Today's Pwned Republicans

You can be certain that if people who are unfamiliar with social media try to use it to their advantage, they'll #FAIL. The Republicans (the US version, not the UK's own republicans) wanted to send messages to the President, the Democratic leader of the House of Representatives and the Democratic leader of the Senate. The messages would oppose the President's healthcare law (which the Republicans have dubbed Obamacare.

Their idea was to train a webcam on a printer as people signed their petition. Each signature would trigger the printer to spew out a page opposing Obamacare, which would then be sent to the President.

You know what happened. People who signed the petition included such notables as "Weedlord Bonerhitler" and that perennial "Connie Lingus".

The Repugs are very good at perpetrating dirty tricks (such as robocalling voters to tell them that their registrations are invalid, or that their voting precinct has moved, although it hadn't) but not as good at taking them. The webcam was removed, but not before someone had captured the stream for posterior…er…posterity.

Accomplished

That's how I feel this afternoon: accomplished.

I bought this at the Good-as-New stall at St. Matthew's Community Centre this afternoon.

Yes, it's a manual coffee grinder. I got it for 50p (around 75¢ US) because Jenny (the stall person and a great soul) said that it didn't work. The handle wouldn't turn. Well, this piqued my interest and, although we have an electric coffee grinder, I wanted to be able to grind more coarsely (for percolators) than the electric grinder does.

So I got it home and quickly disassembled it. There are two screws in the bowl which hold everything together. They go through into the wooden box below and are secured by a nut.

The difficulty was simple: there is a wheel below the handle which holds the grinding mechanism at a certain depth. When this wheel is turned completely to the bottom, the handle is secured and will not turn. Loosen the wheel, and it controls how coarse or fine the grinding is. After I had disassembled the grinder, this became clear to me. Unfortunately, I then had to put it together again.

One of the nuts was close to the drawer opening in the side of the box, and that one was relatively easy to secure on the screw and tighten. The other one, unfortunately, was at the back of the drawer and behind the grinding mechanism, which juts out into the box. I could not hold the nut in such a way that I could tighten it. Every time I tried, either the nut fell out of my fingers or I could not get my fingers into the small drawer opening far enough to get the nut to turn on the screw. Curses! Foiled by my own stupidity—for if I had just loosened the wheel, I would not have had to take the entire thing apart.

How to get the nut close enough to get it to turn onto the screw so I could tighten it? I had a brainstorm.

What I did was get a long-handled flatblade screwdriver and wind sticky packing tape onto the end. I then stuck the nut to the blade and poked the screwdriver into the drawer and got it near enough to the screw (after three tries) to tighten the screw and put the grinder back together. Success!

I now have a fully operational adjustable manual coffee grinder. Success! I can now grind to percolator grind, so that I can enjoy boiled coffee like my parents and their parents used to enjoy. And for 50p, that's a real bargain. Plus, I learned something: I'm still crafty enough to put together something I took apart. At my age, that's quite an accomplishment.