I’m happy to announce that Tammy and I have done our income tax returns. 🎉🍻 Not as big a refund as last year, but still welcome. Again, we used SimpleTax. It’s just really easy to do a joint return with it.
The other big news is I have successfully rehabilitated the typewriter that Tammy found in winter 2016 (February 8th, to be precise). She texted me these pictures on her way to work:
“Strange things you find in the snow,” she said. She went and got it at lunchtime and then brought it home. It was a bit of a basket case, but basically still operational.
From then until now, it was just a brown case getting in the way in the garage. Other than popping the case open to see it, I didn’t have the time to consider what to do with it. It is an Alpina SK24 from 1957. That makes it two years older than my Smith-Corona Galaxie, and five years older than my Underwood.
On Friday, when I was getting the top box onto the Tiguan to go the Nakiska, I had to move the case out of the way again. Mentally, I resolved to either fix it or get rid of it. On Saturday, I stopped by Rona and got a can of paint and a ball peen hammer and that afternoon I got to work. Taking it out of the case, I was met with grime, rust and dents.
I took it apart, removing the carriage and the case. Soapy water helped things a lot.
Then it was doing my best to get rid of the rust and dents before starting to hot rod it.
It took a bit of time yesterday and today to get it back together, but I did it. I lubricated the typebars and everything is now working. No left over screws. I put a fresh ribbon in it and it types well. It needs a slight adjustment because the tops of the letter imprints are lighter than the bottom, but that’s not a big deal. It types pretty well, considering it was a basket case and left for dead in the snow.
I’m pretty darn proud of myself right now.
Well done Simon!!! It feels good when you do something like that and stand back and say “not bad at all”.