This is what you do
when you dump a box of 115 (actually 113, I already used two) assorted 8/32 machine screws all over the floor.
Some of these suckers differ in length from others by only 1/8 of an inch. My brother can spot the difference by eye, but not me.
I've got to line them up next to each other one by one to sort them into groups
and get them back into the damn box!
Now, where was I before being so rudely interrupted?
This display has been up in the corner of our living space since just before Christmas and I figured it was about due to be changed out.
But first, a little cerebral side trip.
I've always been drawn to creating small slices of fantasy worlds.
I'm not sure how old I was but I was pretty young when I first crafted one of these private worlds with words when I wrote, with my limited vocabulary at the time, about a family that moved onto a small sailing ship to travel the oceans together.
And as far back as I can remember I was building models and diorams, little miniture, ordered, controllable, worlds. (I'm from a generation that was raised part feral. After an admonition to "don't sniff the plastic cement", we were then left to our own devices unsupervised in the downstairs rec-room with limited ventilation. What a fantastic way to grow up! Discovering the posibilities and limits of the world unfetered by overly restrictive restraints!)
I'm no psychiatrist, but I speculate that the attraction to crafting these things is being able to immerse myself in a world of my own creation and control to the exclusion of real-world pressures. Creating backstories for groups of miniture people without the angst of actual social interaction. Creating places where I can sit quietly on a mythical porch, free from the drone of lawnmowers (I grew up in the midwest where people are obsessed with lawns and lawnmower-drone is constant from sunup to sundown from early spring to late fall), free from medical appointments, car repairs, insurance brokers. A place where my mind can settle, can reset.
And as a septuagenarian I'm still alright with playing with models. Fantasy worlds rock!
So, (back to our originally scheduled program) time to move the old display to a protective storage container out in the dusty barn.
But before I do that,
My Timberleaf Pica teardrop came with three different battery charging posibilities.
(1) Solar, which is my #1 choice.
A panel coupled with a decent solar charger is a gentle, mostly hands off, and fully self-suporting option that 95% of the time keeps up with my needs with virtually no active input from me. (I might pay passing attention to sun-exposure when choosing a campsite but that's not my first priority especially since I can remove the panel and set it out in a sunnier spot.)
(2) A shore-power charger, commonly called a converter, and, as is mine, often built into the power-distribution center.
This option requires being hooked up to shore-power - obviously - so it's not a self-supporting system. And because of our irrational obsession with size it's actualy pretty harsh on the battery. Seriously! What is the point of having a 40 Amp charger hooked up to an 80 Ah battery?
It's not like I'm pulling in to an EV charging station and am itching to get back on the road again by the time I pee and grab a snack!
If I hook my teardrop up to shore-power I'm going to be there for at least 8 hours. A nice, small, lighter, less expensive, 15 Amp charger is more than enough to take care of my needs, but you can't buy a power distribution center/converter in this practical and functional size.
Which makes no sense because all batteries, even Li's, appreciate and thrive on gentle foreplay and just like any of us, being repeatedly slammed with a hard pounding wears them out and shortens thier life.
Fortunately my Timberleaf was wired with a dedicated breaker for the converter. I leave this turned off, only occasionally flipping it on for a few minutes to confirm that the converter is still working.
If I want to use shore-power charging, say if the battery is down to 20-30% and I'll be parked deep in the woods for a few more days, I'll flip the breaker on then keep an eye on the battery monitor and shut the charger back off at about 80% charge to minimize battery abuse.
(3) DC to DC charger.
This device takes the raw output from the vehicle's alternator - which might be as high as 16V -
coming into the trailer on pin 6 of the 7-way connector, and tames it down to the proper algorithm for charging Li batteries without damaging them. Handy for putting a charge into the house battery when the vehicle is running.
