Botany Photo of the Day is back!

Botany Photo of the Day is back!  After a hiatus of over a year, this daily email with beautiful photos linked is back!  Hooray!  At right is one of the photos from today's email (click to embiggen), a plant I've seen often in some of the areas that Debbie and I love the best.  This photo looks like it was taken in northern Arizona or southern Utah – our stomping grounds!

If you like what you see here, you can subscribe to it yourself (it's free) by filling out the form on the left side of the page linked above...

How on earth does Scott Adams do it?

How on earth does Scott Adams do it?  Today's cartoon (below) captures perfectly one of my main complaints about the current engineering management fad, which goes by the moniker “agile”.  When I was subject to those agile processes, in the last year or so before I retired, I experienced interruptions to my work flow such as I had never had before.  It finally got to the point where I told my boss that I was going to work from home, cell phone off, not watching email or the oh-so-interrupty messaging application the engineering team used.  If he didn't like it, that was fine – I'd happily quit.  He caved and let me work from home most of the time.  My productivity skyrocketed once I was (mostly) out of that “agile” loop!

If I had any talent in any of the areas necessary for a Dilbert-like cartoon, you'd easily understand how I could come up with something like this.  But Scott Adams has been independent of any technology job for a long time, since long before the agile methodology was even a gleam in its cursed father's eye.  How does he manage to do this?  I have no idea; I just stand in awe...

I'm ancient enough that I can remember a half dozen or so engineering management fads that came and went, from the late '70s up until my retirement in 2013.  All of them shared some “features”:

• Lots of work for the managers at every level.  This looked impressive to upper management, convincing them that something good was happening.
• Produced numerous reports purporting to track progress and predict development completion.  In reality all of those reports were bullshit with varying degrees of stench.
• Reduced the productivity of all the most productive engineers, and encouraged them to leave.
• Encouraged the other engineers to value process over skill, experience, or knowledge.
• Produced managers with all the fervor of psychotic badgers, but without the attractive personality.  Somehow these managers tended to rise in the ranks, exacerbating all the other bad effects of the current fad.
• Fizzled out after enough time passed that even the least-aware upper management folks understand that it didn't work.

The joking response to this would be to encourage anarchy in small engineering teams, and get rid of all these engineering process schemes.  The thing is ... I'm not at all sure that's a bad idea.  In fact, it's more-or-less the situation at every startup I've ever been associated with – and they were definitely the most productive engineering teams I know of.

In other words, engineering process may well be a Communist plot!

Model X update...

Model X update...  I took the photo at right just a couple minutes ago.  We've got fog here, the temperature is in the low 40s, it's raining intermittently, and the snow on the ground is melting at a prodigious rate.  We're forecast to get about an inch more rain between now and Saturday night; the snow may be completely gone by then.  That will be an amazing transformation!

I forgot to mention in my earlier post that we actually did have a chance to try out the auto-steer feature.  On one of our trips back from SLC, we were on I-15 in rush hour traffic.  For about three miles we were going slower than 45 MPH – so I engaged the auto-steer to see what would happen.  Bottom line: it worked just fine.  It wasn't very exciting; we were simply lane-keeping and the adaptive cruise control kept us at a safe distance behind the car in front of us.

One thing we've noticed (whether or not auto-steer is engaged) is that where there's a traffic sign that arches across the entire freeway the adaptive cruise control seems to be fooled.  Most of the time we just feel a brief deceleration as we approach the sign, then it picks up speed again right afterwards.  Sometimes, however, the car seems to think that a collision is imminent – the crash alarm starts sounding and the brakes are slammed on.  This always happens when it's far too late to actually stop before the sign, so what happens is we slow down abruptly, sometimes by 30 or 40 MPH, and then we pass the sign.  Once past the sign, the alarm goes off and we speed back up.  The first few times that happened it was quite disconcerting, as I had no idea what was causing it.  After a while I put the pattern of the signs together, so now I'm on the lookout for it.

