stubbed toes and mud pies

[flowerbug]

yesterday i was standing a little close to Mom and talking and she reached out and started to poke me repeatedly in the stomach so my voice was changing up and down and it got us both to laugh so hard and i gave her a big hug and told her how much i loved her.

 

[Marie2020]

if you search for the words "leak" and "roof" and in things i have written you will find some of the history.

here is some more info:

House | Anthive

The place we live in...

www.anthive.com

What a gorgeous fireplace. I love it.

Is this roof fixed now?

 

[flowerbug]

What a gorgeous fireplace. I love it.

Is this roof fixed now?

not until the weather gets warm enough that it can be repaired. too cold and caulk/sealer won't work and also if there is snow on the roof i don't want anyone up there. at most what will happen this winter is getting it tarped better so we don't have any more leaks until it gets repaired.

 

[flowerbug]

well, surprised this morning, the roofing people called and said they would come out and take a look and they did.

it's 22F and windy out but they went up there and took off the covers i had put down and then they looked around and then recaulked the flashing they had installed some years ago. he said the caulk they used is fine to apply down to 0F. they had to warm up a few times and warm up the caulk but they got it done.

so the bricks and pavers i put up there are now stacked up on top and they can stay there until next spring. hopefully this will be the last of the leaks. they left a pretty big new tarp with me to put down if it does leak and the bricks are already up there so we'll see how it goes.

 

[flowerbug]

today i may have finished cleaning up the last of the beans i sorted. i had three partial quart containers of Purple Dove beans that had some stickers still on them that needed to be removed, so while i was watching something else i was also laying here and removing stickers. stickers are just a bit of the bean pod connection stuff to the hylum. there is a technical name that i keep forgetting...

if you look up hilum it refers you to ovaries and gets very detailed. i mean eye-glazed-over level details. which i would love to memorize sometime before i croak, but there's a very good chance my brain will decline faster than it stores new memories before i reach that point. we shall, errrr, see...

this is nice and more succinct: "Plant anatomy is that field in botany that needs to cut into plants to be able to study its subject, as opposed to "plant morphology" (see category : Plant morphology) that can study its subject without resorting to a knife." but it does not address the issue i have in my pea brain...

anyways, back to the topic at hand. i cleaned up all three of those containers of stickers and thus the total amount of all three was combined into one single quart of Purple Dove beans that can then be combined back with all my other PD beans that will then mostly be eaten by us and other people eventually.

some of those beans will be set aside for seed samples and sharing. i have gobs of samples i already made up for previous seed swaps that have not been used up. i'm thinking i may just leave them alone for now and think more about that, but that is then another different topic which i won't be writing about tooon ite.

the point though (like the one on my head ) is that i may actually get more done tomorrow on combining all these samples. i have no big chores lined up and it is too cold to be outside for any reason - i do have projects i'm poking at but nothing is super pressing with those and it is good for me to take a bit of time to ponder some aspects of them anyways so a day off from them is quite ok. yes, i'm not at all being succinct here am i? but it is nice to be at this point at last.

 

[flowerbug]

yay! at last i was able to get some pictures taken after sorting and combining some beans. i still have a lot more to do, but these are the start.


these are a red/pink patterned Painted Pony outcross

a similar bean, but no dark eye ring.

and yet another Painted Pony outcross.

this bean really surprised me in the color is very dark green and then patterned with black. how that came about as a cross with Painted Pony i don't really know, but i'd not seen anything like it before.

four similar beans that are likely children of Lavender. the colors have been interesting coming from these Lavender outcrosses.

grays, blues, green shades of color. more Lavender children.

Red and green real faint on this selection, yes, another likely Lavender child.

for these they might have been children of Vermont Appaloosa and some other bean.

a more dark selection, which might be the same bean.

 

[flowerbug]

in the middle of getting the pictures off my camera my USB cable decided to give up again, i'd already pulled it apart and fixed it a few times, but this time when i pulled it out of the computer a part of the plug remained in the computer and the rest of the wires pulled out. i tried again to get it put back together and to work but that didn't.

so using the now shorter keyboard cord i looked up a few things on USB cables and just decided to do surgery. i got my small solder iron out (i used it as a teenager working on putting together some small circuit boards for my model railroad engine controls, this was very advanced back then as you could control up to 64 engines at once running on the same power rails so you didn't have to isolate each section - i got two of them working and it was fun times. alas, i had to go away to college before i finished the railroad in the basement.) and soldered a new part of another cable on the end of the one that broke. taped it all back together and we're all set with even a longer cord (another good thing ).

