SwampNut

I know many of you will be more interested in the latter, but I'm more interested in how life-changing this has been for me, and for many others. The fact that they are "gouging" has to be measured against the immense effort to create it, and how much value it provides to society. What is it? Tirzepatide, brand name Mounjaro. It's a GLP-1 and GIP agonist, the first of its kind ever, with stunning results. What does this mean? It stabilizes blood sugar for type 2 diabetics, or like me, pre-diabetics. I don't have diabetes, but I also don't have fully normal/stable blood sugar. It's been an ongoing challenge. I also didn't know how much this factored into many other parts of health and life. It does it through multiple mechanisms; better insulin response, and slowed gastric emptying. If your food moves slower, you absorb it slower, and eat less of it. Mounjaro has a retail price of $1044 per month. Notice I said per month, not for any given quantity. This is the game I'm beating. It's sold in a pen injector, which delivers the entire thing in a quick subcutaneous shot. The pens come in milligram doses of 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, and 15. Each is in a 0.5ml suspension. The price is the same. That's right, you pay the same to be "fixed" no matter the dosage. It is recommended to start at 2.5 weekly, and move up to 5 in four weeks. Then see how the results are and probably, but not always, continue moving up. I did none of that. After many many hours of research, I decided on a new course. Also, I had not realized that the pens were all the same price, and had no idea I could defeat them. See, I was prescribed the 2.5 dose, and even with a coupon and insurance, my price would be $750 per month. Motherfucker. My searching and reading led me to various sources of a generic version of the drug, which is not legal of course, so that also made me happy. Beating two systems at once? Cool. I started buying a dry powder version and reconstituting it myself, and just self injecting with a normal insulin needle. I paid $150 for 5mg at first, to see how it worked. That would still be expensive. The results were pretty much a miracle, I'll get to that later. Once I new I wanted more, I shopped harder and found a few other sources. One was $100 per 10mg vial, from a US vendor. They delivered in a few days. The other is in China, $490 for ten vials of 10mg, but delivery is a month-ish. Some people get it faster, some slower. So anyway, I've been using various vendors of the dry powder. Meanwhile, I learn about the game of the pens all being the same price. So it would be $750 for the four pens of 2.5, or for the four pens of 15. LOL, ok, I can see how to beat this. Inject the pen into a sterile vial, instead of my skin, and dispense from there. Too easy. Also feeds my love of hacking systems. Along with this, my reading led to the knowledge that the half-life of the drug is only 117 hours, so just under five days. The once a week recommendation from the manufacturer? Marketing, and ease of use for morons. It would be too hard to get patient compliance for dosing every 3, 4, or 5 days. And marketing "only once a week!" has a lot more power. Motherfuckers. So, I started on the dry powder at a rate of 2.5mg per three days. This is way more than a recommended starting dose. "Carlos, you moron, you're playing with your life and you think you know better than the doctors?" Nah, my doc said it's perfectly fine, but that I will feel shitty. The low recommendation is based on--marketing and patience acceptance. If you get hit with major side effects you may hate it and/or stop. So they start you on light side effect, but for longer. Fuck that bullshit. Rip the band-aid off. Give me all the problems hard, now, and get it over with. Also, I don't want the ups and downs of a weekly dose. I got a spreadsheet showing the blood accumulation levels, and ran calculations on what would get me to a therapeutic dose the fastest, and be maintainable. Again, doc says, you're not gonna die, roll with it. Actually he said "I can't advise you to ignore the recommendations, but you'll be fine." So my blood sugar is super stable. I went from hitting 160-some regularly and peaks of 190+ to never hitting 130 at all (which is the normal max). I went from a waking level of 105 (pre-diabetic level) to being in the 70s and 80s. They consider 100 to be pre-diabetic, and below 90 to be ideal. So cool, how does this change your life? Well, I'm suddenly sleeping all night. I'm suddenly full of energy most days, and have few energy drops that I had lived with and considered normal. And then, one day...a friend makes a comment that makes me realize that the tinnitus I was left with after COVID, is gone. And along with it the recurrent inner ear imbalance shit. This drug is implicated in a shitload of inflammatory issues and auto-immune issues being resolved. It's a possible treatment for MS and related disorders. Diabetes is an autoimmune disorder too (for those who are very aware of T1/T2 differences, new research says T2 probably is too). Blood sugar problems have a shitload of other effects, and they are all gone. The overall impact of the totality of the problem was hidden from me until they were gone. I'm not exaggerating when I say that it's massively life changing, in so many completely unpredictable ways, fixing things I've taken for granted for decades. I had this conversation with the guys at MotoGP; one of their wives has been taking it, and they say "life changing" is an under-exaggeration. Also MotoGP pointed out all my resolved issues. I got up way early, drove an hour, walked 8.1 miles through the entire day, drove an hour, sat around bullshitting, and was the last one ready for bed, at 2am. Got up at 7, drove an hour, only walked six miles this time, drove a couple hours for various reasons, and again last one to be tired. A side problem of diabetes is frequent urination, and being thirsty all the time, even while drinking lots of water. That would suck at the track, and driving a lot. But those things are gone. Done. A side effect of slowed gastric emptying is eating less. Being forced to eat less. Had to learn this. But great, eating more rationally is good. I learned I had extremely fast emptying, which led to never feeling full. The brain connection was fucked. It also means drinking less, including alcohol, and it has a very reduced effect. Wouldn't you want to drink more? Nope, the opposite. And then I find myself thinking, why are all my friends fucking drunk? Anyway, there's the long story. I still have more powder, and now I have my pens. I want to experiment with the real thing to build a baseline of expectations. I'm 90% sure one of the vendors is fucking me on overall potency/amount. But the way to know is to do the pens for a while, and then the dry, and compare results. I'm wearing a constant glucose monitor so every minute is tracked. And that was another pharma game to play, but this is already long enough.

