Update

It is no longer hailing in Buffalo.

Breaking Report

Sources tell us that it is hailing in Buffalo. We will keep you updated on this breaking story.

The Sky is Falling

It rained again today for like 20 minutes. Wowzo!

You know what chafes my bunions? JB Weld & JB Kwik. I mean, they seem like they should be such useful products. And JB Weld has certainly been around enough, end even entered the lexicon as a verb, that if it was total snake-oil, you'd think it would have disappeared by now. But I just can't for the life of me get this stuff to actually work. I can get it to come real close to working, but not to actually work.

I did manage to get one JB Weld repair to last about six months after two tries of it, but I expect anything that dries as hard as steel ought to be able to hold a porch light fixture together for a lot longer than that.

And my JB Kwik experience yesterday told me that as long as I didn't not expect the bond to actually be able to take any kind of torque, maybe it would hold. But as soon as any torque was applied, it'll just pop apart as if held together white the really yummy white paste from lemelentary school.

See, I was trying to fix a table. I dunno why I bother fixing this table anymore. It's a cheapy table that came from some cheapy store. It is made of a ~2' diameter circle of particle board with three legs attached to it. It would be OK if it weren't for the existence of various childrens who like to climb on it and/or wakeboard on it.

First, one by one, the screws that held in the leg mounts tore out. It's just particle board, after all. I repositioned all of them threatened The Childrens with severe beatings if the surfed on the table anymore.

Then, of course, they all tore out again. It's still, after all, only particle board. I threatened to sell The Childrens to gypsies, but I didn't have to beat them as MaxieC managed to get hurt when the table collapsed underneath him, and I got to do a whole bunch of I-told-you-so's and See-that's-what-you-get's, which are the bread-and-butter of good parenting.

So I fixed that by cutting up some scrap plywood left over from the trampoline project, gluing these to the bottom of the table with Liquid Nails construction adhesive, and then using some proper, coarse threaded wood screws to affix the leg mounts to the plywood.

That held for quite a number of days. Alas, with the joint between leg mount and wood fixed, we exposed the next design weakness: the joint between the leg and the mount.

The leg mounts are little stamped pieces of steel that have a hole in the center into which screws a bolt that is embedded in the end of the leg. The little stamped piece of steel has a bit of a flange stamped in it around the screw hole, and this makes the sides of the hole tall enough to have a whole three thread turns on them. But this flange is just part of the stamping, so it is inherently under stress and a bit thin walled, and it turns out that doing belly flops onto the table is enough to separate the flange from the mount, thus leaving only one turn of threads behind which immediately strips out, cuz what kind of weight can a single thread turn in crap Chinese steel hold?

Now CherkyB is not one to give up quickly, so I devised a plan. I would go buy a nut at Ace Hardware that fit the threads of the leg bolt, and then I would JB Weld this guy onto the back of the mount where the flange used to be and thus end up with a much stronger solution that would still allow me to remove the legs. At Ace, I chose the $0.30 square nut over the $0.06 hex nut because it had a lot more surface are for the JB Weld.

Then, when I got home, I looked at how JB Weld takes 24 hours to cure, and you gotta clamp it for god knows how long, so I switched to the JB Kwik that I had purchased for a project I haven't gotten to yet and thus had never opened. JB Kwik dries in 4 minutes and requires no clamping.

The long and the short of it was that I let it cure for an hour, then I screwed the leg in, and it popped apart after the first half turn. Sheesh. So I got out the old standby Quick Steel epoxy clay, used a little of that (which requires no clamping but takes 15 minutes to cure), and it worked like a charm.

I only, however, fixed the broken leg. The other two will likely rip out shortly, and I will have to repeat the process. But not until I get in a couple let-that-be-a-lesson-to-you's.

Wow

It poured today for like 20 minutes. We're getting an afternoon thunderstorm almost every day now. The grass is starting to green up a bit.

Fishus Interruptus

I was going to take HannahC fishing yesterday, just the two of us. But then The Mrs. decided the playroom needed painting, so I ended up with both childrens. It's tough taking both childrens fishing because, if they're both fishing, they each catch a fish about every 3 minutes. Thus, I end up running back and forth between the two of them to unhook fish.

They can't fish next to each other because they fight.

After catching a couple fish, MaxieC gets bored. Then, he starts to do things that are annoying. Like screaming. Or "playing with the worms", which involves dumping all the bait out and then squealing how they're getting away then putting them back. Or throwing rocks into the water where HannahC is fishing. Or whining about how bored he is.

Usually, he does all that stuff in rapid succession.

Anyways, we finally, finally got to the pond after all the sunscreen smearing and finding of shoes and packing of drinks and wipees. It takes, I estimate, 5x as long to take The Childrens anywhere if'n The Mrs. knows they're going than if she doesn't. I often pack up the kids and then just yell into the house that we're leaving and skeedattle before she catches on.

HannahC noted, as we were pulling into the lot, that she was sorry for losing her hook last time we went, which reminded me that I never re-rigged her line with a swivel. OK. I have extra swivels in the tackle box.

I dug around to find the swivels, locating one at the bottom in the back corner, and tied it onto the line. Then, as I'm digging around for a hook, I accidentally bump the tackle box with my toe, and the whole thing dumps into the weeds. So I spent the next 5 minutes rooting around in the weeds to try to find all my tackle, most of which I recovered successfully. Probably lost a couple sinkers, but I found all the lures.

I open up the worm carton, and there are no worms in it.

"What happened to to worms?" We had about 15 when we started fishing on Thursday.

Silence.

"Did we use up all the worms last time?"

A meek response, "Yes, Daddy."

"So we used up all the worms, carried the worm box home, put it in the refrigerator, then carried it all the way back out here? Why didn't you say that we were out of worms?"

"I forgot cuz I got my hook caught in the weeds and lost it."

Oh well. What is done is done. Pack everything back up and back to the truck, off to Jax to get worms.

Get back to the pond and get the gear out again about 40 minutes later. We start fishing.

MaxieC catches two fish very quickly. HannahC is jealous, so she comes to stand where MaxieC is fishing. MaxieC gets bored, so he tells me to hang on to his pole because he's not done fishing, but he needs a little break.

He proceeds to play with the worms.

I catch two more fish with MaxieC's pole. HannahC still hasn't caught anything because she loses her mind if someone else catches more than she does, and she keeps taking her hook out of the water.

MaxieC is really done now, so I pack away his stuff and decide to bass fish in the little corner where I know there are bass.

I got out a floating Rapala of the type the bass in that corner like, and cast it out there. I see about five bass come out from under the logs and follow it.

Big thunder clap.

"Hey kids, we're going to have to pack up soon. There's a storm moving in, and I don't want to get hit by lightning."

Cast again at the bass. Little nibble, but I set the hook too soon and lost it.

Cast again, get stuck on the logs.

Bigger thunder clap.

Lightning in the sky to the west.

"Hey kids, we gotta go now!"

Or, just as soon as I can untangle myself. Which I managed to do and not lose my lure.

I packed everything up, and we started heading for the truck. HannahC and MaxieC got into a panic because of the thunder and started running. MaxieC fell down and skinned his knee and decided it would be best to stay put and just cry.

HannahC picked him up and carried him.

About 6 feet.

I had all the fishing gear, plus all the ridiculous stuff The Mrs. packed for us, so I couldn't carry him. I told him to man up and get to the truck.

He did.

It started to rain about 2 minutes later.

What a bust.