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My kayak instructor from Chile is playing as “Granny’s Mason Jar” tonight. Good bluegrass.

You're an amazing person, Todd. Cheers! EDIT: And that was before I saw the other post. I'm at a loss for words. Thank you so much, Todd and everyone.

Thank you, Todd. This last post of yours helped me to recover some faith in the human race, which I’ve been losing for a few years now.

Highs and lows.....sorry if TL;DR The highs: I love my neighborhood, and the people within. I maintain a website for the "Bunco Babes" here, a group of women who would get together monthly to socialize, play bunco...and drink. Since Karen passed, much of the organizing has dropped off. But the OG's of the babes invited me to a get-together; little did I know if was partially to thank me for the web site and congratulate my retirement. Pics below. A low with a little bit of high: we have a local "Buy Nothing" FB group, for free things. I have refurbed and donated computers perhaps a dozen times now. Gave two laptops away this weekend, one to a gent who has been out of work for almost 4 years because he was in an accident where a Mack truck blew a red light and slammed into him. He is now in somewhat constant discomfort or pain, and can't do much physically; insurance fights every step of the way. He even gets PTSD driving long trips.... Yet still, he does a lot of nice small things for others, and we shared our stories about that. Oh, yes: we had one FB friend in common, a wonderful woman with whom I used to work. She passed away from cancer and pneumonia complications recently; it turns out this is her distant cousin, and he didn't even know of her passing. The lower low: another laptop I gave to a woman who has an autistic son (two other kids too, one of whom has pretty high functioning autism). I volunteered to bring the laptop and a full docking station with monitor setup I had over. This amazing woman and her husband spend almost 24x7 watching her youngest, as he has non-verbal autism and also has a potentially deadly condition where his digestive tract will get blocked. Constant monitoring and care, advocating for him at hospital and doctor visits, etc. Hugs and tears resulted. They don't even have a place right now to set up the full monitor, so I told her I will come and help when they do find the space. You can see the strain, yet the strength all at once. Humans are such amazing creatures. But the two situations above point out how much the system works against so many, though!

(clicks tongue) Noice. Winning.

Let's see how deep we can go into Chinese lens recreations. After success with several Light Lens Lab models, and reading/watching too many reviews on this, just ordered the even cheaper Mandler (named after Walter Mandler, the Leica and IMAX lens designer) 35mm F2 “7 elements” based on the Leica Summicron 35mm Type IV (KOB). We'll see.

Did some testing today on the auto switch filament board. It seems to correctly detect 2A3 300B so far. For the test, I directly soldered the cable onto the 300B filament pins. I know that’s not the best practice, but it was quick.

A reminder that I need to listen to that album again. Early 1980's vibes are always appreciated.

But that's not what the previous owners installed. Besides. https://nmwd.com/your-water/water-quality/

You know...there is whole house reverse osmosis...

Yesterday: Installed (functional) matching tie backs. Fixed hissing / pinprick leak in valve that caused rise from set point to edge of overflow by replacing entire valve assembly after replacing and lubricating just the washer valve failed to improve the situation. Now stays silently at set point. Today: Then: For the house. Replaced With one of For the 'fridge. I think I may deserve a Usual after all that.

Apparently a very small US presence -- three dealers.

Would this be the equivalent of me saying: Pool Boy, at a stealth-mode, roof top Olympic sized swimming pool

One of my oldest Facesbook friends is Matrix Synth. He started out as a user and is now a "page." He mostly posts ads for synth gear on sites like Reverb and the 'Bay. In spite of not being in the market for any synth gear (ever, sadly) I enjoy keeping tabs on his posts. Today he linked to this listing for a virtual analogue widget that is completely unfamiliar to me. Apparently the unit runs damn near 3000 GBP new. It's "virtual analogue" so purists won't like it. I'm not quite so snobbish. What's surprising to me is that I've never heard of this brand of synthesizers before. In any case, this has been your moment of synth porn.

Travelin McCourys Young Guns tour https://archive.org/details/travelinmccourys2026-04-09_202604 The Young Guns were a group of kids from 16 to 7 1/2. They were fantastic players who drove from all over the southeast to play last night, they'd never met each other before sound check.

Rush - Permanent Waves

This one is complex. Hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa dead at 67. The guy coined the term "hip hop." Calling him a pioneer is an understatement. The problem is that he was a child molester and got away with it for decades. There is at least one alleged murder involved in the coverup of his crimes. I can't say RIP in this case.

Saw that on a Hannah short this morning.

Tony Rivers -- did a lot of session work (backing vocals, arranging) with names I'm fond of -- Alan Parsons Project, Al Stewart, Roger Daltrey, Cliff Richard, et al.

No reference, just vibes.

Where are the bananas?

I just really love this song so much. I was actually working on translating it to guitar, back when I played.