On Failure - Flatjacks

How can you screw up a pancake? Well, you can.  

After a hard work week, I had a serious craving for them. It was 10 degrees out and I was teleworking.  A perfect morning for pancakes. I was seriously tired, (when your eyes look like Chinese flags even VISINE® is not going to help) but was determined to make them, turning down Partners offer to make some eggs and toast..  I decided to try a new recipe using some self-rising flour.  Once on the griddle, I noticed how, well, thin, they were.

They weren't puffing up at all. Partner looked in on them and said "are we having French crepes?"

No, Flatjacks.

I looked at the counter at the two flour containers.  *%#@  I used the NON self-rising flour.  I was making hardtack.

OK, I can make another batch, except I was out of eggs and butter and though the store is just a 10 minute drive, it IS kind of cold out.  To the Internets!  I found a vegan pancake recipe on a blog, made with no butter or eggs and the picture looked like regular pancakes.  I made them as instructed and they looked like the picture.  But let's just say, assuming they have a long shelf life, they'll be perfect for the first aid kit to pack wounds. Absorbent, not edible.  Another failure.

Flopcakes.

Attempt #3, with fresh butter and eggs from the store (and look, bacon fell into the cart!), went much better.

But I realized until I catch up on my sleep,  it's best to putter around using the simplest of tools.  Perhaps like 3 or 4 new screwdrivers that showed up on the Range last weekend.

The screwdriver, the tool that likely every household has at least one of.  It has long genealogy, with Archimedes considered to have invented the screw in the third century B.C.with others saying it was Nebuchadnezzar II who did. Actually, what Archimedes of Syracuse invented was designed to transfer motion (as in the continuous worm of a worm and gear assembly), rather than to fasten two things together, so I'd say he didn't really likely "invent" the screw, though no one really knows for sure.  What we do know is that  around the first century, screw shaped tools became common,  with early  screws were made from wood and were used in wine presses, olive oil presses, and such.

If you have enough books, you'll find there's historical records on everything, tools, cars, party boats (which according to famed tool guy Red Green, date back to Cleopatra and the crew of the Exxon-Valdez). But there is a ton of information on the Roman Era and the many developments in tooling and building that came about during that time. Romans had most of our other hand tools and also invented the stiffened backsaw, whose blade is reinforced at the top. This prevents straight-through cuts, but in combination with a miter box, can be useful for cabinetwork.

Cranks showed up in the The Middle Ages, as did the carpenter's brace.  The handsaw, too, is even more ancient.  Archaeologists have found metal-toothead Egyptian saws dating back to 1500 B.C., with  broad blades, some as long as twenty inches, curved wooden handles and irregular teeth.

A soft metal was used, copper, which required the saw to be pulled, not pushed to keep it from buckling.  Since during the pull you can't bear down on the cutting stroke, sawing wood for the Egyptians must have been about as much fun as plumbing.  The Romans used iron for the blades, making them stiffer.

The Romans also added something to the world's toolbox of cutting tools that were beyond ingenious for its time. The frame saw. A fairly cheap narrow blade is held in a wooden frame and is kept taut by tightening a cord. Wooden frame saws worked so well that they continued as the most common type of saw well into the 19th century and if you look at your hacksaw in the garage closely, you can see the principle is still alive (though if your spouse catches you in the shop fondling and staring at your hacksaw he or she may cut off the beer supply).

The first metal screws used as fasteners date back to the 15th century. They had square or hexagonal heads and were not turned with a screwdriver, but a wrench. Screws also appeared as a spinoff from Renaissance warfare, keeping the parts of a matchlock rifle linked. The screws of the 16th century were hand-cut which is both expensive and less than reliable, but they were needed for timepieces as well as armaments. At the end of the 1700s, screw-cutting lathes were developed, making screws more widely available and consistently sized.

But when did the "screwdriver" show up on the scene?