Ok, cool, I'll make my storage exactly 20" wide, that's an easy number to work with too. Let's install it. Wait, what the fuck? I am off by 1/4" on size so it won't fit? Not possible, I'm not perfect, but I get things down to 1/16th or better every time. Motherfucker. Also, the shelf is not just warped from time, but was installed all wonky. Shims it is.

Fuck you, you fuckin' fuck. Yeah, cleaning is always hampered by this. Same with wood scraps. I did yet another office IT decommissioning today, customer gave me a small folding table that will be great for setting up parts/hand tools anywhere in the shop, and a medium plastic drawer storage thing that will fit great in my cabinets or on top of a tool. That office building was a ghost town.

I'm fine, I always smoke a cigar and drink a beer while I do it. The label says that eating, smoking, and drinking during the application are prohibited. I only do two of them. I'm good. I skim the 50 pages of dilution rules, key on the biggest one, and then a little more to be sure.

I had a pulley system for the ceiling, intended to hang bicycles. I got it to hang something else, then changed the plan. It sat around for a while. During the Sunday cleaning, I put the whole thing in the trash. Yes, that's right, two days before big brain idea time, I tossed the parts that would make it possible. Your idea also reminded me of this neat little cubby and drawer thing I had built a very long time ago. Then it wasn't needed and sat around for a while. That's right, tossed it a month ago. But that's all fine, it made me build something perfect for one of the spaces inside the cabinet, and to house the Container Store clear plastic bins that are like $3. Partly from your idea, and partly because I have some of those in use already in the other garage for the reloading stuff. Upside down here.

Huh...or opposite, and pull down from the ceiling. Hmm. The corner could accommodate tall and narrow, and since I rarely need to get to that hardware, it wouldn't be annoying. I'm pretty much out of wall space, and cabinets are not stuffed but not really super empty. Ceiling space and the corner though...

"Worst case scenario, we just end up farther out in the channel and have to drive longer." I'll let Oscar fill in more if he wants.

Oh. Oh no.

Found the hinges. Cleaned a lot, rearranged a "dead" corner. (Place where things land by default and just clutter.) I know this pic means little if you weren't here, but it's a nice change and makes the corner more usable for tools that sort of stay where they are mostly, but need to come out sometimes. Also air cleaner and water softener can just live there. I need to get things like hinges, knobs, and dozens of other misc hardware out of a bin and into...something. I need a way to organize them so they can be found. But they are too big for most organizer things (or the bag of them is, even if singles aren't). So, that's a project.

I thought that was locally regulated, not national? Or maybe, here's the regs unless locals want it different? When I looked into it the local one was something like four pounds max. LOL, that's like half of a shipment.

