Wrench Wednesday

Once upon a time, tractors and other farm implements came with a wrench that fit all the nuts and bolts on the machinery. Farmers being the clever and parsimonious people they are, they never paid for ten wrenches when just one would do the job! I used to find these things laying all over the place in Uncle Irving’s junkyard; now they are collector’s items.

Page from the 2015 Wrenching News fall auction

NASA Ames

Mercifully, the whole thing is starting to fade, to become an episode. When I do still catch the odd glimpse, it’s peripheral; mere fragments of mad-doctor chrome, confining themselves to the corner of the eye. There was that flying-wing liner over San Francisco last week, but it was almost translucent. And the shark-fin roadsters have gotten scarcer, and freeways discreetly avoid unfolding themselves into the gleaming eighty-lane monsters I was forced to drive last month in my rented Toyota. — William Gibson, The Gernsback Continuum

The photoessay This Used to Be the Future reminded me of a childhood spent reading yellowed 1940s science fiction.

1958 General Motors Firebird III

John Lopez: Scrap metal sculptures with a midwest theme

Mom sent me a link to an article on Bored Panda about John Lopez‘s welded iron work.

Horses, cowboys and a dinosaur or two.

sax in the barracks

I’ve never hung about reddit but I really liked this post. The restoration really works for me (too). Maybe I should visit reddit more often.

Rolled through the Monstromart (Oh, great selection and rock-bottom prices. But where is the love?) to pick up some 8x8x16 concrete blocks, having once again forgotten that I am old, and as I left once again spotted the luminous flowers of and fleshy leaves of phalaenopsis orchids lying in the dumpster. I think we’ve got four or five different species now, and at least ten plants.

The stupid FIOS box has been complaining about a bad battery ever since the last power outage (big beech tree this time) but John Witmer gave me the quick fix. I knew that FIOS battery was fine. Unlike the alarm system battery.

dumpster orchids

I found five large phalenopsis orchids and some other nice plants in a cardboard recycling bin behind the local Monstromart (Ooh, that’s a great price for twelve pounds of nutmeg!).

Apparently somebody in the garden center thought the recycling bin was a trash can. I got about ten different plants all told, but I had to pass up three arbor vitae trees because I didn’t have the trailer with me.

There were several other people dumpster diving & we exchanged polite greetings.