DG has been watching the Market crash and is all worried and bummed out about it.
“Relax”, I told him. “It’s not all that bad. It comes back. It always has.”
But he was still upset.
“Well, just turn the chart upside down”, I said. “That will make you feel better.”
Hmmmm. I guess that wasn’t the very best idea that I ever came up with.
It is Daylight Saving Time again. So last night I went around moving all the clocks forward an hour. That was when I discovered that our Daniel Pratt clock had stopped ticking. I tried to get it going again, but it would not run. Don’t believe me? Here is a movie of the clock not running.
As you can see, the clock is not ticking.
Oh. Still watching? OK. I’ll wait.
Hmmm. hmmm… dum de dum…..
Done yet? Seriously, you can watch it all day and it won’t do anything.
Anyway, DG said that the clock was protesting Daylight Saving Time. The clocks are fed up with being joggled and disturbed twice a year, he said, just because some bureaucrat in Washington has made a rule that we have to do that. “It’s a silly rule”, he said, and he has taken up the cause and is protesting in support of the clocks.
While he was doing that, I took the clock down to the bench and found this.
That is the cord that holds the weight that makes the clock go. It was all frayed and wrapped around the axle (sort of like DG). I replaced the cord with a new one, and the clock is now running nicely. It hardly even missed the loss of an hour because it spent a couple of hours in the Clock Hospital.
I showed the cord to DG and said, “Hey, DG. This is just like you!”, and he said, “No. I’m a frayed knot!”
HAHAHAHAHA
Sometimes I crack myself up.
Now that the new chickadee house is up, DG has decided to take up bird watching. So he dragged out his big, serious bird watching binoculars.
I said to him, “DG, it’s only 20 feet away! You don’t need those.”
But then…… when the chickadee came back, this is what DG saw….
.. and this is what the chickadee saw.
I think they gave each other a mutual scare.
I hope the bird comes back.
This morning we saw the chickadees come by and check out the new house. Wow. Less than a day.
I didn’t get any photos; they were here and gone too quickly. They didn’t go in, but one of them looked in the hole.
I think we are off to a good start. 
Today we put up the new Chickadee house.
It looks a little pale compared to that old, weathered house. We are hoping that the chickadees like new things.
This may be a tad early, but we have seen the birds come by in the winter to check out the old house. We want it to be there if they come by. Also, the chickadees nest early in the spring, and we are having a warmish winter.
Stay tuned.
You may remember from a few months ago that some woodpeckers took over our chickadee house and renovated it so that they could move in. Here’s a link to a reminder
Woodpecker Birdhouse Renovation
After the woodpeckers moved out (they only roost in a birdhouse; they don’t nest in it) the front door was big enough that the English sparrows could get in. So we took down the house for the winter. I have now finished the Extreme Makeover of the house to make it a chickadee house again. The makeover was so extreme that I replaced all of the parts except the screws, which means that I really made a new house. Here it is.
I had some wood left over after building the new house, so I took the front off of the old house,
and I replaced it with a brand new front. Take a look.
Pretty cool.
You may notice that the new house is shorter than the old one. One of the reasons that I made an entirely new house is that I wanted to make it smaller. I made it smaller to discourage the woodpeckers from getting in it. They might think that these new digs are a bit tight for them. I hope.
So we now have sort of a Chickadee Bungalow.
Cozy.
Now that we are in a cold snap (Old Man Winter has arrived!), DG decided to stay in and sit down with a mug of nice, steamy coffee.
“DG”, I said, “are you aware that when you do that you make yourself complicit in the Coffee Plant conspiracy to take over the world?”
Seriously, DG, it’s true.
You see, the coffee plant, Coffea arabica, down in Colombia is always trying to expand its reach. It is procreating with abandon and trying to take over the world and using you to pursue it’s heinous plan.
DG: Wha?
Really. Here is what is going on. In order to take over the world, the coffee plant puts out lots and lots of coffee beans, which are picked by Señor Juan Valdez, packed into bags, and put on his mule. The mule carries the bags down to the boat, which takes them across the ocean to here. Once the beans get here they are roasted and ground and sold in the supermarket.
DG: Wha?
Hush.
The beans are sent to the supermarket in little bags and sold to you, DG, and you put them into your coffee maker to make your coffee. And here is the tricky bit. Since coffee contains caffeine, and caffeine is a diuretic it makes you ….. um…… well…. “go”, if you know what I mean.
