Thursday, February 5, 2026
Breakfast: leftover frittata with leftover roasted potatoes, hot water. Troubleshot problems with mail delivery. Reconfigured email spam filters to no longer delete things automatically. Lunch: leftover farfalle with broccoli with marinara sauce, hot water. In the past few months I had a very hard time trying to resolve a problem with our two perforated sidewalk drainage gates. I had found that the gates did not have screws holding them down. Upon inspection long ago I discovered that on one of the gates the screw had a broken head. On the other gate, a portion of the bottom part of the gate and the concrete portion that held it up had broken away completely. For the first gate I had tried a screw extractor, but that did not work at all, even when letting WD-40 sit in the area for an hour, even trying to use heat from a kitchen torch to expand the metal elements to loosen them from each other. For the second gate, I knew how to use SteelStik to restore the portion needed underneath, but I didn't know how to set a new tap for the screw. So for a long time I did not know how to resolve this. But recently I realized that I can set very powerful magnets underneath the gate with SteelStik or similar, so I did that today. The fix seems to be successful. It's very hard to remove with just my fingers, but a flathead screwdriver makes it much easier. I was worried that the magnets would simply break through the hardened SteelStik, but they did not. Gathered tax documents and discussed with Patrick. Dinner at home with Patrick: tempura and butterfly shrimp with soy dipping sauce, leftover steamed rice, and steamed broccoli and carrots, hot water. We watched and enjoyed Roma on Netflix. Patrick went to bed.