Monday Musings

Is there a word for the fog of breathe you see on a cold day?

All I can come up with is:

• Spirit breath
• Blowing smoke
• Fog breath

Surely there is something better!

I really hate it when I can remember the title of a book, especially when DISTINCTLY remember reading it. I've helped other people find titles, mostly utilizing Google or Amazon. Well, I spent about three hours trying to figure this out, but no luck. Now it's YOUR turn to help ME!

The book (or story) takes place during winter. A child (a boy?) ride with his grandfather (or uncle, or something...) on a steam tractor. They help people, in some way I can't remember. I THINK it was written by someone famous. I MAY have read it in a magazine, but I have the notion it was made into a television movie. To me, the steam tractor was the focal point of the story.

Go for it!

Just What DO You Know?

A guest on Michael Feldman's Whad'Ya Know? Office Party show said/implied that Robert Heinlein wrote Dianetics. And no one called him on it. There would have been a big "I think NOT" from the audience if I had been there!

As it was, the was a lound "Heinlein? Heinlein?? HEINLEIN????" from MY bedroom!

A Penny

I got this penny in change at work the other year. It's a 1958 D "wheatie".





Just for fun I looked up its value at About.com: Wheat Penny Values. It's worth about 3 cents. So much for found riches!

My camera technique is somewhat lacking, as usual. There are a ton of sites on the Web showing how to photograph coins. I especially like the milk jug diffuser on Coin Photography. I thnk I might try that!

Let There Be Light

I've been having some trouble lately with my reading lamp. I replaced the 40 watt fluorescent lamp with a 100 watt fluorescent lamp. It died after two hours use. I took it back to the store and they gave me a new one. I've been using that one for about a week, no problems.

A couple of days ago the switch started acting up. I had to wiggle it to get it to work. It made scary sparking noises, and finally ceased to function, electrically, at all.

I bought some new switch guts for it today, installed same, works fine.

I drilled out the rivets on the old one to see what was going on inside.



It looked ok, but when I loaded the picture into the computer and magnified it, I could see that one contact was not in the right place. You can see the contact on the right has sprung out of place. I don't' know if it was like that before I took the top of the switch, and it looks like it's making good contact anyway. I don't see any signs of arcing.

The only think I can think of is, maybe because the right-hand contact sprungded out on the left, there wasn't enough springy tension on the right where the contact makes contact with the piece that you can't see because it fell out.

So, I don't know what the problem was. All I know is the new one works fine.