March 2007 Archives

It doesn't have the same ring to it, does it?

We were going through the cabinets in our garage and decided it was time to get rid of the 20 or so gallon cans of paint we had - all leftovers from 10 years of painting projects. Our city has a household hazardous waste disposal program and so Katy got a pickup scheduled. I suppose we could have put on black turtlenecks and watchcaps and dropped the cans off on the steps of city hall in the dark of night - like some people I know (you know who you are) - but we thought we'd follow the rules this once.

Monday morning I put a large clear plastic bag full of paint cans in my driveway for them to pick up. When I returned home that evening they were gone.

All good, right? Well, not quite.

There is now a large paint spill in the street at the foot of my driveway. Thanks guys! Next time I'll eliminate the middleman and just pour the stuff into the gutter myself.

The bus I ride from the train station to the office had a new horn this morning.

It appears to also need a new horn actuator relay.

It would honk whenever it wanted to - generally for 5-10 seconds at a go. The driver was getting a lot of dirty looks, but we were all laughing about it in the back of the bus.

What Is That Smell?

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Today I had a minor surgical procedure done. I had a mucus cyst removed - sounds pretty gross, but it was basically a little pocket of on the lining of my mouth.

The doctor sprayed my mouth with nasty-tasting topical anesthetic - it was like somebody described what a banana tastes like and someone with tanks of chemicals tried to reproduce the flavor - and then spent about five seconds getting rid of the cyst.

Then he grabbed a weird looking pointy thing and stuck it in my mouth. I felt a tingling like a mild electric shock, and noticed smoke wafting out of my mouth.

"What is that smell?" I managed to ask during a break in the action to get more gauze. The nurse replied "Your skin."

It smelled like burning hair. Funny, I always figured burning people would smell more like cooked meat.

As you may know, I write small. My typical pen of choice is a black Uni-Ball Micro, and if for some reason I need a pencil I generally reach for my 0.3mm mechanical. (Frankly I'm stunned that there are adults that continue to use actual wood pencils that require sharpening.)

Recently one of the guys at work gave me a new pen - The Uni-Ball Signo 0.18mm. Primarily made for the Japanese market, it is only 10% finer than the standard Micro, but boy does it draw a fine line. The one problem I've had with it is the ink does not flow as quickly as it does in a bigger-tipped pen, so you have to slow down a bit to get clean strokes. Nevertheless, I see this becoming my new favorite writing tool.

Just to give you an idea what I'm talking about when I say I write small, I've prepared a .pdf file of my handwriting with various writing implements for you to compare. For reference, the original was a 8.5" x 11" sheet of engineering paper, which has a 1/5" gri. Unfortunately, I was only able to scan this at 300dpi, but you'll get the idea:

Brad's Handwriting.