 

[flowerbug]

finally had some time today to clean up and post a program i'd been working on so others can use it. nothing too crazy or hard, but just takes time i haven't had much of until the past few weeks. the nice thing is that it helps me do another task during the week so it makes it easier and more efficient.

of course more work to do on this program so it works better, but just having a working proof of concept working and available is a good thing.

also got some updates to the website done and learned a few new things. much more there to do also.

no shortage of projects that is for sure... i get a lot more done when there is a lot more to do.

 

[Dahlia]

finally had some time today to clean up and post a program i'd been working on so others can use it. nothing too crazy or hard, but just takes time i haven't had much of until the past few weeks. the nice thing is that it helps me do another task during the week so it makes it easier and more efficient.

of course more work to do on this program so it works better, but just having a working proof of concept working and available is a good thing.

also got some updates to the website done and learned a few new things. much more there to do also.

no shortage of projects that is for sure... i get a lot more done when there is a lot more to do.

What program did you write and what programming languages do you know?

 

[flowerbug]

What program did you write and what programming languages do you know?

you asked and this is going to be long...

it's a program for helping me generate transactions in the right format so they can be included in my plain text accounting files the plain text accounting programs are beancount and several others from that ecosystem, autobean-format is another, but there are others i use too.

the program i wrote will search through my files of transactions and list lots of stock that have not been sold yet. i have some in some accounts going back to the 1990s but in another account i've been doing more short term things because it is tax free Roth account and i use LIFO so it is not always easy and quick to search back through the file to get the correct lot information i needed. so writing a program which displays only the current available lots and the information i needed was a help, but then now i can also specify that i am Buying, Selling or Splitting (with the Split not being needed at the moment so that is not being worked on yet until i get some other things done). once i put in the line which says what i did then the relevant transaction is spit out, the math is right and the format is right so i can cut and paste from the screen or include the file into my transactions. before i was having to do the searching, math and some formatting all manually. i may not trade a lot, but being somewhat dyslexic and transposing digits can be a problem so having the math done with the right numbers speeds up things for me a great deal and not having to track down math errors can save me a half hour. but i generally check my totals at the end of each session i've changed anything so i'm not normally off by much...

it will also let me sell parts of lots, or more than one lot, or all of the shares i have available, etc. this is not doing anything automatic through the broker though. this is just a program to help me keep my records. by the time i am using the program i need the updated information from the broker which for sells may take a bit as they have to post the amount plus whatever fees they might have charged.

ok, as for programming languages, i've learned many since the early 1980's, being a computer science student at an engineering oriented university and half a master's degree. but most of what i learned were mostly built around Fortran, assembler language of many kinds, Pascal, C, Ada, (two dozens others i never wrote any huge programs in), Smalltalk, plus there are many other scripting or tiny languages like bash (a sh like language), awk and then all the web stuff which i never really cared much to get into, but have had to for my website stuff (html, css, go, ...). add on the database languages like SQL and the screen interface stuff i had to do for work it was often pretty interesting.

the more recent language i've been trying to do more with is Python as it has been around long enough and gotten more stable. i missed most of the drama around version 2 to 3 transition, and now i've gradually done different projects to learn different aspects, but still have a long ways to go.

i need practical projects for things i'm doing to give me enough reasons to spend time on it and each time i learn stuff and then i get into gardening season and forget things so each time i have to go back and relearn and then... what takes the most time is that i know in my brain exactly what i need to do but then i have to translate through many layers to get to the language i'm working with. what i'm doing now in Python is hard because i don't know it well enough yet so i have to do research and testing of some basic stuff before i nail it down. in C i could write it out knowing exactly what i was doing and had a lot more control and i had tools which did what i wanted. and then there are problems in my thinking because Python is not Smalltalk. in college courses it was not unusual to have to write large complex programs and C was often the language of choice. writing a multi-cpu simulator down to the microcode level was fun, editors, operating system, compilers, all a normal part of what was taught. the web did not exist yet. when the web came around i mostly lost interest as the problems became more distributed and there was no longer the same level of fine control in one place so i retired from that kind of work and went on with my life after spending way too much time dealing with computers.

and then over the years i keep working on a few programs and trying to keep some records, but then i stopped for quite a few years and threw away some papers, and then the past few years i wanted to get back to keeping better track of my accounts so i found beancount and plain text accounting and put as much of my history in as i could find or fudge together (that's taken a few years), but i'm mostly there now so i can answer questions i have and that has been interesting. i still have a few holes in my files here or there that need more work, but i can keep current and that is what i wanted. so i'm sort of there and making things i need to make it easier and so now that it is winter i have a bit more time to do that too.

the biggest part is that i'm getting more demands upon my finances so having better records and history lets me build upon that when i start getting into full retirement incomeland that phases in over the next five years. i've been mostly retired since the mid 90s, but once in a while i have worked part-time if i found a job i was interested in (small town librarian was good until the management changed)...