MJL21193

Fact: I work in construction and drive a lot - more than 50,000km per year. Fact: I live in Canada.
Canada is a nice place to live but...
We endure a temperate climate here with sometimes huge swings in temperature and precipitation. We get heat, we get cold, we get rain, we get snow, we get it all, sometimes (in some places) in one day!
Character building it's said to be, makes one rugged, tough...
Good stuff for a romance novel but I (of course) have a different view on it: the extremes of climate here don't make us hard wearing, but wear us out!
We are beaten down by the weather, submissive to it's eventuality. We talk about it in whinny, complainy tone - "it's too hot!", "It's too cold", "snow deep enough for ya?" It has made us meek.
Why? Because it owns us, we are it's bitch, as surely as most of you fellows would be if thrust into a prison situation...


Me, I used to love winter....

Ahhhhh, been a while.
I have fun here in this forum, it's the only one that I'm a part of and it consumes a fair portion of my free time. With that said, I can't see how people can be involved in more than one forum; do they ever get anything done? Were to find the time?
Anyway, to the point - from the start I have been rubbing people the wrong way with some of the things I've "said" here. They are imagining a "tone" of voice that they associate with certain words or phrases. A terse quip is not amusing but an attack, a brief and succinct assessment of the facts is not eye opening but a criticism. Too often I find myself re-reading my posts before I submit them to filter this "tone".

A couple of recent incidents bring this to mind, the first was in a thread where the author was looking for advice on driver choices. He asked a question regarding the sensitivity increase of 2 drivers, in parallel or series. I answered the question...

Saturday, yesterday, a beautiful fall day here in my corner of the globe has me thinking about my Stratocaster and how it would be a nice day to spritz on some more finish. Last time was supposed to be the final coats but on close inspection I see that the coverage was still not perfect. I decided to wet sand again and give a few extra "smoothing" coats.
Wet sanding is time consuming and tedious, dirty, finger-wrinkling messy work but I persevere and it's ready for spraying. One of the things I see while sanding is a small fly embedded in the clearcoat:

Attachment 22

Unlucky fool! Character for the piece, I think. Fossilized remains add to the value.

To spray, I use an old speaker box sitting behind my workshop as a stand and the guitar body is projecting out past this and counterbalanced with a bucket that has a brick in it. The bucket hangs by it's handle from the stick that is in place of the neck that...

Over the past 3 years going to the dentist has not been nearly as dreadful as it used to be. I'm fortunate enough to be a patient of the hottest dental clinic in Ontario (if not the whole country...heck, the world!). The staff are (apparently) all female - I haven't seen a man there yet.
The receptionists are hot, the assistants are HOT, the hygienist is smoking hot but my dentist, my own dentist is drop dead gorgeous!
Shoot, I almost look forward to a visit.

Around this time last year I had a tooth crowned, the last molar on the bottom, way at the back (of my big mouth). It takes ~3 hours for my heavenly goddess to grind down the old tooth (and filling - tooth was chipped developed a cavity - she fixed it rather than doing a root canal; she said it would be fine...) and make and fit a temporary crown. Three hours with your mouth stretched open is less than pleasant but like I explained, the view made the time fly.
A week later I skip...

Sitting on the highway in stop and go traffic this evening, I notice a funny logo on the GMC Yukon directly in front of me:
Attachment 17

???
One of the biggest, most offensive, waste of sheet metal, plastic and steel SUV's on the road - a hybrid? What a joke!

The whole hybrid idea is IMO a total load of bunk, a stop gasp measure at best; really, just another example of the big guys cashing in on a trend, a buzz word..."Hybrid".

Here (on planet Earth) we have an enormous infrastructure built around the car - in particular, the internal combustion engine.
Now, as the supply of fossil fuels start to dwindle, "they" want to abandon the internal combustion engine in favour of electric motors and batteries...BATTERIES! Specifically, lately, lithium ion batteries. I know about rechargeable batteries - I've used them every day for the last 20 years. The technology has improved for sure but they still...