I had one of these on The Van but rarely used it, so when I discovered that the DC to DC charger on the teardrop wasn't working it wasn't that much of an operational issue because I was getting along without it just fine. But it was a brain issue! One of those things that gives a person, at least one like me, itchy-brain. So I decided to figure out what was going on, even though that meant standing on my head and contorting in ways no human, let alone an old-man human, was designed for. After all, even if I don't use it, that DC to DC charger is supposed to be working!
But! While wiring diagrams for the trailer running-gear, lights, brakes, etc., are easy to come by, for some damn reason it’s rare to find an RV manufacturer that makes wiring diagrams available for the house-systems of thier products. (This is why I should stick to building things myself! I know where every wire in the cargo trailer and both our barns goes because I put them there - and still have the wiring diagrams to fall back on when I start losing my mind! I know - I know. There's some that claim I've already lost it, but they don't understand that some things were never in there in the first place so they weren't mine to lose - - -)
It's not like they don't have them. The diagrams are there for workers building the units. It's just that they apparently don't give a damn about the poor smuck that buys their shit!
Admittedly, most of us can't decipher such a diagram, but what about the repair person you call in? They could certainly use it!
When you buy a washing machine it comes with a wiring diagram - or at least one you can download from the manufacture's site. It's not neccessarily for you, but for the repair person you will have to rely on one day.
But the mobile RV repair guy, which in my case is me, is shit-outa-luck!
So here we go!
Once I verified that the truck is delivering the charge voltage to the 7-way I knew the issue was within the trailer. More specificly, probably back there behind the fire extinguisher where all the electrical/electronic stuff is hidden.
So now it's time to start taking things apart and try to create my own wiring diagram so I can figure out how it's supposed to work and from there what the hell is wrong!
The cloth is covering the positive terminal of the battery to prevent mishaps. Though I have the disconnect switched off, killing power to pretty much everything, that terminal is still hot and chassis-grounds are all over the place inside this small space. Inadvertently connect the two with a dropped tool and - well, it wouldn't be good!
Speaking of dropped shit, a trick I use when working in small, crowded places like this is to put a small magnet on my driver bit, sockets, or wrench so they hang onto ferrous screws, nuts, and bolts rather than letting them fall into some inaccessible space.
Using eyeballs and my meter I chased the incoming charging voltage from the 7-way, down the length of the trailer, to this auto-resetting circuit-breaker where the incoming black, or hot, wire changes to two seperate red wires that spiral off, along with the accompanying white ground wire, into the spaghetti-maze of like-colored wires stuffed into this small space.
Another quick meter-check shows the breaker is passing the charge voltage on through.
Crap! That means I have to start chasing individual wires snuggly bundled together with a lot of other wires, through tight spaces to figure out where they go and what's gone wrong! (If only there was something like - oh I don't know - a friggin WIRING DIAGRAM!)
After a lot of contortion, cutting of cable ties, unscrewing of cable clamps, scraping of hands, and a few scathing words, sometimes muttered, sometimes enunciated very loudly, I still wasn't any the wiser (it didn't help that one or two of the wires changed colors at butt-splices buried inside cable-bundles!), so I went at it from the other end to see if things would be any easier to track down. (Spoiler alert- no!)
I knew that in the panel just above the electronics bay I was rooting around in was a switch to enable/disable the DC to DC charger. (And yes, long before embarking on this folly I tried the switch in both positions just in case it had been installed upside down!) So I figured I'd start chasing from that end instead.
Well that wasn't any easier!
Oh, it was easy enough to figure out that the black wire plugged into the back of the switch was ground and the green hot, so that orange wire must be the one turning the DC to DC charger on and off. Chase it down and it will lead me to whatever is actually doing the controlling.
OK, yeah. That didn't work out quite so well.
You see - that orange wire disapeared, along with a bunch of other wires, none of them orange, into a wire loom (think plastic conduit) that loops through the living compartment and into the back of the electronics compartment - only there's no orange wire coming out the other end!
I had to stand on my head in the living compartment and tear open the wire-loom to discover that, buried deep inside that loom the orange wire was butt-spliced to a - oh crap! - red wire. Do you know how many red wires there are coming out the other end of this loom?! Five! I counted!