Nothing lives in my yard. These are here because they fly in, and it's only late in the day, the lights are clearly attracting them. There's no way it can be that hard to kill everything with today's chemicals. That TalstarP might as well be nukes. Perhaps the pros follow the label guidelines, while I may be a bit more liberal with my mix ratios and application rate.

Is this motherfucker staring me down and giving me the finger?

I went through that with duplicate tools over time. When I rearranged, I was forced to find everything, and then to mentally catalog everything. I'm feeling like I'm slipping back to lost things. The other day I went to find a hinge I swear I should have, but didn't find it. So for me, organizing is positive. I'd also bet I have several cubic feet of absolutely unnecessary shit. It's hard to find the line between hoarding and saving. Ok, now I'm talked into it.

It's not worth the cost, to me. I've been doing it myself for as long as we've lived here, minus one visit to fill the tubes. And then they insisted that my call for one visit entered me into an "unspoken" one year contract. Yah, nah. I think what you missed is that I said these are flying in, we don't have any crawling things left because I spray the fuck out of the property regularly. There is no way you could live here and not spray regularly. You'd be eaten by scorpions. Battery powered backpack sprayer and these... Which BTW, I learned should be kept indoors in most places. They cannot get hot, or freeze, or even close to freezing is bad. And temp change is bad. I love and recommend this sprayer. And this for spot mosquito control for outside gatherings.

Back on topic, I think I might have a happy home for the vac-sys bases without changing connectors around. I will see. I had to re-think a long-standing storage habit. Also I built a new storage drawer. I made the storage drawer to solve the problem of the big bases being in the way of things on the assembly bench (work other than clamping). While making it, since the bases were in my way I got an auxiliary table to clamp down the new work. I clamped the new work to another table because the vacuum clamps were in the way. LOL. This hasn't worked into my mental habits yet. Change is good, I should re-arrange the shop based on new info and changed tools.

Yeah, it's super hard to search for this thing because Festool is well known for their dust extraction systems. Now, they don't call it a "vacuum," they say "dust extraction system." It's also quite glorious, in how it works with the tools, and is so quiet. You leave a cord from the vac to the tool hooked to the hose. Which is conical by the way, fucking weird, but they say it's way more effective. You unplug the power from the tool end, to swap tools. The vac powers on when you power on the tool. It has a Bluetooth button to manually start it with no tool or a non-system cordless tool. With a Festool BT tool, it signals the vac to start and stop. The Festool Sustainer cases connect to each other for site work. I don't need that, but it's also nice to stack them in the shop. You can open a middle box without unstacking, assuming you can support the tilted weight.

Our local regs for black powder say a 1" wood cabinet of any kind, NOT metal and not sealed. To prevent it being a bomb. I have 3/4" cabinets, will have to do.

I have a lot of insect-killing wood, but also basics like Maple which they love. And of course generic construction pine. Today I did full retard and filled the garages with about half of what I normally use for the entire property. Mixed at 50% extra. I'm 90% sure they are simply flying in, as that's their breeding stage. But just to be sure.

I should have also asked this question. Anyone have experience with a DIY solution for the in-wall pest control tubes? The pros I talked to all insisted on lengthy monthly contracts that are all inclusive. I'm very happy with handling my perimeter and spot spraying on my own. It's not even a job I dislike. But I'd like to also leverage the tubes (Traex/HomeTeam). I see adapters and various DIY pumping methods.

I have a similar one in the yard blower. Which I never use and should sell/give away. Anyway it's always worked great, smells great, and seems to have infinite life. Also, great to see that you keep the fuel next to the black powder. You wouldn't want a SMALL explosion.

Suddenly the word got out that my shop is a free buffet, and I see them fly in a lot. I spray the perimeter of the house and much of the yard, looks like I need to go full retard on the spray in the garage too.

Wow, that's a hell of a lot of shocks.

All useful thoughts, for sure. They are arrows, but I think they mean "release like this" and not the air flow direction. Not sure what you're thinking about filters, but this vac system is purely to clamp things on the bases, not working with dust or chemicals. Vacuum is supplied to these bases, so that wood is held to them magically. The bases also use the vacuum to clamp themselves to the table. There's just one little filter like a fuel filter to keep dust out of the pump. There will never be significant material/vapor flowing through the system. Oddly the fittings are all "high flow Euro style" but I'm not sure that a lot of air is flowing. I think the pump is like 1CFM, or so.

The red/white/black really works for me. Maybe I need a new project......