Scottish crafts manuals from around the time of the American Revolution give screwdrivers as "turnscrews"; the same word in French, tournevis, turns up in 1723. .But the origin of the screwdriver itself is obscure and not widely mentioned in texts even though screws were evident in many applications during this early period.

Now, there are multiple types of screwdrivers, cabinet screwdrivers, stubby screwdrivers, electricians screwdrivers, spiral ratchet, etc, and assorted tips, Parallel tip, Pozidriv,  Phillips, Clutch, Robertson.

Some handles and shanks can take multiple tips, and one of them here even has a magnet built into the shaft.  You might laugh at the Ronco Food Dehyradator/Flashlight/Auger but combination tools have been around since ancient times, the two oldest woodworking tools being the ax (timber!) and the adz, with its blade turned ninety degrees, which is then used for dressing the timber.  The Minoans in Crete were using it long before the Romans started getting that bigger toolbox.

Some of the modern screwdrivers have the head as you see in the pictures here, others have a bulbous head, which provides a little better grip, with a greater area of surface contact between paw and tool, but that's just my preference.

But the other day, there was a Sears Hardware going out  of business and well

Tools

Sale

Need I say more.

Just a few were picked up, with one deciding difference.  Something you all may know, but I didn't catch on to immediately.

Square versus round shank.  What's the advantage of the square?

You can place a wrench on the square shank so you can apply torque with one hand and downward pressure with the other which is more effective than simply trying to twist the handle, especially when you don't have the upper body strength of most handymen (but more than Justin Beiber).

It's also more effective in stripping out slots on screws on 1960's British Cars.

On Friendship

Chapter 22 - On Friendship (From True Course - Lessons From a Life Aloft, Outskirts Press 2019.

I think the friends we make in the aviation business are unique. There's something about sitting inside for a meal after a long day in the cockpit, watching the lights reflected in your beverage, a long day ended, that sometimes is the best part of the day. It was a chance to relax and share conversation with someone, who between 4:00 a.m. show times and approaches to minimums in heavy snow squalls and turbulence, became your friend.

It's the time you review the doings of the day, when you tell stories and bragged softly and the advertised glamour of being a pilot emerges long enough to make you believe it and forget for a moment the lack of sleep, lack of pay when you first started out, and too frequent lack of respect.

Growing up in a mostly male household and spending all of my early life in a male-dominated profession, I have no idea how most women choose their friends. But it seems that men have two kinds of friends. The first kind of friendship develops slowly, the friendship growing like an oak, thickening each year. My dad, in his ‘90s now, has that kind of friend. The kid with whom he played stickball is now the guy with whom he plays cards.

The second kind of friend is different. The bond is instant, forged under fire, molded in the heat of battle. For many that friendship is forged in the military or law enforcement. For me anyway, that kind of friendship was forged in the cockpit. I guess it's for this reason, rather than for any love of the thrill of working long days in decrepit aircraft for five hundred dollars a month, that I remember my first days as an airline pilot as being the best years of my life.

When I wasn't flying, I was hiking and climbing. It was more a technical hike than a true climb but we still loved it. My friends with whom I flew also joined me on such adventures.  Climbers, at least those who manage to do it without breaking something, learn early on that there is no adversary in climbing. You can't “conquer” a mountain. There are times when I got halfway up, and enveloped briefly in both cloud and the excess of testosterone in the air, stopped, afraid to move. Yet my friends were with me, encouraging and guiding as the sun came out again and, on those occasions, the mountain sometimes granted me the privilege of a successful summit.

I did most of this in the Pacific Northwest and Colorado and the friendships formed there warm me still. Understand now, we reached the summits of nothing more than a couple of 14,000-foot peaks, not anything requiring professional mountaineering skill. I did my excursions with a ragtag bunch of amateurs rounded up from the crew lounge.

