Dull Men's Club

This is a tad embarrassing. You see, I thought that I was merely copying a popular Facebook group. I was unaware that Dull Men's Club was an official club. Please give the site a peruse as it is quite a delight!

...and I came home with a 1x4x8 and a tube of caulk.

I continued sanding some dining room chairs for painting, that I started last year December 2023, in preparation for a nye party. Today I continued this project and have 3 chairs left.

Ahead of a christmas baking session, decided to clean the oven

Pulled out the front glass and the inside ribs, smothered it in brown soap and put them in a plastic bag to soak outside overnight. Smothered the inside of the oven in brown soap, covered the bottom of the oven in a damp cloth to let the soap do all the hard work. This morning, scrubbed out all the soap from inside the oven and rinsed the glass and ribs in ample hot water under the tab. Put the glass back in and ran the pyrolysis function on the oven. After it cooled, ran a damp cloth over the inside of the oven and remounted the ribs. Clean as new

Way better than instant. Two parts water, one part oats. Boil the water, turn off the burner, add the oats. Sprinkle a bit of salt. Stir to make sure all the oats are wet, cover. Wait a few minutes.

While you're waiting, put whatever you want into a bowl - butter, syrup, brown sugar, cinnamon, bits of fruit, honey, peanut butter, jelly, etc. (Probably not all of those at once, but you do you.) Serve the oatmeal on top of the add-ons, mix.

They were good.

Gotta break out the ol' rain bibbs, jacket, galoshes, and gloves to get up on a ladder and clean them out. Because I am worried about the foundation getting more damaged by the water runoff not being directed at least a few feet away from the house.

Cross-posted from "Lots of ice on the car this morning" by @multicolorKnight@lemmy.world in !asklemmy@lemmy.world

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It went from rain to snow overnight, got even colder, and froze hard. This morning there were about 2 inches of very rough ice on the car. For some reason, it always collects the most at the bottom of the windshield, right where it's most important to see. The ice was about as hard as the glass.

I broke one scraper trying to clean it, started the engine and left the defroster on for a few minutes. After driving around for a while, and one mighty crash as the glacier on the roof let go, you would hardly know it was there at all.

I have a garage bay I could use, but it's full of other stuff, and I only park the car in there during disaster level storms.

Old one got a tear in the front and was leaking water on the floor. Had to take apart a bunch of the machine, and I gotta say that the two seals (inner drum and outer casing) were both tricky to get on properly.

Doing a test load of laundry now, and there's no leaks (so far), so that's pretty excellent

!

Podocarpus genus, took me twice as long as the last time. I used the same technique, not sure maybe I'm just getting old. House looks clean again I'm pleased.

A couple of days ago I bought a pack of 4 veggie burgers, as is my routine. They are convenient and quite tasty but not as cheap as they used to be. So imagine my delight when, on opening it, I found not 4 but 5 veggie burgers inside. The grocery stores have spent years raising all their prices at the expense of us little people. Well, now is my moment, now they really screwed up. Ha! That fifth veggie burger is going to have the delicious taste of revenge.

Edit: They say revenge is a dish best served cold. This turns out not always to be true. If cooking from frozen you need to grill it for 10-12 minutes, turning halfway through.

Our city leaves free dirt out at the fire station for people to spread on their sidewalks in the winter. I grabbed some for the back ally which is very icy.

I probably only grabbed 30 lbs or so, but I was still very diligent to lift it properly. Last thing I need over the holidays is to have a sore back.

The road behind my house is lined with bradford pear trees. Their leaves are so big that my pool vacuum cannot suck them up. So once they start falling I need to go out every night and get out what I can with a net and a special leaf vacuum. We had strom come through this week and thankfully the winds knocked the remaining leaves out of the trees. It took an hour and a half but I got every last one out of my pool. Now I can relax until the spring when they sprout and drop their flowers.

We've had weeks of alternating torrential rain and super hot sunny days that have both prevented me from mowing, but super charged the lawn growth at the same time.

The lawn was almost a foot long after not being able to mow it for 14 days due to the weather.

I had to empty the catcher on the mower every 10ft, and I made so many trips back and forth to the green waste bin with the catcher, I got my 8000 steps for the day.

It normally takes me an hour to mow the front and back lawns, but today it took me three and a half hours. The last two hours were in the dark, and I had to mow with a pair of torches...

It's nice that it's done now, but I'll have to mow again within the next 5 days.

I went scrounging around my garage and house and found all the mismatched screws lying around in various places, then organized them all by length and put then in labeled little drawers.

I've made sliders about 4 or 5 times in the past couple months and they've gotten really good. I use Gibsons seasoning salt, a higher protein beef (88/12 was the last one), white onions, and Hawaiian rolls. Add whatever cheese we have at the time.

I brought one to my neighbor and he suggested horseradish sauce, which was absolutely stellar.

My kids, my wife, and my neighbors all say they're amazing.

I don't know how I never got that idea. I've always complained that a panorama roof is mainly a feature for the rear passengers - well, this is actually rather excellent.

Drank some coffee while the dog romped in the first snow of the year. Made him come back in when he started a bark party. Too early for that.

If I tell him to, he knows to stop at the mat just inside the patio doors so I can get down on the floor and dry his feet off with a dog-specific towel thing we have. He loves getting dried off.

We have a service contract with a local heating oil company. It includes 1 tune up per year. I asked him a couple of questions and he was nice and answered them. One of the parts he was replacing had stripped threads and he had to wait for the parts truck to deliver a new one, but it's covered by the service contract.

Right now he's in his truck, doing paperwork I assume.

