PEACE AMONGST RUBBISH

First off... VICTORY! I've got both the A/C blowers working in my 
Jag for the first time since I bought it six or seven years ago. On 
the second one (which looks to have been a replacement unit) it 
turned out, as expected, that the transistor driving the motor on 
the low and medium speed settings had blown. Except it wasn't kind 
enough to completely blow, but just have too much resistance, so I 
had to mess around checking other connections thinking the 
resistance might have been somewhere else. It turns out that 
amongst all my stocks of high-power transistors I didn't actually 
have any darlingtons in TO-3 package, so I ended up building the 
darlington circuit from the datasheet using two transistors, which 
at least meant I could use one of the incredible 60A 250V power 
transistors that I picked up very cheap years ago. Then because I 
thought I should be able to omit the first internal resistor from 
the original part's darlington circuit I managed to completely 
confuse the motor controller and it played dead for quite a while I 
said various swear words. I still don't know what was going on 
there, the controller has some sort of feed-back system I think. 
Anyway, that was the easy bit, the hard part again was getting the 
thing back in place, deep as you can get into and above the 
driver's foot well. Still not nearly as bad as getting the 
passenger one in though, even though I had to do most of it lying 
upside-down through the door, bumping my head on the brake pedal. 
Another little nest of about eight relays over that side as well, 
for good measure. At least I think wrestling these things in and 
out of place has built up my arm muscles a bit.

So I was never more glad to feel warm air on my feet when I drove 
over to the city of Geelong where, among other things, I made a 
visit to the "tip shop" at the transfer station. Yeah I know, I 
take this fancy car to all the most glamorous places :). Anyway, 
after finding a park amongst vans and battered hatchbacks on the 
strip of dirt behind the ramp for the rubbish skips, I went in and 
had a look at all the neat stuff that people had thrown away since 
however many months/years since my last visit (I don't like driving 
through city traffic, so I rarely get over to that area). The 
council website still said that they had the number of people 
allowed inside limited to four and other social distancing rules, 
but unsurprisingly that all seemed long gone and there were quite a 
few people wandering about. I picked up a arm-load of stuff - six 
not-too-badly-scratched DVDs to substitute for the loss of my usual 
local op-shop intake since it burnt down, a pack of nuts and 
washers, one of those round IDE cables still in its packet, a few 
giant syringes of which they had hundreds and must be handy for 
something, etc...

But the spot I want to talk about is right at the back of the long 
old shed which makes up the indoor area of this tip shop. It's 
beyond the point where most people walk and the door is 
half-disguised by a row of shelves along the wall that you approach 
from, half filled with more DVDs and a scattering of varous music 
mediums. Above it is written in permanent marker:

   all
books $[2]

Where [2] is the spot where someone has stuck a little square of 
paper over the number that was there before (1, I'm pretty sure, 
because that's still what's written on the shelves inside, where it 
hasn't worn off). The rectangular room that it opens into from the 
side was obviously an office from when the place was a factory, or 
possibly an earlier incarnation of the transfer station. It's 
comfortably small compared to the expanse of the rest of the space, 
light coming in along a narrow window just below the ceiling along 
the exterior wall, necessarily supplimented by an old florescent 
light in the middle. A steel pipe runs along the same wall, 
slightly offset, just passing through for some purpose probably 
long forgotten. There is a mix and match of various old half-height 
domestic bookcases along all the walls except the end opposite from 
which you enter, where there's an old chair and a wheelie bin with 
a sign requesting "no food scraps". Behind are some dated 
reading-related posters and some little quotes written on paper 
with permanent marker. One went something like "When you watch TV 
you see the future, when you read a book you travel through time". 
There are a couple of plush stool things placed in the middle of 
the room, looking rather obviously out of a skip but not so much 
you wouldn't sit on them. It's just nice in there, like some quiet 
little nook within the big busy city, little discovered yet somehow 
slightly cared about. Really I don't know who does care for it 
because the tip shop is run by the normal blokes who work at the 
transfer station, haggling hard with people over the price of a 
rusty lawn mower (they seem to have generally given up on marked 
prices at this place, you just go up to the counter and see what 
they say). With all due respect, they don't really seem like the 
bookworm types. Still there it is, and I feel like I could stay 
there for hours, poking through incomplete sets of encyclopaedias, 
travel guides, and cheap paperback novels. Honestly most of the 
books there aren't much good, especially for me as I don't really 
read fiction. Last time I did find an old university chemistry 
textbook from the 80s and (surprisingly) a very practical general 
engineering textbook from 1942, but nothing at all this time. It's 
the nicest bookstore, with the worst books. But it's just peaceful 
there somehow, amongst the rubbish.

 - The Free Thinker