but most pizzas just don’t veganize very well. They did say that they would put our non-dairy cheese on a pizza for us if we brought it in a sealed package as it comes from the store. That may be worth a try).

I left early enough to do my shopping at meet up with the group at 3:30 PM. Luck was on my side. Lowe’s had a garbage disposer that looked exactly like the one installed in our coach. It was a Badger Model 1, 1/3 HP. Badger is In-Sink-Erator’s budget grinder line.

Today I opened the unit, read the instructions (yeah, I’m one of those guys), gathered my tools, and went to work. As shown by some of the photos that follow, the discharge port of the old disposer was completely clogged with—well, I’m not sure what—some combination of rust and food scraps. Kind of nasty, although that stuff doesn’t bother me. I removed the unit and discovered that it was a … In-Sink-Erator Badger Model 1. Sometimes you just get lucky. At least it was guaranteed to fit! Everything went back together fairly easily. I added water to check for leaks. Water tight. Plugged it in and voila, we have a functioning garbage disposer. And yes, the switch we thought was for the disposer is in fact for the disposer.

The other project I have been contemplating had to do with toilet paper. Our female cat, Juniper, likes to unroll it, shred it, and eat it. As shown in the pictures the doors on the bathroom sink cabinet are easily reached when “seated.” The right door opens into your right knee, but the left door swings clear. Oh look, I could mount a toilet paper roll holder right there. Open the door to use, close to hide it from the cat.

So, off to the ACE Hardware store in search of an appropriately sized TP holder. They had just what I needed; end mounts in (fake) polished brass, and inexpensive too. I like it when that happens. I assembled the tools I needed for this project but was not able to find my drill bits. Back to ACE Hardware for a drill bit. The project was done quickly as projects go and it works great! We’ve talked about mounting a paper towel holder somewhere in the kitchen. That may be tomorrow’s project.

Here are the photos: