Lifeless Woodstove

New rhythm ... I check Drudge each Sunday morning.  Once.  Read the headlines, move on.  I still get tons of political e-mails, but long ago set filters in GMail for those to be marked as read upon arrival.  I get maybe 50 characters of info.  That's enough.  It's time to focus on law and baseball.  I don't need anything else.

I found a site new to me - Issuu dot com.  People use it to pimp catalogues, books of all nature, and such things.  Pretty amazing.  The free account covers everything I'll ever need.  I'm creating a catalogue for patterns.  Working through the specifics, even though I'm being fought.  Remarkable how many obstacles arise at times.

I'm gonna make lentil soup either today or next weekend.  I'll do the crock pot.  Put it all together as I absorb my morning coffee.  OK, next weekend.  Sunday.

November seems to be flying past me.  Calendar is filling for December.  Will be busy prepping for January trials.  I think at least two.  Glad we only have criminal terms every other month.  I should have a few set for March.  May is too far to contemplate.

I'm contemplating (or cogitating - great word) Issuu some more.  I wonder if I can do a catalogue for the law practice.  It'd be a replacement for a printed glossy thing.  As I see the finished product, it wouldn't be detailed - jam packed with information.  Just passingly instructive, introducing me and a criminal-defense practice.  I can goof around with it for a while and see.  When it's created, uploaded, and converted I can set it to private.  I'll also use my personal account to keep it tucked away in a sorta test bed.  When I'm done, I can open an account in the name of the practice, then pimp it.  Cogitating ... what's that humming sound?

Got a challenge with the wood stove I hope to figure out today.  It's an older model.  Apparently the company that designed it didn't have a reliability engineer on the team.  Once the blower in the back ceases to blow, a consumer is left with a several-hundred pound wood stove insert that radiates heat without a distribution mechanism.  Nice job.  Go union labor!  It's such an engineering catastrophe that the company ceased even selling replacement blowers, even though one could conceivably replace the blower provided a crane and blowtorch were at the ready.

So I have four outlets designed to distribute heat, assuming, naturally, that a functioning distribution mechanism were in situ.  The top two are not conducive to repurposing.  The sides, however, have removable vent covers.  The right side (as one faces the lifeless stove) is where the electrical cord is threaded to the now-dead blower.  The cord was clipped long ago.  That suggests to me that the right side may be more acceptable for placing something that moves air into it.  Think, think, think ... what moves air?  I GOT IT!  A fan!

It's got to be constructed of metal.  It needs to be small, quiet.  I can attach it to the exterior of said lifeless stove after removing the vent cover.  I don't need much generated wind ... anything directed towards the back cavity will swirl around the now-dead blower and exit the three other vents.  If it's small enough - whew, maybe thin like an inch or less - I can thread it into the back.  But the heat in the rear cavity has got to be significant.  I think it'll have a greater chance of surviving if I attach it to the exterior.

The problem is that the stove is on one end of the house in the living room and the kitchen is on the other end.  The heat in the kitchen originating from the furnace works about as efficiently as the now-dead blower. If I wasn't so consistent with live traps to maintain some semblance of control over the mouse population, I'd probably see Mr. and Mrs. Mouse huddled around the sole heat vent each winter's morning. 

A small fan.  That's what I need.  I tried a few places.  Not Home Depot or Lowe's yet.  I guess that today's venture.  It'd be humorous if Radio Shack winds up having the answer.

I am increasingly, and sadly, disappointed in Radio Shack.  It used to be that I'd go in there to see true geeks, replete with pimples and bad hair, that would listen intently to my quandary only to whip out a Texas Instruments graphic calculator then lead me to several solutions ranging from condensers to entire circuit boards.  "But," he'd intone, "I had a similar problem once.  I stole one of my sister's booby pins.  Scrapped off the rubber on each end.  Then I salvaged some heavy-gauge wire from the unused knob-and-tube electrical-distribution system still present in my grandmother's attic.  When I stretched out the bobby pin and ran the wire from ..."  The story would ebb and flow for 20 minutes, absorbing both of us utterly, disrupted only by the need to wipe his spittle off my glasses when he became hard to see, not much different than this acrylic painting (which, btw, the original hangs in my office).

Now, however, things have changed.  The last two times I went in it seemed that I knew more than the kid although the pimples and bad hair were both still in place.  I had to measure the distance between two prongs of something or other.  He didn't have a measuring tape.  I suggested comparing the span to any known distance.  He seemed lost at the concept.  Another kid showed up.  He opened a drawer (about the only one of a dozen that Kid One didn't open).  There resting on top was a measuring tape.  Kid One measured.  "Looks like less than an inch."  "Ayep" I said, "but I'm maxed at 5/8s.  Can I see that?"  Sure enough it was less than an inch.  Came in at 3/4s.  It occurred to me that the kid didn't know how to interpret the lines between the inch numbers.  The entire transaction brought sadness to me.  I left the store and walked through the mall which had "For Lease" signs in half the storefronts.  "What if I were a geek?" I thought.  I went home and stole one of my daughter's bobby pins.

Bye for now