I've also learned a bit more about how the adaptive cruise control works.  It uses forward-looking sensors to “see” the cars in front of us.  I know the car has radar, cameras, and ultrasonic sensors looking forward.  I know (from reading) that the radar is involved with the adaptive cruise control; I'm not sure about the cameras or ultrasonic sensors.  Anyway, what I've discovered is that the car the system is “looking” at is always the car directly in front of my car.  That's not always ideal.  Consider the case where there are two lanes of traffic going in each direction, and the road is turning to the left.  If I'm in the left lane, a car that's ahead of me in the right lane might be directly in front of my car.  In that case, if the other car is going more slowly than I am, the adaptive cruise control will slow me down – even though my lane is completely clear ahead of me.  That tells me that the adaptive cruise control has no sense of the layout of the road, despite having an excellent map available to it, and a vision system that is clearly tracking where my lane is (I know this because it shows the results on my dashboard!).  The left hand of their driving automation doesn't appear to know what the right hand is doing. :)  Hopefully they'll fix this one of these fine days...

Paradise ponders, surprises and hectic days edition...

Paradise ponders, surprises and hectic days edition...  I can't believe I missed two sequential days of posting.  I can't remember the last time that happened...

Nothing bad happened, but there was sure a lot of stuff that did! 

Debbie and I both got colds on Sunday, but I recovered within 24 hours and she's still miserable.  The poor girl is on the tail end of the current cold, where her pattern is to cough and cough and cough.  Ugh...

Monday we made a surprise trip down to SLC, for Debbie to get an injection.  This was for another drug (Prolia) to help with her osteoporosis.   A new drug means a new battle with the insurance company – they don't want to cover it, and her doctor insists that its the only one that will help her.  Her doctor says the insurance company's recommendation (which, of course, is much less expensive) is completely inappropriate for her.  So we're paying out of pocket, and the doctor is going to battle for us.  This tension between our healthcare provider and our insurer is becoming a pattern, and I'm afraid it may be the new norm.  We're not too happy about that, especially when we're paying an absurd amount for our health insurance premium, relative to the benefits being received.

I took my Tesla Model X down the service facility on Tuesday, as planned.  The problem with the spoiler they replicated immediately.  The first thing they tried was to “recalibrate” the spoiler.  After some discussion with the techs, I confirmed that what that meant was to recalibrate the position sensor for the spoiler.  Once they finished with that, the spoiler worked great!  But once I got the car home on Tuesday night, it again didn't work.  Tesla is still working on an answer for me on that.  The mirror problem that I thought I had turns out to just be my el stupido: The mirror wasn't dark, it was the rear window that I look through.  It is, in fact, tinted very dark – so even when the mirror is not darkened, it looks like it is.  Well, to me, anyway.  The techs there told me that nobody had ever complained about that before.  Oh, well.

That evening I met up with an old friend, Doug W., and his wife Dee.  We had dinner at the Red Iguana.  My entree is in the photo at right: a grilled chicken breast smothered in tomatillo sauce, with roasted (and seeded) jalapenos and some grilled shrimp.  Lovely, it was (both the company and the food)!

Yesterday Debbie had a hair appointment, which in her priority scheme ranks just behind life-saving emergency medical treatment.  Ordinarily she would drive herself down to Ogden (where her stylist has her offices), but because of her cold she's been getting very little sleep.  I didn't want to let her drive in that condition, so I drover her down and waited while she got her hair done.  That took five hours out of my day, so I got little else done.  But we did both get back here safely. :)  Also, we had a fine meal at Maddox, where I learned something interesting while reading a poster about their founder: he lived in Paradise until his early 20s!  I had no idea...

Today I'm concentrating on getting ready for our upcoming trip to Hawai'i.  We leave on Monday, bright and early, and we return on the 28th.  We're staying at our favorite bed and breakfast in the islands: the Hale Ohia Cottages, just outside of Volcano Village.  We've been there about eight or nine times over the past 25 years or so, but it's been about 12 years since our last visit.  We can hardly wait to be there again!  We'll be in Cottage 44; if you happen to be in the area, stop in and say hi!  They have WiFi there, and we'll have our laptop, so you can expect some posts and photos from there...

Yet another dichotomy...

Yet another dichotomy...  After an email conversation with a couple of friends, I've learned that the world of free electronic design automation (EDA) is mainly divided into two highly polarized camps: those who like Eagle, and those who like KiCad.  Years ago I had some very unhappy dealings with AutoCAD (who owns Eagle), and KiCad is a CERN project – so for me the choice was easy.  I'm now a KiCad guy! :)

After downloading it, getting completely flubberblated, reading some tutorials, cursing whoever it was that designed their user interface, gradually coming to understand that the OSX version is way behind, I finally managed to actually create a schematic.  This is the touch sensor part of the mud room switch project I posted about yesterday.  I'll keep publishing these in sections, as I build and test them.  This part works just fine.  Vcc, BTW, is 5 volts.

