Christmas

Fixing Up Our Christmas Present

Neither of us had any presents under the Christmas tree (which we don’t have anyway) this year because all that kind of money is going into furnishing and resupplying the one big shared present, 1025 Pacific Terrace.

The last owners of our new home were only in it for 2 years. I’m mildly curious as to why, but whatever. In those two years I don’t think they ever really cleaned. They must have done some sort of quick clean before they left because the place was habitable when we moved in, but a deep clean, not so much. We are on our second box of Swiffer cloths removing dust and cobwebs from nooks and crannies in every room. We are also on our second container of Clorox wipes removing various stains and dirt spots from the walls and ceilings. In the Master Bathroom there were lots of black hairs stuck to the walls and ceiling from the previous owner blow drying her hair.

I have replaced between 15 and 20 light bulbs throughout the house. I don’t know what the reason, to conserve energy or just plain laziness. I betting it was mostly the later because there was a burnt out bulb in almost every 2-light fixture. The light on the front and back porches had bulbs, but the one on the pole in the front lawn for the stairs didn’t. The light in the bottom of the microwave that illuminates the stove top was out. The light on the garage door opener was burnt out and this was vexing because the garage is really dark when we get out of the car at night.

On Christmas Eve I decided to replace the bulb in the garage door opener. It worked fine using the wall switch, but when the garage door would go up and down the light would flicker like a strobe light. I opened up the light compartment again and noticed the the bulb socket was held in place by some tabs, thinking maybe it was loose wire I pressed the tabs and pulled the socket out from the opener body. FLASH! CRACK! It was a loose wire and when I pulled the socket out the two wires touched and shorted out. Now we have to manually open and close the door until I can find someone to install a new garage opener.

I don’t think the previous owners used the two car garage for cars. I have been sweeping out dust and cobwebs from all over in there too. There was a long bench along one side of the garage that I decided to take apart today to make room for the imminent arrival of the Miata (supposed to be sometime this week.) This thing is big, about 2 feet wide and 8 feet long. Sturdy too, it is made up of 2x4s and half 1/2 plywood screwed together with deck screws. There are about a a dozen nails in one end. I figure whoever made it started hammering it together and realizing that that would be an awful lot of work, then switch to screws. I was about 90% through disassembling it when I accidentally stepped on a nice long nail. OUCH! Went right through the sole of the sneaker, my sock and probably a 1/2″ into my foot. Direct pressure stopped the bleeding after about 5 minutes. Thought it might be a good idea to go to the Emergency Room , but then thought of the cost, so just cleaned it out with some alcohol and dressed with a band aid and some polysporin. I’ll try and get a doctor to give me a tetanus shot tomorrow even though the nail was clean and shiny having spent who knows how long inside that 2×4…

I think I need to reassess my handyman qualifications…

Its That Time Of Year

Please accept – with no obligation, implied or implicit – my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable tradition of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your preference.

In addition, please enjoy a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2020.

Its That Time Of Year

Please accept – with no obligation, implied or implicit – my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable tradition of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your preference.

In addition, please enjoy a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2019.

Christmas Presents

We have been busy doing our part for Christmas commercialism this past week by filling our stockings with stuff.

1. Last Wednesday I noticed a very low left rear tire. I noticed it because all of a sudden I was bottoming out on my own personal speed bump again. The other 3 tires were at 24 p.s.i. and the left rear was half that. I backed the car out of the garage, jacked up the left side, removed the rear tire and found a nail head visible in the center of the tread area.

Initially I though to take it to a local independent tire store and have them put a plug in it, but dismissed that idea when I saw how shallow the tread depth was. The tire was worn pretty good, probably a few hundred mile until they reached the wear bars. Plus the inside of all the tires were way worn, probably from the more aggressive alignment from Panic Motorsports when they put on the new shocks and springs last year. It was time for a new set of tires and a more stock alignment.

Ordered another set of Toyo Proxies R1R‘s from TireRack and had them drop shipped to Aiken Discount Tire. By Friday at lunch the CTBNL was back in the garage on fresh rubber.

2. Over the weekend the 8-year Dell PC was acting all sluggish. I tried several clean-up operations without much success. Overnight I copied all our important documents off the main hard drive to the large 2TB secondary drive. On Monday the plan was to plug in an older 250GB drive that used to be the main drive in its spot and reload windows, but that fell through after the PC would not restart after turning it off.

This failure to restart has been an issue after an unplanned power failure several years ago. This is why we never turn the PC off, we’d shut the display off and walk away. On the occasional time I did have to turn it off for maintenance, and if it didn’t turn back on, I could coax it on, by holding the power button in, pulling the power cord and plugging the cord back in. When this problem first cropped up, I swapped out a power supply I had borrowed from the Valve Store and that didn’t solve the issue, so I figured this was a motherboard issue and decided it was time to replace the PC.

