Tag: challenges

Taking Hold

On By Daniel DavidsonIn LifeThoughts, PD, personal2 Comments

I’ve been holding onto a hundred different ropes. Every one of them is a thread running to something in my life – something that I believe has potential. Something wild to be taken and tamed. It’s high time to let go of some of those ropes.

All this time, I am eagerly anticipating that day when I defeat a Bengal tiger at the end of one of those ropes.

Anyone can subdue a lamb. Many have tied up a calf. It is nothing extraordinary to catch a squirrel.

The future belongs to the one who bears the gaze of the tiger, and then binds it.

I’ve been waiting and preparing for that life or death dance with that proud beast.

The myriad of squawking chickens and noisy toy monkeys on the end of my ropes are distractions. It’s time to let them go.

It’s time, with both hands, to take hold of the line that leads directly to the snapping jaws.

When the brakes needed changed

On By Daniel DavidsonIn DIY, personal, Stories2 Comments

I spent a good portion of one long Ohio summer at my best friends house. I was 18 going on 19 that year. Josiah and I spent countless hours playing ping pong, hunting, and riding four wheelers that year. One evening some of his parents friends were over, and one of the ladies brought two new brake pads for her oldsmobile and she asked if Josiah’s dad, Chris, would change them out for her.

Chris said “sure, we will change them for you” and looking at Josiah and me, he said “why don’t you two go ahead and do that”.

I had never changed the brakes on a car before. He knew it wouldn’t be very difficult for us, since they were just disk brakes. Plus Chris had all the tools we needed; a nice floor jack, a compressor, and an impact wrench with all the bits we could want. It seemed scary at the start, because the brakes going out from a mistake we made would be devastating, but we got right at it anyway. We soon saw that it was just a series of little steps, and we had the capability to do it. So we went right to town, jacked up the car, took the old disks off and replaced them with the new ones. We made sure the calipers were freely movable, we bled the lines to ensure there wasn’t any air left in them and we checked the brake fluid up top.

It really didn’t take us too long, and then we asked Chris if we did it right. He said that sounded about right, so we took it for a test drive. I drove real slow at first. Pushed the brakes hard. Pushed them soft. Felt them bite and release. It was a fantastic experience. No one actually showed us how to change the brake pads.

We only used our previous experience from changing tires, and the stories we had heard about replacing pads (always bleed the lines), and figured it out. That experience encouraged me to take on more challenges.

Bathroom Tap Pt. 2

On By Daniel DavidsonIn DIY, personal2 Comments

I started by drilling a pilot hole, through the bottom of the vanity (just off center under the wash basin) and continuing right through the floor. I fed some wire through the hole so I could find it easier from the crawlspace under the house. I wanted to make sure I was knew, when I was below the house, which pipes supplied the faucet (since there is a shower, bath, and commode all within a few feet of each other).

Next I went crawling into this hole from our backyard, which got me under the house. This gave me a look at the plumbing leading to the bathroom, and thanks the wire it didn’t take long to figure out what was what from underneath.

Once under the house, it was quite dark down there, so I took my Solar LED Lantern that my dad had bought me for my birthday. It was so light, ad bright enough, that it worked very well for me getting into position, then I dragged a corded work light in, because I was going to be in and out all day long.

I only had 18 – 24″ of total vertical space, from the terribly dusty old dry dirt underneath me, to the bottom of the floor joists above me. So much of my crawling was with my chest flat to the ground. I wore an N95 mask and full coveralls, but still got filthy and I coughed up dust later.

I made some determinations about which galvanized pipes I needed to cut. I was going to replace just the last couple feet of both the hot, and the cold, supply lines with PEX.

I headed to Home Depot with a plan to get the PEX and necessary adapters.

The gentleman who assisted me steered me away from any kind of compression fitting, or other work-around fitting, into the galvanized. He said even if I had to replace 30 feet of the galvanized, I’d be much better off by finding the closest threaded end and attaching the PEX there. He also told me to try PB Blaster on the old fittings, since I had seen they were pretty rusty. I grabbed two 14-inch pipe wrenches (one aluminum and one steel) and went back home.

