Working the weekend "to do" list

Several items on the agenda this morning.  One of which is to get my van serviced.  It went over 300k recently.  Lots of miles on it, maybe a lots more are possible if I'm lucky and careful.

Second item is to attend to the list I made yesterday.

One thing I did that may not be on the list was to make a mini-filter.  It works the same way the bigger cousin worked.  I'm using a straw.  I stuff some cotton at the drain end, put in some sand, more cotton, activated charcoal, and then more cotton.  I ran some preliminary tests on it and found that it drains much too slowly.  Perhaps I didn't mention this, so I'll mention it now.  I made a filter out of my lamp about which I described in a video.  It has a long shaft too, and I'm thinking that the long shaft idea isn't going to work too well for the reason given above.

Another thing I tried was to use the drill on some dried up filter dirt from earlier water experiments.  This dirt had hardened up into some formidable type bricks that may be useful proxies for how the dirt will respond when I go out there.  The bad news is that it broke up rather badly.  If that happens out there, I won't get good holes that I'm looking for.

It may require some different kind of bit, which I looked at last night.  This is a backup plan if Plan A doesn't work.  That is, try another bit.

Reviewed plans for my next trip.  No changes made.

Here's a thought not on the list:  I went through my "home again" posts this morning.  Interesting to see how this all developed into what I'm doing now.  Actually, it is somewhat related to my list, but it is not a new feature.  Maybe it can be a new category, but there are so many of these already.

Time to move on the next thing.

Update:

The van is serviced, and now for the tent.  I put it together rather easily, or maybe not so easily because I got one point wrong.  Now I know what I did wrong, I can get it right the next time.  As for getting it up outside ( I was doing this inside my bedroom ), I will have to contend with the elements such as sun, wind, and maybe other things like how I feel.

As for the plastic bricks, not a whole lot of luck there.  Looks like I might be able to make a wall, but not the way that the thing is intended to be used.  Other configurations allowed this, but not quite in the way I wanted.

Maybe it might be better to just make the friggin' wall out of cinder block and get it over with.

Looks like I've touched base with every item on the list, except the videos, and it isn't even noon yet.

Update:

Went back and re-did the tent.  It's right this time.  This was more work than I thought, so I'd say it was a good idea that I returned to it.

Also went back and re-did the water test with distilled water as a comparison with last week's results.  There were water spots on the distilled water test too, but they were really hard to see.  The impurities may have been introduced from careless little old me.  As a point of comparison, it does show that the water obtained last week was definitely not distilled water quality and may have had significant amounts of impurities in it.  This leaves me with the thought that running it through the humidifier isn't really worth it.