Busy Weekend

Friday nite I stayed late at work to finish up part of a project I've been working on - a microcontroller-based blade stop timer. It measures how long it takes for the blades on a mower to stop spinning. One of the challenges has been that the 8-bit microcontroller is not well suited for doing heavy-duty math, and part of my program is that I need to do a little bit of math. I ended up writing some routines that allow me to work with 128-bit numbers. I can now add/subtract/multiply numbers from zero to 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456. Nice.

Our project for Saturday was to replace the 4' x 5' window above the front door. Sometime during the winter it started to crack on the inside pane. Our builder gave us a new window and said good luck. At first we thought that we would have to peel back the siding and pull it out from the front. Turns out the replacment was only the glass thermopane (no frame at all) that we could replace from the back side without tearing apart the entire window.

It has been rainy and in the 50's all week. Friday nite it started to clear off, and by 8:00 Saturday morning we were back into normal Nebraska weather - windy. It blew 30 mph non-stop all day. JP & I popped the old pane out and nearly dropped it as we were trying to hook up some slings to lower it. The wind was pressing hard on the 2800 square inches of 70 pound glass. We hollered for CP to go get CG from across the street. He came over and helped up lower it safely. After that, we realized that we needed to close all the windows in the house so that the wind wasn't trying to blow thru the window.

I went to the home depot for supplies and found that the eight-year old battery in my car had finally died. JP & the boys came to my rescue with jumper cables. CG came over again to assist with the installation of the new pane. It was spooky, but it went in without a hitch.

Notice the wind-blown small maple. It blew non-stop ALL day. After the window, we cut the grass and then went to Sam's Club for cookout supplies and a new battery (only $65 !). We had CG & family over for a cookout.