In all the years that I've been building electronics projects, I've never before used a schematic capture program (or EDA of any kind, unless you count circuit simulators).  The closest I've ever come is using Visio with a component outline library.  That's really just a drawing assistant; it doesn't “know” anything about the circuit.  KiCad, on the other hand, can generate net lists (for SPICE, for example) and directly generate the artwork for printed circuit boards.  Most of the (eighty bazillion) online prototype PCB houses will directly take KiCad (or Eagle) files, so presumably it would be pretty darned simple to get boards made for homebrew projects.  One of these days I might actually try that, but this is not that day. :)

If anybody actually wants this schematic, I'd be happy to share it.  It would make more sense to wait until I've actually finished, though!

Some electronics fun...

Some electronics fun...  The photo at right (taken with my iPhone peering through a 2x magnifier) shows the current state of one of my projects (I have lots of projects!).  This is the beginning of a touch-activated switch that will go onto the new cabinetry being built for our new mud room.  The cabinetry will hide a three-way light switch for the mud room lights.  This project will let one of the cabinet's knobs take the place of that switch, by toggling the state of a relay each time the knob is briefly touched while the cabinet door is closed.

The stuff you see there is the regulated 5V power supply for the electronics, plus the touch sensor.  The little wire visible coming out from under the top of the vector board will connect to the knob.  The blue 20-turn potentiometer adjusts the sensitivity of the circuit.  The funny thing with a white cap below the potentiometer is a switch, for resetting the touch sensor chip if it gets stuck.  The chip is the tiny little black rectangle with six leads just above that blue potentiometer.  It's the smallest component of all – smaller than the quarter-watt resistors and absolutely dwarfed by the 0.47 microfarad capacitor (the green monster on the right side).

It's kind of mind-boggling for this old fart just how small this stuff has gotten.  I can still remember (not very fondly, actually) when I did all my electronic construction using lug strips and point-to-point wiring, most resistors I used were huge 5 or 10 watt things, and the active components were vacuum tubes with sockets an inch or more in diameter.  Things sure have gotten much smaller!

Much to my amazement, when I finished wiring all this stuff and fired it up, (a) there was no smoke in the air, and (b) it worked on the first try!

Model X update...

Model X update...  I just finished installing a software update.  This one promises to enable some more auto-driving functionality.  Though I read the release notes, it's still not entirely clear to me exactly what was just enabled.  Many of the release notes covered things that were released in the previous release, talking about them as though they were new.  Also, the same language is in there about “calibration” requiring potentially several days of driving before the features are actually enabled.  So ... all I really know is that I just installed an update.  I have no idea what it's going to do, or when. :)

Super bowl?

Super bowl?  Two readers emailed to ask why I haven't been commenting on the super bowl (or, as I like to call it, the “stupor bowl”) game that's happening today.  Obviously these two readers don't know me well.  For their benefit (as well as for my other readers who may not understand about me and sports):

I don't know anything about sports – I cannot even reliably identify which sport is being played in any particular game.  I don't know how the games are played, or what the rules are.  I don't watch or follow any sports.  I don't know the names of any sportsmen (or women).  I don't care about sports.  I don't have any favorite teams.  I don't “root” for any teams.  I don't even know the names of any teams.  I care about sports less than I care about the abundance of fleas in Irkutsk, less than Debbie cares about stray inductance in 5% carbon film resistors, but slightly more than I care about Hillary's career opportunities.

Just to be clear for the more obtuse: I will not be watching the super bowl game today.

Actually, the only reason I even knew it was today is because it showed up in the news that I read.

More Milo...

More Milo ... this time on Tucker Carlson's show.  Again, excellent.

I just felt...

I just felt ... the strangest thing!  I walked from our house into our barn, about 50'.  I wasn't wearing a jacket or a hat.  It's nearly 50°F out, and the sun was out.  I felt the warm sun on my head – what an odd feeling, after a couple months of winter!

If you've ever done any electronic logic design...

If you've ever done any electronic logic design ... then most likely you already know that ROMs can be used to replace any collection of logic gates.  In effect they can be thought of as extremely simple FPLAs.  For instance, a 4kb ROM has 12 address lines and 8 data lines – which you can think of as 12 logic inputs and 8 logic outputs, and the outputs can be programmed to be any function of those inputs.