Eventually I managed to track that orange-then-red wire to this relay buried about as deep as you could get in the back of the electronics compartment, just above the battery and squeezed between the power-distribution center and the shore-power inlet, as far away from the actual DC to DC charger as you can get in here.
While I was nursing an aching head and trying to figure out how I was going to get that relay out so I could test it without disassembling the whole damn compartment, I also got to wondering
why the hot wire for the switch in the panel above was being fed through the battery monitor instead of directly to the switch.
So, to postpone trying to extract that relay, I decided to try and figure out the whole battery monitor side-trip thing.
I've been using this model of battery monitor - this is my third - for many years, but this is the first time I've seen these terminals on the back being used.
So I did some poking around in the blue-tooth interface for the monitor and buried in the 'settings' I found another tab for 'relay'
And found that this relay is for controlling an inverter (which I've never had and still don't), making sure the inverter is shut down if the battery charge-level gets below a user-defined threshold.
But more importantly, notice that the relay is disabled!
As soon as I enabled that relay through the interface and turned the orange-wire switch on, the friggin DC to DC charger started working!
Why in the hell someone decided to wire a switch to a relay through another relay, I have no idea. And one day I'll get my tools back out and bypass that monitor-relay altogether since it is unneccessary and completely redundant as well as introducing complications and potential failure points!
Now- maybe I should start drawing my own wiring diagram for next time? - Nah, maybe later -
Possum, Bobcat, Armadillo, Coyote, Deer, Skunk, Fox, Feral Hog, Feral greg, Rabbit, Racoon, Squirrel, not to mention a variety of smaller rodents, turtles, snakes, lizards, and a good selection of birds, large to small, and more insects than can fit in all the Home Depot buckets in stock! (It's estimated that there's about 2.5 million ants for every one of the 8 billion humans on the planet)
It's safe to say that we have some wildlife here on the property. In fact, the two of us wingless two-leggers are way outnumbered here!
So it's not surprising that I come across fresh dens quite often (see how orange the dirt at the arrows is. It hasn't had time to weather to a more faded color yet). And sometimes quite close to the trails I've cut that weave through the property.
But because I do the bare minimum of trail-maintenance
it can be difficult to distinguish my trails from the many game trails out there. Here, my trail veers off to the right, under the green arrow, which is more difficult to see than I anticipated, while a game-trail continues nearly straight under the red arrow.
Here's an example where the game-trail (red) is significantly more pronounced than my trail (green), even though I have boots on my trails 6 to 8 times per week.
Is it any wonder that I sometimes wander off along a game trail instead of sticking to my lane when I'm not paying attention?
Not all game-trails are easy to spot. This one, just off the toe of my boot, is called a foraging-trail,
as is this one snaking past my hat, visible right now because of the low angle of the light.
These are made by tens of thousands of leaf-cutter ant-feet following the same route between nest and foraging area and back for weeks at a time. In the case of the boot trail they were collecting Juniper berries from further up the hill and taking them back to the nest, which is about 100 feet from this spot. The Juniper berries have pretty much all been collected, but if you blow the image up you might be able to spot a stray ant or two still using this trail.
Most of the property is too hard and gravely to show many footprints,
but there are a couple sandy spots where tracks, from boot, bike, deer, feline, canine, rodent, reptile, insect, and bird, show up fairly well. In this case
when I got down on hands and knees
I counted over a dozen
different kinds of tracks in this one small area,
including that of a fire-breathing dragon!
OK, maybe just an ordinary dragon.
OK, OK, perhaps just a lizard. But then again, lizards are dragons!
(Is it just me, or does anybody else see a perfect little horseshoe in the side of that deer print?)
Anyway - off to get lost on my trails again.
OK, I just got called out - understandably so - on having yet another surgery without saying anything here prior to, thus apparently contravening my mandate to be more open.