Because we live in a technological wasteland, if you need a PC in a day you have very few options. First up was the Staples right around the corner. I went online and found something that I thought would work, there was one in stock, so I put it on the charge card for in store pickup. When we got it home and I opened the box I realized it was a slim tower with no room to add my second hard drive. Back to the store it went. A quarter mile down the road was a Walmart, we peeked in there and nothing was on the shelf that would work.

We were headed to Augusta later in the evening for dinner out with friends, so we figured a visit to Best Buy was in order. So instead of dealing with actual people I did the same thing there as I did at Staples, online order for in store pickup. I’ve spent the last couple days uninstalling the multitudes of HP branded software crap and reloading all the programs I do use onto the new Pavilion 590-P0054.

It was not all dull and unexciting gifts though…

3. We dropped into Academy Sports and bought Donna a couple new pairs of Fila Memory Threshold athletic shoes.

4. And I went online to Amazon and bought some new boxer briefs. 🙂

Chag Sameach1

The President-Elect has decided we will return to saying Merry Christmas at this time of year and with 70% of Americans identifying as Christians it is a pretty safe bet, so next year it’ll be nothing but Merry Christmas all the time around here. So for now I’ll trot out my favorite all purpose seasonal missive one last time and a little something for the other 30%:

Please accept – with no obligation, implied or implicit – my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable tradition of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your preference.

In addition, please enjoy a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2017.

1. The Hebrew equivalent of Happy Holidays, literally “joyous festival.”

Christmas Lights in Hopelands Gardens

Tired of merely walking the 1-1/2 miles up to see the lights in Hopelands Gardens and back, last night we decided to walk the 3miles to downtown for pizza at Mellow Mushroom before swinging by the lights on the way home.

Backup Man With A Backup Plan

“Don’t try to frighten us with your sorcerer’s ways, Lord Vader. Your sad devotion to that ancient religion has not helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes, or given you clairvoyance enough to find the Rebel’s hidden fort…” – Admiral Conan Antonio Motti

The Valve Store has actually hired a real IT Guy1 a couple months ago, so I am back to being just a back-up. And right now my only actual duties when the primary IT Guy is off is to change the backup tape every day in the server room2. Occasionally I get called upon hand out a cable or go lay hands on an ill PC, but the tape is really it. I remove the previous night’s tape and put in the current day’s, then take the used tape over to the main entrance door and hand it to the Security Guard (where later he gives it to a courier for off-site storage.) The highlight of this duty is to make up something different to say about the contents of the tape: “Just fast forward to the hour and 15 minute mark because that is where all the nudity is.” or “Don’t let Congress get a hold of this, its got all of Hillary’s emails on it.”

Unless you have been out west protesting an oil pipeline for the last 2 months or so you probably know there is a new Star Wars movie coming out. Well, over Thanksgiving week while the real IT Guy was on vacation I thought it would be cool to make a label for Friday’s tape referencing the supposed plot of Rouge One. That way when he pulls out the tape on Monday to swap them, he’d notice my little Easter Egg and get a smile. Trouble was, because I wouldn’t be in on that Friday, the guard was going to do the swapping and I didn’t want to take a chance he’d notice the different label, not get it, and call somebody because of the “error.” So I didn’t do it.

But last week I got a second chance. The IT Guy had to visit a sister plant for a project and would be gone from Tuesday through the end of the week. Friday afternoon I scoured the internet for a Galactic Empire logo and I also found out that the “Death Star” had a real name – Orbital Battle Station. I made a label just a touch smaller than, and used a glue stick to paste it over, the existing one on the tape.

Monday morning I heard the IT Guy get paged a half dozen times in the first hour by at least 4 different people, so I knew he was hopping around like a one-armed paper hanger. Around mid-morning I finally stopped in for a visit and asked him how the visit went and updated him on any IT problems that arose. I then asked if he had changed the tape yet. “Yep” “Did you notice anything different? Like the label?” “Yeah,” he replied, “I thought the storage site messed up somehow and just put the tape in the box and sent it off.” He totally missed my joke…sigh.

1. His name is Matt Somethingorother, but I like IT Guy better. And besides it gives him a bit of anonymity. The previous fellow’s real name was John Smith, but that’s got the anonymity built right in.
2. This is what the new IT Guy calls it because that is where our plant’s servers are. John and I always referred to it as the computer room because it was purpose built to hold the AS400 mini-mainframe we were supposed to get.