If you've actually used ROMs as logic in practice, then you've probably also run across their main drawback: glitches in the outputs when an input changes.  If you're circuit is synchronized this isn't an issue, but for pure logic without synchronization, it is potentially a major problem.

So when I ran across a homebrew computer that claimed to be built entirely with ROMs, I was really curious how this might have been done.  About a third of the way into the web page, I ran across this:

Some observations have led me to assume that when the address input changes from a value A to a value B, even if the same value X is memorized in all the addresses in T(A,B), a transient state can appear on the data outputs during a few nano seconds. This transient phenomenon can be enough to “break” the storage loop. I worked around this problem by putting a 1nf capacitor on each data output of the EPROMs used to implements registers. This solution gives no guarantee of reproducibility. It could be improved by using resistor capacitor circuits in the storage loop instead of single capacitors. Without this hack, the computer crashes after running a few tens of thousands of instructions.

Well, that's about as hacky as you can get!  Basically he's using capacitors as a sort of low-pass filter to keep the transients from affecting his ROM logic.  One would never engineer something for production like that, as the necessary values for those capacitors would be affected by all sorts of things, from ambient temperature to which production run of ROMs was being used.

Still ... having a computer built entirely from logic implemented in ROMs is pretty cool! :)

Paradise ponders, outdoor liquid water edition...

Paradise ponders, outdoor liquid water edition...  Yesterday morning was cold and very foggy (see photos below).  It wasn't cold enough to form hoarfrost, though.  Later in the day the temperature rose above freezing – and it stayed there all last night and so far today.  This means that the snow and ice that's accumulated over the past month is starting to melt.  Even yesterday morning (when I took the photos below) most of the snow had slipped out of the trees, as you can see.  This morning there's no fog, and it's wet outside – from some light rain and (lots of!) melting snow and ice.  Our driveway has running water on it, something we haven't seen outside for quite a while now. :)

Animated circuit simulator...

Animated circuit simulator...  At right is a screenshot I took from an animated circuit simulator I ran across yesterday.  It's called EveryCircuit, and it runs on Chrome browsers, IOS devices (iPad, iPhone), and droids.  The circuit is a simple relay driver with a diode snubber, copying something I have in real life – which let me look at the actual circuit with an oscilloscope, and compare it to the simulation.  They were remarkably close, even with the component's values at the default setting.

I go looking for simulators every once in a while, hoping to find something a bit more interactive and usable than the bog-standard SPICE simulators.  Those feel to me like I'm using hand tools to build a house – I wanted a circular saw, dammit!  I've found some interactive simulators before, including (if memory serves) an earlier version of EveryCircuit.  They were so simple as to be nearly useless.  EveryCircuit is not.  It is not as complete or as sophisticated (by far) as a decent SPICE implementation – but it is complete enough to serve for the vast majority of my purposes.  It works remarkably well on the iPad, and despite the small screen of an iPhone it's passable there as well.

There's a very active online community with vast quantities of user-contributed circuits.  I did a search for “zero crossing” and got 16 results.  The quality varied from pathetic to quite good.

It's free to try (even on IOS or Android), but the trial comes with some severe limitations.  To buy it is a one-time purchase of $14.99, which is the least expensive commercial simulator I've ever run across.  It's now part of my electronics toolkit.  I'm sure I'll still bump up against its limitations now and then, and for all I know they'll go out of business some day – so I'll still keep a “real” SPICE implementation lying about.  But for the common little jobs I need to do, this will do just fine...

Things every hacker once knew...

Things every hacker once knew...  This is a fascinating essay by Eric S. Raymond.  Almost everything in it is well known to me, though I don't think Eric would consider me a “hacker”.  I'm five years older than he is, and I suspect I started with electronics (though not computers) a bit younger than he did – so some of the things he lists don't even seem that antique to me! :)

Update: first link fixed.  Thanks to all who commented or emailed to let me know!

Model X update...

Model X update...  We've had our Tesla Model X now for just over a month.  How do we like the car after having had it for a while?

Very much, thank you!

