I’m taking a break. Enterprise has been turned off for two days by now, I actually spent the whole of today laying in bed with a fan pointed at me, watching National Geographic and Discovery Channel.
I was actually planning to spend a week working on a few DIY projects. The first should have been a very simple one, just some walls for a drawer that’s too big to store stuff in it properly. My idea was to take some plywood, cut it in properly sized rectangles, then cut some slots in them so that they plug one into the other.
I was able to cut slots in two pieces, and was working on the third yesterday, when the mini-mandrel I was using started losing power. I thought it was just overheated but today when I resumed working on the slot it did the same trick, and started having a bad burning smell. I opened it to find the cables looking strangely brown. If you ever seen electrical cables burning, you know the colour.
So now I am without a mandrel to finish the job, which is quite annoying actually, as I use that when I have to fit the new plug modules in the place of the old ones (the old ones were smaller, so the tiles, in the kitchen and the bathrooms, weren’t cut exactly around the boxes).
I suppose this is what happens when you rely on cheap-o-tools. I suppose ecology (and probably economy) would be glad if I actually started buying good tools that last rather than stupid tools that break down in less than two years. Indeed the mini toolset I was using I only paid €18, while a similar set from Dremel (Bosch) is available at around €70.
The problem is that I was planning on buying a router (the powertool, not the network appliance) as I was hoping to work, this summer, on building a bookshelf. Having to replace the toolset is bad news.
So my break is going to be less bricolage-oriented than I hoped. I’ll probably read The Dragon Reborn, although I was hoping to read more society and political books (like the ones I have in my wishlist but I guess that the powertools will use the money I was hoping to use for those.
And I still have to find a way to replace Enterprise.
