CozyNet Blog

General Update v29

Publish Date: 2026-08-14

A poor photo of a rising red moon. I need a real camera!

The months of July and August felt like they flew right by me! They've been especially hot and dry too, which is common for the area this time of year. My yard is crispy dry and dead, meaning I haven't had to mow ever since my last general update blog post, I believe.

Unfortunately with all the heat and sunlight, it's baked my poor truck to the point of blistering the clear coat on the roof and hood. I think this is possibly because I wasn't consistently keeping up a coat of wax on it. It's a 26 year old truck so these things eventually happen. I will try to restore those spots, but in the meantime I went ahead and washed it off and waxed it. This sort of has me wanting to buy one of those metal carports so my cars aren't always baking in the sun, but I do have a barn in the back I could park them in if it weren't full of junk!

Maybe I'll pay someone to clear it out instead of buying a carport.

A few days ago I got back into the swing of wood working and made an almost complete window frame. I haven't made the check rail yet since it's a unique piece and wanted to perfect my technique in making the bottom rail and stiles. I had to tinker around with some spare stock on the table saw to learn how to work around its imperfections. Afterwards, and knowing what to keep an eye out for, I managed to make very accurate cuts. I do believe that I'll be using these for a final replacement frame in my kitchen!

I've also been researching the types of weather stripping I could use in the window casements. I would like to replicate the same system that was there before which were aluminum strips, but unfortunately it doesn't appear to be produced anymore. I can find the spiral window balances, which I'll probably use here, but the particular aluminum weather stripping for converting old wood window frames that I'm looking for doesn't seem to exist anymore. My guess is that they were common between the 50's and 80's for wood windows before the market shifted to cheaper fabrication methods. Nowadays it's all aluminum or vinyl casements, tracks, and frames with foam or rubber gaskets but nothing for wood frames and casements which is making this difficult.

One of my windows in the house that also needs repair work...

I'll try to salvage the old stuff if it's repairable. I've come across spring bronze stripping, but it's ridiculously expensive and kind of shoddy by comparison. I can't see it making as near a good seal around the frame as the aluminum weather stripping of yesteryear, but it seems to be the only option on the market.

I haven't made any additional home repairs yet. It's been a busy month and my scheduling could be better. I've also missed the last few days of journal posts too. The journal blog posts have been fun to make, but I feel like they're getting repetitive. It's also a chore to keep up with it when I've got other things going on so I think I'm going to pull back on it.

Change of subject...

I've been going thru some old stuff on my NAS server lately. I've accumulated a lot of stuff over the years, most of it being old junk I once identified with. I consider these idols today that I don't want having a part in my life anymore. I've deleted hundreds of gigabytes of game ISO's, my old WoW screenshots, all of the music I use to listen to, my sci-fi TV series collections (Farscape, Star Trek, Star Gate, Babylon 5, etc...) There's still a lot more to go thru, especially the things I have stored away in large containers up stairs, but it's going to take some time just because of the sheer amount of stuff I have to go thru.

Batch deleting files from Windows file explorer is faster than Dolphin!

What set me off was a series of events, but one evening I was listening to some old albums from Above and Beyond. They're well made and a good quality sound, but I found myself looking back to a sinful past and felt like this was leading to a pillar of salt situation for me. I don't want to keep stumbling over this stuff to be tempted by it and so I'm just going to get rid of it. The least personal items I'm going sell on ebay or give them to someone else since it might be worth something, but the more personal things that I use to identify with I'm going to burn them if possible. My identity isn't in the shallow things of this world anymore and I'm not going back to it either.

Thanks for reading my blog!