Got up this morning just in time to see the snow beginning to come down. Always my favorite day of the year.
Today’s basic plan is to continue tackling the wiring in the housebus. I managed to label and bundle a whole bunch of the wires on the starboard side yesterday, so I’m hoping I can make a lot of good progress on this today. I had hoped to check out the job I did on the window seals yesterday, but until it’s warm enough to rain out there I don’t expect to find any liquid water leaks.
Okay, so the job I did sealing that first window last week isn’t holding up. I’ve noticed water continuing to leak through even with the butyl tape and weatherstripping in place. And today I noticed a number of other windows are leaking at least as badly, if not worse. So, before I attempt to tackle sealing those, I’m putting together a rough plan of attack to try to deal with this once and for all.
Ah, what better way to spend a holiday than trying to figure out what’s chewing through my remaining hard drive space?
Bad news: I noticed this last night, my HD space just constantly getting smaller and smaller, a GB every ten-fifteen minutes, until I run out of so much available memory I’m forced to start quitting applications. Trying to run any kind of file recovery or hard-drive mapping software repeatedly would hang or crash the whole laptop.
So far today, I’ve installed a few new apps to try figuring this out, and one thing I DID manage to discover is that at some point a few years back something went wrong with my MAMP install, and within a day or two I suddenly had about 20 recursive duplicates of my entire localhost directory, the one I use for local web development. According to the apps I was looking at, this was occupying upwards of 300GB on my drive, so I’m trying to delete all that right now. I verified that it wasn’t being used or referenced with my actual localhost setup, so I hope it’s safe to trash it. If not, I’ve got plenty of backups in my Time Machine.
After that, hopefully there’ll be little enough left on the HD that running InventoryX won’t choke my computer again, and I can see what’s going on in there.
Today’s plan is to get out to the housebus and start the long process of sealing up all the windows.
I’ve known since I first picked up the bus that it had moisture problems – the musty smell was unmistakable, and the thin layer of mildew on all the seats was unpleasant at the least. I thought I took care of the biggest leaks early on, and maybe I did, but I know that at least a few of the windows are still a bit leaky. And knowing how prone the seals around bus windows are to cracks and gaps even straight from the factory, I figured I’d be re-sealing all the windows sooner or later.
Today’s housebus score: A decent, newish window AC unit, three milk crates, and almost a dozen 8-oz mason jars!
The window AC is a Frigidaire, and looks to be in really good shape! Aesthetically, at least. I still need to plug it in and make sure it works, and then find the specs online to see what kind of BTU I can expect out of it. As with all of my free finds, if it doesn’t work out, I can just pass it on.
The milk crates were something I’d only kindof been thinking about? Like, I know this conversion is already running the risk of looking like a white trash yard sale, so I’m not planning to use these for any kind of visible storage, BUT I did see this video on Will Prowse’s channel where he built a DIY LiFePo4 battery in a milk crate, and it certainly looks like they’ll come in handy!
And the jars, also, weren’t something I was seeking right now, but I know I want a bunch of them to mount under the kitchen cabinets for small dry-goods storage. Also, I might get into canning some stuff from time to time, who knows! Looks like they were used for candles recently, so they’ve got some cleaning to be done still.
And a little bit of progress on the floor today: With the starboard-rear quarter of the bus totally done and painted up, I was able to move the foam panels over and get into grinding and scraping rust off the port side. Scrape, grind, sweep, scrape, grind, sweep. Then I was able to hit it all with the rust-convertor spray paint, and now it gets to sit for a couple days while I figure out how to do the enamel coat — after the last attempt, I’m nearly out of the paint already, and also my roller has dried into a rigid, unusable sponge. I could try to use the roller, I suppose, but I wouldn’t get very far with the paint I have left. Gotta try again to contact the seller up in Vancouver who had three quarts, see if it’s still available.