First off, that wasn't a self-mandate, it was imposed by others. True, they were mental health professionals and I try to be respectful of their attempts to help me, but so far I haven't come across a single one that actually walks in my shoes. After all, dealing with touchy-feely and intense personal interaction is hardly a career the autistic person is going to gravitate to!
Second off - well - have any of y'all seen the TV series called Astrid? It's French with English subtitles. (The PBS Masterpiece English language version called Patience, even though using much of the original's scripts verbatum, is a watered down and hacked up attempt at mainstreaming the show for the North American market) And yes, I have dammed all things French while doing vitriolic hack-jobs on them in the past, assuming the French business culture, and Parisians in general, were representative of all French. It's interesting that when you take the time to step outside the business world, and the realms of the haughty Parisians, the 'normal' French feel just about the same way, and make the same sort of snide, divisive cracks about them that I do. Which makes them more human than I care to admit. (But I still contend that French cuisine is highly overrated.)
Anyway - one of the protagonists of Astrid is autistic. A little further down the spectrum than I am, but frankly not by much any more. (I swear I have been getting worse since retirement!) She carries 10 beans in a pocket. When a stressor is encountered she moves a bean from that pocket to another. How many beans she moves depends on the intensity of the stressor. When the stressor has passed she moves a bean(s) back to the original pocket. The lower the supply of beans in the 'home' pocket, the closer she is to a meltdown and she sometimes has to bail out of the 'secular world' - to give it a title - and hole up somewhere untill the crisis passes.
Well I only have so many hypothetical beans of my own and sometimes have to conserve. It's not that I'm trying to be obtuse, obscure, secretive, uncomunicative, it's just that sometimes - often - that's how an autistic's self preservation comes across.
But now that the primary stressors of this latest event are behind me and most the beans are back in the hypothetical home pocket I am able to process without a meltdown, or at least only minor meltdowns.
This particular surgery, my 7th in the past three years and done on Feb 20, wasn't really that big a deal, except that it was.
You see - in September of 2023 I threw a bright-spot in my left lung during my 3rd CT scan (so far I've had 12 CT's with more scheduled) and even though symptomless, that sent me to the ER and landed me on blood-thinners because of a 5 year old, previously undiagnosed, clot in my right leg. But I had two major surgeries scheduled for the following month and had to be off the blood-thinners for them
so I ended up having an ICV filter installed before the surgeries to trap any rogue clots in my full-strength blood before they got to my lungs.
The IVC was placed, the surgeries were performed, successfully removing the detectable cancers, (continued chemo was used to knock out the undetectible, if any, cancer cells) and I went back on the blood thinners.
But here's where things fell apart. Aparently IVC filters are normally removed again within three months. But somehow, if it was ever sent at all, I missed that memo. (My excuse is that I was more dead than alive at the time, what with cancer standing over me with a scythe casting a shadow across my shoulder on one side and side effects of the first round of chemo and two major surgeries nearly killing me on the other side.) and it also apparently fell through the cracks with my various care-teams.
Then in Feb 2025 my original oncologist left to become the Chief of Oncology elsewhere and I was handed off to another oncologist. Thus further disrupting the flow.
At our third consult (which always follow a round of scans and tests) she, the new oncologist, suddenly twigged to the fact that that IVC filter was still in me (I honestly thought that was normal right up until that moment, after all, as far as I know that clot is still there) and panic erupted!
I was handed off to a Hemotologist who reviewed my case and handed me off to Interventional Radiology, the people that actually insert and remove these things. Those people, from the nurse taking my vitals, all the way up to the surgeon, got all hyper over the fact that the thing had been in me so long.
Anyway, after 2.5 years it was a moderately high-risk procedure to get it back out again (but even higher risk leaving it in since the fine little arms can fatigue over time and potentially break off) so I was booked for the first surgery of Feb 20 at 0700 (fresh staff and maximum supplies on hand) at the main building where I'd be next door to the trauma and ICU facilities.
