Diary of a Wolfeman

Like several hundred million other folks, I play the Wordle daily. I like logic puzzles, and these generally don’t disappoint.

There is one type of puzzle, however, that just pisses me right the hell off: the one where the answer is one word out of many that fit the basic pattern and only change one letter. This puzzle from a week or so ago is one of the most egregious instances I have ever encountered:

I managed to get almost the maximum possible number of incorrect guesses on this puzzle and still didn’t manage to guess the word. And ‘guess’ is the operative word here, because there’s no effing logic in figuring this out. According to the quick research I did, there are over a dozen words that could have fit this format.

“But Wolfie” I hear you say, “the answer is always a word that’s in common usage. It shouldn’t be that hard to guess.” To which I say: that’s bullshit, because “common usage” is entirely subjective to who you commonly speak to. And lemmetellya, I apparently don’t talk to bakers or tree-scientists, because I haven’t heard the word ‘corer’ in forever. ‘Coder’ is by far more common in today’s vocabulary, and just about everyone is a coper cowering under cover in this climate.

To the creator of this puzzle, imagine a big hairy middle finger to go along with my “fuck you”. Your puzzle was bad, and you should feel bad about it. don’t pull this crap again.

I have survived yet another year (your assassins suck, by the way) and this past week I followed my latest tradition and took the week off. Mostly to decompress from the stress of Life in The Apocalypse, but also just ‘cuz it’s my birthday.

And also to get myself a gift. After nearly 20 years of telling myself it would be silly to buy a motorcycle again when due to work and such I would probably only be able to ride it one or two days a week, and that mainly in the summer considering how much rain we get up here (and how badly most drivers deal with it in the ‘Burbs).

This year though, several things came together in a rather nice conglomeration: the car is paid for, my student loans are finished, the Daughter-Unit aged out of support, and we aren’t moving or anything, so the tax returns were in savings rather than having been spent. We’re actually in pretty good shape financially.

(I feel kinda guilty saying that considering how many other people are having problems as I write this, but we’ve worked hard to get where we are and I’ll take whatever luck that brings me.)

Combine that with all the bullshit of 2020, plus work and, well, to paraphrase the Recruiter in Deadpool, “I finally hit fuck it.”

This is the result:

This being 2020 and all, however, means that things just won’t go smoothly. The Vulcan was not my first choice – that honor went to a Suzuki Boulevard S50 in silver paint that mysteriously disappeared from the dealership the day before I went to look at it. I almost bought a Honda Shadow 800 while I was there (signed the paperwork and everything), but my Credit Union didn’t like their numbers enough to push back on it, and I realized that while it was a good bike, it really wasn’t the one I wanted so I backed out.

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As I learned the hard way back in high school, if you’re driving a ’70’s era Subaru with a manual transmission, it may behoove you to own a pair of long needle-nosed pliers with a bend in the jaws. A lack of this tool turns replacing a clutch cable from a 30-minute task to a 2-hour task. That’s 2 hours of lying on the back of your neck upside-down in the driver’s footwell trying to remove and replace a cotter pin by reaching a pair of straight needle-nose pliers through a hole in the actual clutch arm… yeah, buy the pliers.

If you own a 2009, replacing the #1 spark plug requires a wobbly (“universal joint”) socket extension due to the placement of a pressure sensor solenoid mounting bracket. At least, I think that’s what the device is, I can’t find a specific picture. It’s a block with a half-dozen or so small-diameter pipes sprouting out of it, and it looks like way to big of a pain to remove. A wobbly adapter is useful and only costs $3, so it’s worth the purchase.

The irritating part is that there’s nothing in the owner’s manual about spark plugs save for one small section that says something along the lines of “this should be done at intervals, but it’s difficult, so take it to your dealer”. How about you include pertinent information for those of us who actually have the same skills and don’t feel like buying the dealer repair manual?

I did the full write-up over on my leatherworking site – here’s the link:

workbench 2.0

And a teaser:

Happy reading!

Long live the sock!

I told you all ages back that when I moved from Oregon to Las Vegas back in 1992, I did so bearing two dufflebags and a box of books. Well, those dufflebags didn’t contain any holiday ornaments or decorations.