We continue to be thrilled by the visibility and quiet, perfect for the kind of sightseeing and wildlife viewing that we love so much.  The comfort of all the little things like heated seats and automatic doors is very nice, though it still feels a bit weird for we who have been driving pickup trucks for 30 years! :)

I've had just one problem with the car other than those I've previously described in posts: the rear-view mirror inside the car is permanently darkened.  All three rear-view mirrors are supposed to automatically darken when there are bright headlights behind the car, and the two exterior mirrors work fine.  The software upgrade is performing well, though I'm still a little disappointed by the restrictions on it.  We haven't been able to try auto-steer yet, because the limitations currently in force mean that there are no roads anywhere near us where we can use it.  The current restrictions are (a) you must be on a limited-access highway (i.e., an Interstate or something like that), and you have to be going under 45 MPH (i.e., high traffic situation).  Well, in this neck of the woods we have neither Interstate nor heavy traffic, so we're SOL until the restrictions get lifted.  This is promised once sufficient experience has been gained by the entire fleet of Tesla cars.  Won't be much from northern Utah!

We're going in for our service appointment (to look at the non-retracting spoiler and the rear-view mirror) next Tuesday afternoon.  Later that same day we're meeting friends for dinner at the Red Iguana.  Should be an interesting day!

Oh, one other Model X related thing: we've purchased a couple of accessories.  The first one, which we're already using, is a pair of color-coded silicone covers for the Tesla fob (which replaces a key).  The covers add some cushioning and waterproofing, but the color-coding was what we really wanted: red for my fob, black for Debbie's.  The fob is how the Model X figures out who you are, and determines the settings for the seats, mirrors, etc. that it restores to the driver's seat.  We've also purchased a couple of tempered glass screen protectors, one for the giant screen in the center console, the other for the smaller screen in front of the steering wheel.  I'll be installing those this weekend.

Random morning thought...

Random morning thought...  While I was reading the news this morning about the 63,411 things that Trump did last night, a memory surfaced: some advice I got many years ago from an executive trying to teach me how to manage an engineering group.  He told me the most important thing I could do was simply to do.  When I looked baffled, he said “Do something, even if it’s wrong!”  That led to a more interesting discussion about the importance, in leadership, of making decisions and setting a course of action.  Even more interesting was his assertion that a core skill of managers is the ability to make decisions in the presence of imperfect or even absent information.

I felt the truth of that advice on many occasions in my decades of management experience.  I was surprised by just how often subordinates would be unable (or unwilling, to the same effect) to make a decision and instead raised it to me.  I hope it's true that I didn't do the same to my bosses!

What dawned on me this morning is we're seeing that principle in action at the level of the President of the U.S.  The sheer speed with which Trump is taking actions means that we're seeing low information decision-making.  Well, I guess there's one other possibility: that all these actions were queued up in some master plan.  I'll dismiss that, however, on the basis that if any such plan actually existed certainly it's presence would have leaked, and most likely much of its contents.  So I think it's more likely that it's “Do something, even if it’s wrong!” that's going on.

So here's the big question: is that a good thing, or a bad thing?

I really don't know.  I do know, however, that it's frightening.

I'm handling it this morning by listening to Frank Zappa's Apostrophe, which ever gives me joy...

Milo's response...

Milo's response ... to the Berkeley riots.  It's excellent.  In particular, I like his point about the irony of this happening at UC Berkeley – where the free speech movement started...

Trump has already floated the notion of stopping all federal funding of Berkeley in response.  The challenge, as always, would be finding the right criteria – and the right judges – to use in determining which institutions of higher education should be defunded. 

I have a proposal for a way to avoid that tough problem: defund them all (to be clear: I'm talking about federal funding).  And yes, I'm serious.  If any particular institution is truly doing a vital job (and I'm very skeptical of that with respect to Berkeley!), then there will be market-based funding available.  If not ... well, then, that institution must not have been all that important to anyone other than its faculty, administrators, and students, then.  So why the hell should taxpayers be funding it?

Paradise ponders, shifty grout and hoarfrost edition...

Paradise ponders, shifty grout and hoarfrost edition...  But first, for your amusement, the video at right (try to ignore the fact that it comes from the New York Times).  The subject is very simple: it just shows people standing on a 10 meter (about 33 feet) tall diving tower as they try to work up the courage to dive off.  I couldn't stop watching it!

A few days ago I wrote about my grout project.  It's finished now, and we can use our shower again.  But there's something mighty peculiar about the caulking we're using: it changes color, and quite dramatically.  When it's dry, it's roughly the color of milk chocolate – a rich, dark brown that doesn't match our other grout at all.  When it's been wet for 30 seconds or so, though, something quite dramatic happens: over the course of about 10 seconds it changes to a very pale beige, almost precisely matching our old grout!  So ... while we're taking a shower, the new grout looks great.  After the shower dries out, it looks like someone spilled dark paint onto the patched areas of our grout.  Sigh...

