Status: Today has not gone at all according to plan. Tonight was supposed to be a public "star party" at a local state park, hosted by the local astronomical society. I was signed up to be one of the astronomical society volunteers hosting the party. I was going to take my telescope and camera. I need to finish a bracket to attach the camera to the telescope.
I have an adapter to attach the camera to the telescope's eyepiece, but it puts the entire weight of the camera on the telescope's focusing tube, which really isn't designed to support that much weight. I'm machining an aluminum bracket to support the camera. Due to the small size of my milling machine, this is more complicated than it would be with a bigger mill, Drilling and tapping the holes for the screws to assemble the two pieces of the bracket can't be done with the mill at all; the piece of aluminum is just too tall. I have to drill those holes with my (mini) drill press. To do that, I have to build a fixture to hold the aluminum plate on its edge, perpendicular to the drill press's base, and clamp that to the base so I can keep it aligned with where the holes need to be drilled while I slide the workpiece to the next hole. I.e., the fixture keeps the holes aligned with the center of the thickness of the plate, while I manually position the relatively noncritical length axis.
All this took rather longer than I planned, but I was finally ready to drill the holes in the aluminum. The drill press, however, was not. My drill press uses these belts.
AFACT, they really don't like being stored in the hot Texas summer. Or something. When the original belt gave out, the first replacement lasted a reasonable length of them, but when it gave out, I went through the other belts I bought at the same time in rapid succession. I went through three belts today; I didn't even finish the first of the 6 holes I need to drill.
I ordered more, but they won't be here until late next week, at the earliest. And I just realized I didn't buy enough of them. I bought 5 last time, and for some reason I thought they came in packages of 5, so I ordered 2. However, they don't; they're sold individually, so I bought only 2 belts, not the 2 5-packs I thought I was getting. I need to order more right away, because those 2 may not last long at all.
So I couldn't finish the bracket, and can't until at least next week.
However, it doesn't matter that I didn't get it finished for this evening. Tonight's star party was canceled due to cloudy skies. This was not entirely unexpected, as the weather forecast was very unpromising, but we were hoping there'd be enough gaps between the clouds to see something, even if it was rather limited. But no. And I got word of the cancellation late. I was told that if it was going to be canceled, email would be sent by 14:00, but I wasn't notified until after 15:00, by which time I was at Home Depot buying parts to make the tooling to make the bracket. (This was before the drill press belts broke.) And of course I forgot something else (unrelated) I needed there, so I'll have to make another trip.