- then they called the night before and rescheduled for 1015. Of course the scheduler has no idea why, they've just been told to make the change.
- at 1115, while I'm showing signs of a meltdown (I couldn't use the green candy to derail it because no food after midnight. Fortunately my meltdowns are not outwardly disruptive - i.e. don't look like a tantrum, but rather I shut down, curl up, and retreat from the world) there in the packed waiting room, The Wife starts raising hell until we were finally given an update (the guy in the OR ahead of me wasn't doing well but they were making progress)
- At 1200 we finally get called back and at 1255 I was given a touch of midazolam and fentanyl to, and I quote, "help you stay relaxed and comfortable while staying awake and breathing on your own" (of my 7 surgeries I've been awake for 4 of them). That same paper also says "The medicine helps reduce anxiety and pain". Well when you start at the elevated levels of anxiety of an autistic thrashing around amidst every sensory trigger there is as if they'd been tossed into an industrial clothes dryer and left to tumble while booming rap music is blasted into their ears, 'reduced' anxiety doesn't even get you down to the level where normal people live! The instructions also state "If you feel anxious or have pain at any time during the procedure let your care team know right away" (their bold, not mine) But, as The Wife pointed out to them, I can't.
It's really hard to explain, and I'm not sure I really understand it myself, which is why those that don't live it don't have a frigging chance of understanding, but there are times, such as these, when I can not verbally express myself. My mind races and produces sentences, but the connection between there and my voice is temporarily disconnected. During events like this I can stimm with my left fingers but very few people not involved with autistics recognize that that might be an attempt to communicate. It would be better if they'd let The Wife into the room so she could translate for me. If I'm stimming the anxiety and pain levels are high! But she's not so, as you'll see below, I end up silently dealing with the pain of the procedure.
What follows is cut and pasted from the aftermath report with my unsolicited comments thown in.
Ultrasound evaluation of the right internal jugular vein demonstrated a patent and compressible vein. With the patient in the supine position, the skin overlying the access site was prepped and draped in the usual sterile fashion. Lidocaine 1% was used for local anesthesia. (Holy Crap that shit burns until it finally takes effect!) Under ultrasound imaging-guidance a 21 gauge needle was advanced into the vein and the access site was scaled up to accept a Micropuncture transition dilator. (Which is a fancy way of saying they punched a hole in me then used a big-ass
An image was obtained and placed into the medical record.
A guidewire was advanced into the venous system under fluoroscopic-guidance and a 5 French flush catheter was advanced with the aid of the wire carefully past the Option filter into the distal inferior vena cava, (what's not in this report is that in the process, twice, the wire slipped into the adjacent renal vien before it was spotted and pulled back out and I felt it like a kick to my kidney each time! I'm writing this on Feb 26 and my kidney still aches, although that might be phycosomatic.) followed by digital subtraction venography of the inferior vena cava and its major branches. (Fancy-speak for 'took another picture')
The access site (that friggin hole in my neck that's fast becoming the size of the Lincoln Tunnel!) was then scaled up to accept an 11 French sheath (In human speak, they decided
Post procedure venography demonstrated the following: No evidence of extravsation with a normal appearing inferior vena cava
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| Those hook-like things on the ends of the wires are exactly what they look like. They grab onto the interior walls of the vein to keep the filter from drifting away with the blood-flow. To get it out they snag the little loop at the top then pull while lowering a sheath around the filter to collapse the wires, pulling them away from the vein's walls and unhooking them. In my case one of the hooks was stuborn enough to come out with a bit of me still attached to it. |
And to answer your question Michael, no The Wife has no instructions on how to let all y'all know if I've 'walked on', to use your phrase. If I have she'll have enough to deal with without that too. Instead I have a 'doomsday' post queued up that will release on its own. That, depending on the timing, will be somewhere between two and three months after I'm no longer able to alter the scheduled release. Of course it won't have details of what happened but it will serve to close the book.