While I was being a bachelor, I didn’t really bother with them beyond getting a little live tree about a foot tall and a set of battery-powered lights. Once the EMC moved in, things had to change and a full set of ornaments and yea, even a stocking was purchased.

That stocking has served it’s purpose over the years, but I had been getting less and less impressed by it. It appears as if it were hand-knitted (but it isn’t) and it’s really just a long tube closed off at the end. It also happens to be just a bit snug when trying to get your hand all the way to the bottom, and the structure of semi-loose yarn tends to grab anything and everything.

Time for something new. Time for something uniquely me. Time for something…

…leather.

And thus was the new stocking born! I’m not sure what kind of leather this is (a friend tells me it’s pigskin, but I don’t remember ever buying anything non-bovine), but the fur is genuine rabbit from two different pelts. The toe is a bit snug on this one due to a measurement gaff on my part, but I am basically pleased with the design. Tolerant says I should just put a buckle on it and call it a boot. I’m not sure.

A word to the wise when cutting rabbit fur though: don’t do it in the house, shit gets everywhere. Buy a good lint roller.

Joyous Yule!

Just a quick post with a couple of pictures from the last event:

Marten makes a friend

Apparently praying mantis like black with white dots. marten’s little friend perched on his knee for most of 15 minutes.

New candelabra

The new candelabra made by Tolerant’s bro-in-law made its maiden voyage, to much appreciation by all parties. We had a scary moment with it when the wind came up and lifted the tent canvas, allowing the steel plate at the top of the pole to fall out and come crashing down on the candles. Luckily, only one glass candle cup got broken.

Turned out to be a good event, despite the heat and the field burning that nearly smoked us out of the site. (Lebanon, Oregon sucks in the summer. Of course, it probably sucks in the winter too.)

Do not, I repeat DO NOT let your bracing finger slip whilst punching a hole through leather and stab yourself on the inside of the first knuckle joint.

DAMN that hurt like a bitch until the nerve settled down. Or in this case, went numb. I can’t feel the outside of that finger now. I’m sure it will be fine in a couple of days, but nnggyahh!

As I’ve said before, I occasionaly write fiction. I was originally posting it under the main site, but that means I have to edit html, where if I post it here it’s simpler.

What, me lazy?

So, off to the left you will see the heading ‘Fiction’ under the pages listing – that’s where I will be putting it from now on.

You may have already seen what I put there tonight; I could have sworn I posted it before, but somehow I have lost the first 54 posts to this blog, plus the posts I transferred from when I was using MovableType. Not a big deal – I doubt I wrote anything important. In any case, here it is again.

You were warned.

Let’s see, what’s going on in the world?

I’m pretty damn bored right now. Got up early to work the 6-2 shift, but the phone isn’t ringing.

Microsoft has once again filed a silly patent application, this one for using the body’s skin as a data bus. Like I really want that kinda tickle while listening to my music.

Scaled Composites ran an almost completely successful manned test flight to the edge of space – they say they lost attitude control during descent for a brief period. fixable, I’m sure, but it probably freaked the pilot pretty good.

I’m still bored.

Excerpted from the Mt. St. Helens National Volcanic Monument webpage:

At 8:32 Sunday morning, May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted.

Shaken by an earthquake measuring 5.1 on the Richter scale, the north face of this tall symmetrical mountain collapsed in a massive rock debris avalanche. Nearly 230 square miles of forest was blown over or left dead and standing. At the same time a mushroom-shaped column of ash rose thousands of feet skyward and drifted downwind, turning day into night as dark, gray ash fell over eastern Washington and beyond. The eruption lasted 9 hours, but Mount St. Helens and the surrounding landscape were dramatically changed within moments.

Yep, that was 24 years ago today, and I remember it pretty well. I was living in Grants Pass at the time, still in gradeschool. We of course watched the news about it, and were fascinated by nature’s fury, but it became more real the next morning when we discovered nearly an inch of ash had fallen overnight, turning the city into a grim parody of a winter wonderland.

Put a whole new perspective on learning about Pompeii, lemme tellya.

This was not the first natural disaster I had near-personal experience with. Just a couple years prior to St. Helen’s eruption, my family had to be evacuated from our home in rural Oregon due to forest fire. I still get twitchy whenever I see the sky turn a particular shade of red.

I guess they call it the Ring of Fire for a reason, eh?