I filled a bucket with water, in case we would need the toilet twice before I had the water back on, and then I shut off water to the house and opened the taps on the tub to bleed the lines.

Back under the house, I used a cutting blade on my angle grinder to sever the sections of galvanized line I was removing. There was still a decent amount of water in the lines, and some ran down on my grinder, which I didn’t like mixing electric and water. Maybe I should have found a way to bleed the lines better than just opening the tub faucet? But hey, silver lining was that the pipe didn’t get hot (hate to have any kind of fire risk under an old wood floor) while I made the cut because it was water-cooled.

With the PB blaster in place on the fittings, it was quick work to remove the pieces of galvanized. This was a great moment, because I knew I was now past the blockage that caused me to do all this in the first place. These lines were connected to taps that had good pressure, which meant I could run new lines to my bathroom sink and have good pressure there as well!

More to come.

Bathroom Tap Pt. 1

On By Daniel DavidsonIn DIY, familyLeave a comment

We left Sandalwood Ave, and moved to Auburn St, this past April. We had rented an older, but clean, house through a management company for the 12 months previous to that.

When we did the initial walk-through of the house, before we signed the lease to rent it, we discussed many things that still needed repair or replacement.

One of the issues in the home was the master bathroom sink. It had no hot water flowing to it, and it had poor pressure from the cold water tap. The handyman told me he would fix it soon after we moved it. We contacted the company nearly every month and the response was always the same, “we will tell our man to fix it soon”.

He never fixed it. We lived there for an entire year without hot water in our bathroom sink.

Our home on Auburn also had a shoddy bathroom tap. When the faucet was opened up wide, the water came out from the tap much too slowly. Fully on, it could be better described as leaking rather than flowing.

Today I finally had the gumption to tackle it. It took several hours, but it was successful in the end. I’ll write more about the techniques soon.

Anomalies?

On By Daniel DavidsonIn LifeThoughts, PDLeave a comment

I have typically been highly sensitive to decision making in small sample sizes. A single day’s outcome doesn’t matter much in a year’s worth of results.

Parts of Popper’s philosophy of falsification were thoroughly engrained in me during college, and my common exposure to research, statistics, and significance leaves me very wary of the single case of surprises. Anything to avoid a Type 1 error.

However, I think there is an area of study where a single aberrant finding can mean much more than it would in chemistry and physics. Undesirable behaviors.

I don’t yet have this thought fully fledged in my mind.

I just know that I have experienced, now multiple times, the significance of a single event when investigating problems on dairies. A single observed expression of a bad behavior; undue aggression, cutting corners, carelessness etc. has later been shown to be only one in a long list of transgressions. It has been just the “tip of the iceberg”.

Moving forward, I think I should consider longer those be single actions, and not chalk them up as anomalies.

Travel Aroundabout

On By Daniel DavidsonIn personalLeave a comment

We left Tulare before 10 pm last night. We expected to be in Columbus Ohio within 9 or 10 hours, arriving at 10:30 am eastern time.

We left earlier than we thought we would need too, and in the end we were grateful to have that time margin.

First off, the Fresno airport was busier at 11:30 pm New Year’s Day than I had ever seen it before. After waiting twenty five or thirty minutes just to check a single bag, we went off to security and were turned away because Katarina was not indicated on our boarding passes. We were both using mobile passes and I wonder if that is why her name did not show up.

I quickly returned to the bag check line, and ended up waiting another fifteen or twenty minutes to speak with the agent. The agent quickly printed passes for us and Katarina was good to go. I returned to security and we made it through with only a couple minutes before our first flight began boarding.

Little did we know.

This was just the start of the January 2019 Great Ohio Adventure. Our next flight was cancelled, so rather than landing in Columbus at 1030 am, we left Dallas around that time bound for Charlottesville North Carolina. I think we spent nearly 8 hours in flight today.

Tiffany and Katarina were real champs. In the end we all made it.