I wrote this several years ago, but never published it.
Since I just blew out yet another set of hiking shoes and have had to switch to some replacements, it seems appropriate to finally release this post into the wild.
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| New and watertight (left), old and leaky (right) |
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| Not sure the old one on the left can pass the Lincoln-head test anymore |
So here's the original, but previously unreleased, post
OK, this is a weird one that I'm trying to make a little less weird by giving you the complicated back-story.
Christmas of '77 was roaring at me like a visit from a herd of stomping riendeer, and not the friendly Donner and Vixen kind. First one in my life where I'd be truely alone.
A few months earlier my forever-more had taught me that forever can be pretty damn short as she carried her bags out the door and drove off in our only car! And now I was sitting there in Pascagoula Mississippi, 1000 miles from family. On the outside looking in, apart from all the twinkling festivity round me.
Used to working long hours, actually embracing working 12 hours 6 and 7 days a week at the shipyard at this point in my life, suddenly I was looking at two full days off. Two and a half if you factor in that I was working swing-shift and didn't have to clock in untill late-afternoon the day after Christmas.
Now I was staring at 56 hours alone in a tiny, newly bachelorized apartment (my bed was a sleeping bag on an air-mattress that doubled as my lounge-chair) staring out at a sun-burned, broken asphalt parking lot while being reminded of what could have been by sappy old Christmas movies on my 9" portable black & white TV. And I didn't like what I saw.
So at first-light Christmas Eve morning I threw the handfull of still-wrapped presents sent from home, along with a spare set of clothes (except socks. I forgot socks), and a map into my practicly brand new, bright yellow (only came in red or yellow in those days) Honda Civic CVCC 5-speed manual that cost me $3000, $300 down, and headed for Key West.
Why Key West? Why not? I could make it there and back before my next shift and it seemed about as far from Christmas pity as I could get. - Which wasn't very far at all since I apparently packed that in the car right along with my spare underwear.
That night I found myself in a cinder-block motel in Homestead Florida with a leathery 7-11 hotdog on a glue-like bun waiting on a corner of the TV stand with one packet of soup-like ketchup, one packet of watery mustard, and a bag of chips, while I opened Christmas gifts on the bed in my underwear. (Mom, up there in Michigan, had sewn me a big puffy-coat winter jacket - hint, hint - which I wore over my tighty-whities for a few minutes but it was too warm for too much of that sort of nonsense!)
Before dawn on Christmas morning I was out of that souless, puke-green and perpetually musty room and back on the road.
An old friend, the road. Just me alone in the car observing the world go about its business from the solitary safety of my personal cocoon.
In fact I was so solitary and unwilling to face the real world that day that when I got to Key West I drove a few loops through town and turned back north again without even parking, let alone getting out of my tiny yellow fortress of solitude.
Stopping only for gas-n-snacks, which wasn't very often since that 1.5 liter, 55 hp engine got just shy of 50 MPG and it had a 12 gallon tank, I drove almost around the clock, straight through. Not that I was in any rush to get back to that souless apartment in Pascagoula, but what else was there to do?
I had the radio playing just loud enough to almost hear over the open window wind-noise, and sometime in the wee-hours someplace in the sparsely populated (in those days) hinterlands of the Florida/Alabama panhandle somewhere inside my road-tranced head, I thought I heard, in that quinticencial, low, buttery-smooth voice of late-night 70's DJ's everywhere, something said about Alabama thighs.
I'm sure I miss-heard. It was probably something more along the lines of Alabama skys, or something like that, but in my trip-addled state of mind, out there sharing the road with pretty much nothing but a few lonely comercial trucks and the occasional dimmly lit yellow window off in the woods, I latched onto Alabama thighs and spent the rest of the drive writing the following in my head. Clearly a self-indulgent exercise in wallowing pity and wishful thinking.
But while you're judging, remember that this was written in the 70's by bruised and bleeding 23 year old boy.
Alabama thighs