Our hikes and climbs weren’t the stuff of today’s YouTube videos. Our efforts were simply free form days of testing our limits. Adventures fueled by caffeine, youth, and the unspoken octane of facing up to fear in something other than an airplane. We tackled such trips with fierce pride, in our unity, in our will, even as we prayed to God each night that we’d make it home safe, to that God that looks after new-hire copilots no doubt. With this faith, we simply put one foot in front of the other, until the journey was complete.

It was on one of these climbs that we met Frank. He was from the U.K., the robust sort of fellow who looked on life as an exercise for the heart to prepare it for encounters with the rest of the world. He was an ordained minister, and one morning on a trail on the side of Mt. Rainier he produced a Bible, a small metal flask of wine and some week-old bread and ministered a quiet communion to us.  As I held that little piece of bread in my mouth, looking out onto a landscape that was as pure and pristine as forgiveness, hearing the sounds of nature behind the words of sacrament, that simple act brought tears to my eyes.

The major airlines started hiring again, and most of us moved on, but stayed in touch, trading stories of our flights in the Army Reserve or the Air National Guard as well as pictures of our new and improved airplanes. We would try and get together each year, usually in Montana where a couple of us had family.  Frank even joined us a time or two, and we could sit around the fire after a day of fishing or just wandering the woods, proclaiming this an aviator’s true calling as from the white ash of a campfire, our old memories cooled as we made new ones.

It was a few years later, most of us scattered and gone, with new jobs, spouses, and all the trappings of adulthood when the call came.  Frank died while on a trip visiting his family.  There was going to be a funeral in his homeland.  But our flying schedules and budgets prohibited the majority of us from such a trip.  So we met someplace close.  We drank too much, we reminisced at length, and it was only when the words grew cold with the night air did we raise our glasses to the man in the empty chair.

What's on YOUR TV Tonight

I seldom watch TV at home. Mostly as we got rid of ours about 5 years ago and just watch boxed sets of our favorite shows on the humongous computer monitor I have in my office/den/writer's den of brain block.

But sometimes when traveling for work, I arrive back at the hotel, peruse the room service menu, and too tired to post anything of worth, consider TV. But not for long. If I watch, I do like the History Channel, NCIS, Red Green, Firefly, Top Gear and some old shows and movies, especially westerns and old classics. When I was commuting and had the crash pad I got the most basic and cheapest of cable service and only because with Internet I got a deal. So in watching that I discovered several things. There is NO subject off limits in commercials. (Seriously, I don't want to know about the amazing merits of "Panty Shields with Wings!". Wings? Good Lord, they act like we won WWII with those things. Also, "have a nice period" Shouldn't that be changed to "vehicular manslaughter is wrong")? If you are dead due to Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (caused by breathing the microscopic dust of ground up yard gnomes used in older insulation) you are NOT able to call the attorney listed at the end of the commercial. No matter what time it is and how basic your cable, on one channel will be Law and Order Special Victims Unit. 

I also rediscovered why I don't watch much television. One late nights selection: Talk show with guest - liberal Hollywood airheaded "actress" Zombie Strippers (wait, wasn't that just on the previous channel?) Cindy Crawfords Skin Secrets! Bridalplasty Rock of Love Murder She Wrote (look, every time Jessica Fletcher shows up at a dinner party someone gets murdered, and yet she keeps getting invited, hellooooo) Great Horse Cleaning Tips ( Maybe that was "house cleaning", at least I hope so.) Depression and Anxiety Help (you invited Jessica Fletcher over for beer and Brats didn't you?) Pimp my mailbox (or some such home decorating show) Infomercials (I've got to get one now, I've nothing to wear if Caligula comes on later) , Petty Officer Junction - (the silly other NCIS show) BBC's "Fastest Animals on Earth (sorry folks it's still a fully grown Holstein dropped from a C-130 at 150.626 ft/sec assuming a 0.7 drag coefficient) And of course, Home Shopping Channel: Buy Jewelry Now! Jewelry and You! Jewelry to accessorize with your wearable towel! What were/are your favorite shows? If the Internet was down tomorrow for something what would you watch? Or would you watch at all?