u/nodesearch

Earlier this year I bought a well-used Kubota U17 for maintenance and projects around my property. This is the pacific northwest, so some time in October it's going to start raining and not stop raining until June. I doubt I'll be able to do much work with the excavator when the ground is as wet as it's going to be, so it's going to sit for months.

What should I do to prepare for long periods of inactivity? For gasoline engines I'd drain the gas or at least put in a good stabilizer, but this is literally the only diesel engine I've ever owned and I don't know what you're supposed to do to keep it happy. It'll be under a lean-to, so no direct rain, but it will have to deal with ambient humidity. Should I just go out there and throttle it up for a while every week or something?

Last year I started getting into metal fabrication at my home shop in a more serious way. The only place I know of in Kitsap that sells steel is Central Welding Supply in Bremerton, they have a small but reliable steel yard where I can get the common square tube sizes, flat bar, some sheet metal, and so on. Great people, too. But I would love more options, right now I can’t even compare prices because they seem to be the only ones in town. Are there any other steel yards I’m missing out on?

I’d also like to rummage around at a scrap yard, you can find some pretty nice usable metal there sometimes. I know Yank-A-Part in Poulsbo takes scrap but I haven’t called to ask if they sell it yet. Any other scrap yards?

(This is my first post here, and mainly I think I'm just getting this off my chest, but if anyone has advice on getting an eye doctor to take floaters more seriously I would love to hear it.)

I'm 53 and I've had a slow but steady buildup of floaters in both eyes for about the last four years. I've always had a handful of floaters and I used to tune them out, but they have multiplied to the point that they are driving me absolutely insane and I cannot ignore them. They're long, stringy, fibrous looking things that float around very freely and sometimes bunch up, and they catch the light in the most annoying ways. And god damn there's a lot of them. They don't interfere with my vision in a way that causes real problems, but they make me hyperfocus on them CONSTANTLY.

I first brought up the issue with my regular eye doctor in 2023, and again at every eye exam since then. First, the good news: My retinas are super healthy, no issues, and believe me I'm not taking that for granted, I feel lucky as hell. Also, there's no sign of retinal detachment or PVD. Great. But that means that every time I bring up the floaters, my doctor essentially shrugs and says "yeah it do be like that sometimes haha".

This year I finally brought up the idea of vitrectomy. He gave me a pretty firm "no". He said he would only recommend a vitrectomy if the floaters were so bad that they were causing significant problems driving because I was trying to dodge things that weren't there. After reading up on the risks of vitrectomy when you don't have PVD, I can understand why, but it was still disappointing.

The thing is, he won't even really talk to me about WHAT kind of floaters I have. When he does imaging and inspection of my eyes he can't see them other than maybe one small shadow, so I'm sure from his point of view as someone who sees patients day in and day out they're just not that bad. But I'm over here worrying "how much worse is this going to get???"

He's honestly really good other than this. I kind of want to get a second opinion, but good eye doctors around here are hard to find.

I’m just getting started doing real fabrication work and I need to get my material handling under control. My shop is one and a half garage bays in a three car garage (USA, so roughly 15’ x 20’ with a big post unfortunately right in the middle of it), and everything except the plasma table is on casters so I can move it around. I have been buying my sheet and plate steel in 24” x 48” segments because that’s basically the biggest thing I can wrangle by hand, and even then 1/4” steel is the absolute max and a real struggle. I have projects coming up where I’ll need to handle 48” x 48” sheets of 3/16” and those are 122 lbs, I can’t do that by hand.

The best thing I have right now is a mini skid steer with pallet fork attachment that I can get material out of my truck with, but it’s too big to drive into the shop and do fine maneuvering. For those of you who move steel in a tiny shop, what are your go-to tools and methods? I’m willing to spend real money on good tools to save my back.

I only just this week heard about Bill C-3, and remembered my grandmother long ago mentioning that her mother was from Canada. I got on the phone with my aunt, the last surviving member of my mom’s side of the family, and we confirmed it: Yes, my great grandmother was born in Québec!

It only took a few hours to find digital records of her birth & baptism and her marriage to an American in Québec, so it looks like there is a paper trail that can be followed. I know that it’s day one and there are a million things that could go wrong and stop the process dead in its tracks, but I can’t help being excited. I’m going to be spending the rest of this week reading the FAQ here and catching up on other people’s stories while I figure out what I can get my hands on, and how to do it. Wish me luck!