It's solid black, I've seen it twice now. It's supposed to dip to 0°F or lower this weekend so tomorrow I'll be setting up a shelter with a heat lamp. If it decides to stick around I may try trapping it to get shots and a vet visit in the spring. I have 6 cats at present so I really don't need another but if it stays outside I don't see a problem, I like cats.

Just woke up and made my coffee, found that my migration is complete!

I built a nas when I was fresh out of college with 3 drives in raid5 but because btrfs was relatively new at the time, I decided to go with ext4 for the file system. Essentially it defines how the 1’s and 0’s are arranged on the disk and how reads/writes etc work. Btrfs boasted some neat new features, but I just wanted reliable storage so I went with the established tech. I also left the 4th bay open because drives were expensive as frig at the time.

Now that time has passed and btrfs is more widespread, I found myself missing some of the features like snapshots and copy-on-write, so I decided to both add a hd and convert at the same time.

Only thing is that there isn’t really a way to convert an ext4 drive to btrfs - you have to copy everything off and back on. Some of the files I’ve got I’ve had for more than a decade, so I was understandably terrified of the thought.

I ended up making my new drive in the final bay into a standalone volume which I manually copied everything to, then wrote a bash script to recursively check the hash of every file on both sides to make sure they’re the same. This took 4 days of straight copying and reading/verification.

And cuz I’m a paranoid fek, I repeated the process with an old external drive I bought so I’d have two copies, one on the raid volume and on the external. Less chance of something going wrong on both simultaneously.

Even with two verified copies I had to take a deep breath and think real hard about anything I maybe forgot before I deleted that >10yo volume full of photos, legal docs, etc. Terrifying.

But this morning the restore has finished! Now I just verify the restored files and I can nuke the temporary standalone and add it into the raid cluster, and I’ll have a shiny new ginormous storage volume with all the lovely btrfs features I’ve been reading about.

The nice thing about this project is that I realized that this single drive failure that my raid cluster isn’t really the same as a full separate backup on a separate media. So I’ve left the cheap external that spins down if not accessed and set up a job to spin it up once a night and back anything new or changed to it.

This morning I’m sitting here excited about my objectively dull accomplishment. I think if I explained this to anyone I know irl their eyes would glaze over in the first paragraph, but I’m living my best boring life and it’s fantastic.

Having recently moved in to a new place, I needed to unclog out both bathroom sink drains. This house was built in the 50's and the previous owner used draino liberally, so both drain tail pipes snapped like twigs at the threads when I went to remove the trap. I tried replacing only the damaged parts, but ultimately, nothing was salvageable, as each part I replaced led to another catastrophically failing.

The guest bathroom plumbing wasn't too bad, as the vanity is spacious and things were at least installed correctly despite the damage. The en suite, however, has a cramped vanity, is too tiny to lay down in, and whoever did the plumbing directly abs-welded the <1" wall stub to a DWV elbow instead of using a slip joint. I had to take a hacksaw blade and gently floss the pipe between the wall and the joint, taking ~45 minutes and only having enough room to use my fingers to grab the blade

The plumbing is now done correctly, uses the right parts, and will never see draino again as long as I live here.

Tomorrow (Saturday) will be the December Solstice. The "shortest" day in the northern hemisphere and "longest" day in the southern hemisphere. Although it will be the day with the least amount of light for many of you, it means that each day after will be brighter. For others each day will be shorter, and thus duller. For places near the equator the change will be negligible throughout the year. Of course if you live near either of Earth's poles you will need to wait a few months to see the change.

I wish you all a very dull and uneventful day.

It is the polar opposite of the hustle culture, and I despise the hustle culture. Here I can be comfortably adequate and still feel valid.

I haven't done a damn thing today at work. My inbox is empty. The helpdesk is stagnant. Nobody's come into my office with an emergency. I've been watching Star Trek TNG interrupted only by toilet and coffee breaks. I'll wait for the cleaning lady to check the trash cans (they're empty), lock up, and go pick up my dad's gift.

What a perfectly adequate day.

Starting tomorrow I'm off through the new year. What should I do to really bang it up? I was thinking breakfast out tomorrow seems like the way to go.

It was closed for maintenance. Very disappointing.

It was very satisfying

I just like to make other people think there's something maybe a little exciting going on, like an enthusiast meetup or maybe a glitch in the matrix. It gives me a little chuckle.

I got the chimney cleaned today for the heating season.

I needed an adjustable wrench and guess what? They had some cam buckle straps for cheap. I've been not really looking for them but they'll come in handy. They're red. I like that colour.

I applied some paste wax to the table saw and was pleasantly surprised that it made a difference.

I think I'll have to use this on the wood runners on the old dresser I have too.

In case you're concerned, it's just a little DeWalt contractor's table saw. No sawstop or powermatic here. That's for the cool guys on youtube.

Now I have to connect the replacement one to the WiFi.

I've evolved from bifocals to trifocals. I didn't pick new frames, as Iike the ones I had before, so I just got the same frames again. I got these ones with lenses that go dark when you wear them outside and clear when I come back in. This means I'm not constantly swapping glasses when I come inside, or go outside...

There was nothing wrong with the fan; the previous installer (me) had not replaced the receptacle when installing a ceiling fan in place of a light fixture. It is now installed correctly.

I normally have pretty basic tastes when it comes to sandwiches: meat, cheese, mayo, a spread of some kind and/or lettuce if I have some on hand. But it's nice to throw in something different now and then.

Sticking to one or two ingredients (this is the dull men's club after all) how do you all like to kick up your sandwiches a bit?

I'll start-- it's nothing crazy, but Aldi sells a Bavarian sweet mustard that's a really nice step up from regular yellow mustard for a ham & swiss.

Total cost, $65 and a few minutes of time.

2 weeks later than I should have, of course.