Michelle H. is one of the friends we've made here.  She's also the lady who comes over to clean our house, and she's done many other things to help us when we're on trips or (especially!) while Debbie was injured.  She lives in Paradise, and is an altogether typical resident here: a devout Mormon, mother of eight children, friendly, full of smiles and good cheer, and (very) active in the community.  A few days ago we took her out for lunch at Los Primos (which she loves!), and on the way back home we were admiring the hoarfrost on the trees.  We'd had a freezing fog in the morning, and even the weeds were beautiful.  Michelle called it something else (“frosty fog” or something like that), and I told her that it was actually called hoarfrost.  I wish I had a photo of her face when I said that.  It was obvious from her reaction that she thought I said “whore-frost”, and most Americans would pronounce the two as though they were precise homonyms (there's actually a subtle difference).  It took a little while for us to convince her that we weren't having some fun at her expense! :)

A few days later, she was in our house while I was unpacking a tool I'd received in the mail.  She asked me what it was, and I replied (with the truth): it's a nut-cracker.  Once again, that face! :)  The tool I bought looks exactly like those at right.  Michelle only recovered her equanimity after I explained what the tool was actually for – splitting nuts that had become corroded onto a bolt.  Oh, poor sheltered Michelle, exposed to a couple of outsiders like us!

Our forecast has five days of snow in the next seven days, but none of the probabilities are high, nor are the forecast amounts large.  Better yet: for four days starting tomorrow, we're supposed to have temperatures well above freezing for most of the day – and on two of those days, we have rain in the forecast.  Oh, that would be lovely to have enough rain to melt down a substantial part of the snow mountains we have all over our place!

Yesterday while we were out gallivanting amongst the wildlife, someone came by our driveway and moved two of the largest snow piles I'd made so that we had better visibility when trying to leave our driveway.  We spotted that as we pulled back into our driveway.  Even around here, surrounded by the nicest people on the planet, that's still a very nice thing for someone to do.  I couldn't tell who did it; all I could figure out (from the tracks) is that whoever did it had a very large piece of equipment indeed – those tire tracks were about 30" wide!  A little later in the day I was taking our trash can out to the highway, and I saw the person who was doing the nice driveway-fixing – he was working on my neighbor's driveway across the highway.  I went over to find out who it was and to thank him, and discovered that it was a county employee!  He was actually assigned to do this work, as a way of reducing accidents by enabling people to see as they pull out of their driveway.  He was working his way along the entire length of State Highway 165, clearing everybody's driveway.  What an eminently sensible thing to do!  I've lived in California so long that I basically never expect the local governments to do anything sensible, so seeing it happen here is still always surprising...

Paradise ponders, super wildlife viewing edition...

Paradise ponders, super wildlife viewing edition...  Debbie and I took a drive up Blacksmith Fork Canyon, leaving shortly after sunrise.  The photos below are all from this morning's trip.  In addition to the beautiful sunrise and winter scenery, we saw dozens of deer, a group of nine elk, three bald eagles, five moose, and an American dipper.  Many of the large mammals were quite close to the road, close enough that I could get photos even without a telephoto lens.  The dipper was a hoot to watch, and we had a good long view of him.  He was hunting bugs in the stream, submerging often, and once we actually saw him catch some sort of beetle and gobble it down.  The bald eagles were roosting in trees, one of them just 60' or so from us.  The entire trip up to Hardware Ranch we didn't see a single car – we had the entire canyon to ourselves.  The elk herd at Hardware Ranch hadn't yet been fed, and they were all watching closely in the direction the feed carts come from.  A wonderful start to the day!

Paradise ponders, massive burrito edition...

Paradise ponders, massive burrito edition...  The photo at right shows what you get if you order a carne asada burrito mojado from Los Primos.  I'm pretty sure I gained two or three pounds just by looking at that thing!  Somehow I managed to eat the whole thing.  I was hungry, so that helped – but still, that was a ridiculously huge (and delicious!) burrito...

The shower grout project occupied much of my day yesterday.  I will finish it all up today; only cleanup of excess caulk remains.  Then I have a couple other projects in the house to attempt.  One of them involves cracking a couple of nuts that are (a) thoroughly and completely “welded” to their bolts by corrosion, and (b) in an incredibly awkward place with the opportunity to break an expensive fragile object.  Should be great fun!