Yeah, nothing especially memorable to report, other than Indiana doing what Indiana does. We got buried under about a foot of snow, and then someone apparently reached up and set the thermostat for the entire state to 0 Kelvin. It stayed that way for almost two weeks. Jennifer was dog-sitting for part of that stretch, so the timing was especially obnoxious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Right after she left, my right ankle, the one that had surgery a year ago, decided to remind me who\u2019s in charge. One of the tendons in the tri-tendon repair apparently decided it no longer wanted to be friends with the other two, which probably means another surgery is in my future. A couple of days later, the ankle gave out completely in the shower, and I landed hard on my right wrist. X-rays didn\u2019t show anything obviously broken, so now it\u2019s just a waiting game. Four to six weeks of healing, depending on how much I annoy it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Meanwhile, the new furnace<\/em> that was installed last year struggled heroically and still couldn\u2019t keep the house much warmer than the low 50s. The dogs and I spent most of that time buried under an ever-growing pile of blankets. There was probably a solid seven-day stretch where I didn\u2019t even step outside. Honestly, who wants to go anywhere when the cold hurts your face? And who decides to live somewhere that hurts your face?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before the snow hit, I at least made sure the Porsche and the Tiguan were ready for winter. Thankfully, both of them were perfectly happy to fire up this week. On Wednesday I drove the Porsche to the shop, and on the way home managed to pick up a screw in one of the magnetically wide rear tires. No big deal. I grabbed a patch kit and fixed it. I\u2019m choosing to believe this is just the cold continuing its personal vendetta against me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The cold didn\u2019t do the cars any favors either. In particular, the Porsche 911\u2019s Gulf livery vinyl is starting to show its age. It\u2019s been on the car for several years now, and the vinyl has gotten brittle. My next step is probably to pull it, address the cracks that have formed in the epoxy, and take care of some metalwork in the wheel wells to properly seal everything up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve also made a decision on the 1972 Porsche 914\/6. I\u2019ve got what I believe are usable 1.7-liter and 1.8-liter Type 4 engines. Thomas and I are going to rebuild one of them over the next few weeks. Once we have a solid running engine, the plan is to have the 914\/6 chassis dipped, etch-primed, and painted. He\u2019ll end up driving it to Cars and Coffee, and it\u2019ll help me move forward with The Heritage Porsche Project, documenting the history and stories of individual cars. That part still feels right, and still feels worth doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the writing front, I\u2019ve got two articles going into the March\/April issue of CIRCular<\/em>, the Central Indiana Region PCA newsletter. I\u2019m also starting to do more staff writing elsewhere. That includes articles for the Next Level Performance website and a few other outlets. I\u2019ve also written two journal articles, one for Physics Today<\/em> and one for a higher-education publication, both of which look likely to be published. That progress almost makes up for the fact that my autobiographical vignette project is currently stalled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Academically, I\u2019m signed up for Harvard\u2019s CS50W, the web development course focused on HTML and JavaScript. I\u2019m aiming to finish it by the week of March 17, since that\u2019s when my Java I software development course starts at Ivy Tech. I haven\u2019t really touched Java since around 1995, so this is very much a refresher phase. I need to be ready for Java II as part of the master\u2019s program in computer science I\u2019m working on through Harvard. If I need to, I\u2019ll take Java II at Ivy Tech over the summer, but either way, I\u2019m taking Java II at Harvard in the fall. No negotiating with myself on that one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yeah, nothing especially memorable to report, other than Indiana doing what Indiana does. We got buried under about a foot of snow, and then someone apparently reached up and set the thermostat for the entire state to 0 Kelvin. It stayed that way for almost two weeks. Jennifer was dog-sitting for part of that stretch, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":387,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,14,9,79,24,80],"tags":[85,84,82,83,81],"class_list":["post-386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-boring","category-hobbies-and-stuff","category-my-thoughts-on","category-porsche","category-sick","category-writing-about-writing","tag-academic-grind","tag-garage-projects","tag-injury-recovery","tag-porsche-life","tag-winter-downtime"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tjtryon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tjtryon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tjtryon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tjtryon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tjtryon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=386"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tjtryon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":399,"href":"https:\/\/tjtryon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386\/revisions\/399"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tjtryon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tjtryon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tjtryon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tjtryon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}