DG: Eww
After you go, it gets flushed, filtered, and fumigated and then dumped into the ocean where it evaporates and turns into fluffy little white clouds that skip across the ocean down to Columbia where it rains on the coffee plant, making the plant grow so that it can make more beans….. for Señor Valdez to pick… and to take over the world.
So, you see, your real purpose in this world is to be a very small cog in the complex life cycle of the coffee plant….
DG?
I think DG has switched to tea.
DG is sick of all this rain. He really wanted to build a snowman before the crocuses bloom.
I told him that he could blame it on the Augernaut*
You see, in that very first snow storm in early December, the Augernaut broke (again) when we were half way through cleaning up that mess. Since then it has been in and out of the Augernaut hospital for a broken arm and then a fuel leak. We only got it back and working a few weeks ago…. just in time for the constant rains to hit.
I think that the word “snake-bit” might be appropriate for that machine.
*Our very huge snowblower, which we are beginning to have doubts about.
Continuing on with our ancient computer theme, we went digging through the Computer Museum again and found another machine that we can use to calculate the comparison of our hit rate to the hit rate of The Google.
That is my Heathkit, all-electronic, desktop calculator.
And…. I want to tell you the backstory behind this calculator….
Yes, DG, you DO have to sit through another telling of this story, so quit complaining!
Just to be clear, this calculator is not a $5 calculator like the one that I mentioned in my previous post. Nope. Here is a calculator like that.
Actually, that isn’t a $5 calculator either. That is, in fact a 25¢ calculator that I picked up at a rummage sale. It still works, and I use it most of the time. The battery is long since dead, but it works OK on solar power. So I just keep using it because it works……
But I digress.
Way back in 1971, when I was in the A.F. I was deployed TDY to England for a few months……
DG: Groan
Me: Hush.
While I was over there, I saw an advertisement in a magazine for a new Heathkit all-electronic calculator. It was one of the very first “affordable” all- electronic calculators made at that time. Brand new, and high tech. It was only $149.00….. which today would cost…….. $953.85 …. Hmmm.
So, having MMTB, as soon as I got back Stateside I ordered one. By the time the box arrived at my doorstep, it was already obsolete and they weren’t making it anymore. (True story; the technology took off like a rocket and they had a better one already).
But I assembled the kit anyway, and it worked. Yay.
Now here we are, 49 years later, and I still have the calculator. So I yanked the cover off of it, blew out the dust bunnies, and toggled the power switch…… and it lit up!
Wow. I put the cover back on, and here it is, all lit up like Broadway
Pretty cool.
So I made a short video of how we would solve the hit rate calculation back in 1971.
Well…. this is how we would have solved the hit rate calculation if there had been a hit rate. A hit back then was something you did to a baseball.
So…… DG, waddaya think?
Hello?
Waddaya think, DG?
DG?
DG: Zzzzzzzzzzzzz
Q: What the heck is this “computer museum” that you keep talking about?
A: It’s just a bunch of junk that I have collected over the years that used to be useful for calculating stuff. For example, here is my Chadwick Magic-Brain Calculator.
Q: What the heck is a “Chadwick Magic-Brain Calculator”?
It is basically an abacus with a stylus, cleverly marketed using the words “brain” and “calculator”, and most important of all…. “magic” in order to sucker less astute children out of their allowance money. Here’s how it works. Suppose you want to add the numbers 6 and 5 together. You take the stylus and put it into the hole next to the number “6”, like this:
Then, according to the CMBC instructions, if the column color is red, you pull the stylus down like this:
That enters the number 6 in the little window at the top. To add 5 to it, stick the stylus into the number 5, like this:
Since the column color is white, you move the stylus up and around to add in the 5. Like this:
The “around” action carries the surplus value to the next column over. You can see that the number 11 is in the windows at the top. Easy peasy.
To clear the calculator, pull the top bar up.
So, that’s it. I spent my pennies on this thing way back in the ’50s, and I still have it. How do you spell P-A-C-K R-A-T?
Borrowing heavily from Mark Twain’s comment about pool, “Owning a Chadwick Magic-Brain Calculator is a sign of a wasted childhood”.
You can actually still find these things on ebay for a few bucks, being sold by people who are smarter than some others and who are cleaning this stuff out of their closets instead of hanging it on a wall next to their $5 calculator, which can do the same calculation in a nano-second.
