WTF

Cicada Siren Song

Remember last Friday when I said I had two things on my honey-do list before I put down the garage floor tiles? The tiles were installed on Sunday and those two items are done, but for the life of me I can’t remember what day I did them. Might have been Saturday afternoon or heck even Monday after work, I do remember it was during the day.

I don’t have my own little shop to work in, so I often do little projects either in the driveway or on the back deck. For cutting up that junk wood, the deck was used, because this way I could lay the long pieces of wood on the seat that runs around half the deck, stick the wood out about a foot, step on it and use the circular saw to cut segments off the the end.

The 12 feet of junk wood from behind the plant started life as a box top, so along with the 1/2 thick pieces I needed for my test, there was a border of 1″ x 3″ wood strips as support that had nails spaced about 4 to 5 inches all around. Rather than try and remove the approximate hundredty-million twisted nails from the 24′ of wood, I just hammered the bent ends down flat. Because of the nails I had to cut the 1″ x 3″ wood into about 60 pieces total.

After a little while I got a nice rhythm going; cut a couple pieces, release pressure on my foot, slide the board forward, repeat until done. About halfway through cutting up the second 6′ piece of wood a very large black bug dive-bombed by the front of my face and angled down towards my right hand. I let go of the trigger on the saw and dropped it to the deck.

There was a female cicada trying to mate with still spinning blade. After a few seconds the insect realized its mistake and flew back whence it came. I finished that board and started on the third 6′ piece and wouldn’t you know, my horny cicada took another shot at the saw. I dropped it on the deck again. This time when the bug flew back into its tree, I went inside the house and got my can of Raid Wasp & Hornet spray for the next time.

Sure enough, as I was finishing cutting the third piece, my love struck bug returned. I dropped the saw, grabbed the can and fired off a stream of insecticide at her. I’m not sure if I hit the cicada with any of the stream or she finally learned that the sound of a circular saw rhythmically cutting 1″ x 3″ pieces of wood was not a male of her species, but I cut the full 6′ length of the last piece without a return fly-ins.

What Is It?

If you have ever watched Ask This Old House you will have seen a segment they call appropriately, What Is It? One of the four hosts brings out some sort of oddity and asks the other three, “What is it?” They then, in their best To Tell The Truth manner pretend they know what it is and spin a yarn, only to be told what it actually is at the end.

Mazda USA every year gives out something they call a Zoom Zoom Box that is loaded with various Mazda branded items (pens, keychains, hats, t-shirts, etc.) to Miata Clubs around the country to give the items away as prizes or door prizes for an event they have planned. This year the MMC received such a box, and the officers divided up the content and passed out a small bag with some items in them out to all the members. One of the items that was given to us was the thing you see in the above picture. It is made from some sort of rubbery material and the back is covered by a piece of peel and stick adhesive. There are also 4 tiny holes in the back through the adhesive and material. I have no idea what this is.

If I was a host on Ask This Old House and was handed this item I would say, “I know exactly what this is, it is a replica of a small auto trash bag for your 1/4 scale replica Mazda made from Lego blocks.”

What would you say it is? Leave me your answer in the comments.

Paper Recycling Under Our 5S Rules

The President of the company is going to be visiting the Valve Store in early August and apparently he is a big proponent of 5S. So much so that he is almost militant about it. So a few months back they forwarded a PowerPoint presentation about how we can prepare our cubicles so as to look nice and neat and orderly. But very few individuals actually took it as to mean the letter of the law. My cubical neighbor to the rear was one of them1, so not to be outdone, I did too2. This morning with the visit closer on the horizon the PowerPoint presentation was re-emailed to every one. There were just 2 items I still needed to address, so I undertook them this morning.

The first was removing the white cardboard pieces I had strategically placed in the A/C vents to keep the cold air from blowing on my neck and the second was removing the boxes under my desk, one of which was my paper recycling one. With that gone I wondered how I should handling that usual gathering of no longer need paper pile. So I emailed my immediate supervisor:

Boss,

In the past I kept an old box that the reams of paper come in under my desk where I would toss waste paper for recycling. I’d empty it every month or whenever it got fairly full. On the second page (which is numbered 43) of the 5S rules you forwarded4 yesterday, bullet point #6 says “No boxes, parts, etc. stored under the desktop, drawers, etc.”, so I have tossed my recycling box in a gray recycling cart on the Assembly floor.

I figure I have three options on what to do with paper that needs to be recycled:

  1. Just toss it in the trash.
  2. Put in a pile on the desktop (space is not an issue for this) and each day on the way out the door throw it in the big blue bin.
  3. Spend $8 on a dedicated recycle “waste” basket from Staples.

What is your opinion on my best way to recycle paper under our 5S rules?

Brian

When his answer back was that he was going to check with the big boss about buying everyone a blue wastebasket, I wrote back saying that not to worry about that as my letter was sort of tongue in cheek and that I was planning on doing #2. And that actually I was going to take the whole Lean thing even further by instead of waiting until the end of the day, because the large department blue recycling can was right next to the printer, I would dump my paper to be recycled every time I went over to pick up my freshly minted future recycling.

Acronym Smacronym

On this visit to Hendersonville we didn’t stay in our usual Holiday Inn Express, instead I figured we could save more than $20 by staying on the other side of the Interstate at the Mountain Inn and Suites. Sometimes, and this was one of them, you get what you pay for. The walls were thinner, the shower weaker and the TV was a tiny 24″ LCD wide screen model with no available HD channels.

We put some of that money saved to good use on Sunday morning too. The free breakfast at the hotel didn’t start until 6:30 and we were up and ready to go at six. Figuring that the quality of the morning fare would probably be mirrored by the quality of the room, we opted to walk the 100 yards down the road to a Waffle House.

Because it was early, there were the night shift folks waiting to go home and day shift workers just coming on, so there were like six Waffle House employees in the restaurant and just two customers, Donna and I. We had snagged a Sunday Asheville paper on the way out the door of the hotel to enjoy as we were waiting for our breakfast to arrive and because I was reading, I really wasn’t paying attention to the conversations of employees, but occasionally I’d catch a snippet. One of them that stood out was when one of them said something like, “You know, like John says, ‘Tee Eye Em, Too Much Information.’ ”

A Day Early

And 4 days late.

The offset O2 sensor wrench from Harbor Freight came in the mail today. If I follow along with the USPS tracking page this tool left Los Angeles, CA and passed through Lake Havasu City, AZ, Vaughn, NM, Clarksville, AR, Graysville, AL and Atlanta, GA before arriving in Aiken, SC some 2,400 miles later. When I looked at the return address label on the padded envelope it arrived in it said; Harbor Freight, 224 Harbor Freight Rd, Dillon, SC 29536. Did it actually come from California in 7 days or did a Postal Service employee walk it the 160 miles from Dillon to my house in the same time frame?

I’m not sure just what I’m going to do with it right now. Do I mail it back to return it? Do I make a trip to Augusta to return it? Do I eat it and keep it as a backup in case the one I bought from Advanced Auto breaks when I’m trying to replace the front sensor when it inevitably fails in 6 months? Maybe I’ll give it away as a door prize at this Saturday’s MMC breakfast.