Category: general

Breaking all the rules and writing in the morning.  Up early today before work and seemed like a chance to catch up on missed time last night.

Did the after-work wakeboarding thing again last night, rode a different board with different bindings this time and it was a whole different game for me.  Easier getting up, more controlled when up, and a bit more confidence because of that extra control.  Not that I’m even remotely skilled, but I sure have a good time doing it.  A little sore in the neck today from a backwards wipeout, but otherwise good.

Oh and, blog, I meant to tell you: I finally got that box of pictures mailed off to the bulk-scanning place.  The night before we left for our Fourth of July weekend getaway Sharaun and I stayed up until 1am filling the box with the pictures I lifted from my parents’ albums last time we were in Oregon and supplementing those with old print images from our own collections (OK, from her collection… I don’t have any at all of my own).  I think we crammed over a thousand photos in that box, but I’ll be able to verify that count when we get the DVD.  The DVD which, as my e-mail told me yesterday, is now on it’s way back to us with all our photos.  Talk about a fast turnaround.

I’m so excited to be getting all these pictures digitized, and hope they all came out OK.  Since the place is right here in California, I suppose it’s even possible that they could arrive today.  I’ve been thinking on the best way to share some of these images with the sounds familiar community… and have considered some kind of “flashback Friday” kinda feature where I pick one or two or whatever and write about them a little bit.  Could be fun and could also be a shot in the arm to my writing.  Just looking at them as we bundled them into the box for shipping got me excited to share and talk about them.  Yeah, maybe no one cares… but then again… I guess I don’t write for people caring.

The other night, Sharaun and I booked an impulsive weeklong vacation to Mexico with some friends.  A spur-of-the-moment decision, we sprung on the all-inclusive flight and hotel deal mainly because the prices were just too good to pass up (and we had such a good time in Mexico last time around).  And now, my eyes are glistening and distant with thoughts towards an October week on the shore.  Yeah I know it’s a ways off, but when you work vacation-to-vacation it’s something that’s always sitting in the back of your brain, y’know.  So come on October, “¡Ándale! ¡Ándale! ¡Arriba! ¡Arriba!”

Good morning.

Well internet folks, I tried; I really tried.

Over the past few days I’ve been working this deal and that deal and every other deal in between with the local Chevy and GMC dealers.  What am I trying to do?  Why, I’m trying to persuade them to let me take advantage of the government’s CARS plan (formerly known as, and written here about as, “cash for clunkers”).  “Oh yeah, how’s that going Dave,” you may ask…

From my experience while shopping these past few days, dealer awareness of the program seems poor overall, and when folks do know something it’s very hit-or-miss.  Some know about it in vague detail, some have never even heard of it, and none so far that I’ve been to know enough about it to be able to explain it as well as I can (all my knowledge coming from the website and legislation itself).  I think, were I owning a dealership, I’d make the law’s language itself mandatory reading for my sales staff, and have this  document printed for them all to have on-hand (especially the cheatsheet quick-reference table at the back).  But… that’s why I don’t run a dealership.

What’s got the dealers in such a fog, you may wonder…

See, the legislation mandates that the program went into effect yesterday, but that dealers won’t be setup with the funding/scrapping logistics until the 24th.  In other words, the deals are technically workable right now but the mechanics of how they work, from the dealer’s perspective, are undefined.  Some dealers, however, have been boastfully telling me that they’re doing C4C (my shorthand for the plan) “now” or “early.”  But, when it comes time to sit down to at the table and work the numbers, they get cold feet about fronting the $4,500 without  any real assurance from Uncle Sam that deals done prior to the official July 24 implementation will be reimbursed to them.

So, even though the sales managers are initially hot to trot and may promise the $4,500 while you’re on the lot – when they get back to the desk and realize you’ve done your homework, expect 0% APR and have GM “friends and family” pricing… they quickly realize they’re not going to make-up that $4,500 in sticker and instead recommend I wait for the “real” program.  Believe me, I’ve had three separate dealers swear to me they could give me C4C-equivalent trade-in for the Ford only to have them back out when I started talking numbers.

So, we wait.  Which is fine, although I do worry about the sweet 0% financing deals disappearing (right now they’re set to expire after the holiday weekend) and, to a lesser extent, the inventory on lot selling off.  But, I’ve waited this long… so I just need to practice some patience.  And, with the long weekend escape we have planned I think I’ll have no problems clearing my mind of all this vehicle business.  At least, here’s hoping…

Patience… patience…

Tuesday is here, and work is short this week.

Two blissfully short eight-hour days to go and then it’s off to the southern high-desert; a holy place.  You’ll find us celebrating our independence with friends in a little cabin on the floor caldera.  A fitting homage: watching fireworks from the bottom of a pit left by one of the largest volcanic events in the history of our tiny planet.

Sunday was a blistering hot day in California.  106° the weatherman said.  Hot enough to drive me back inside after only a few minutes working in the garage to hookup a new dual-zone speaker switch I got (so I can either the backyard speakers, the garage speakers, or both sets at once).  Hot enough that just standing around at 6pm as Keaton played in the park was causing the sweat to show through my salmon-colored polo.  I mean hot.

Even though today was better, it’s a good thing we got the AC fixed last week.

Friday night Sharaun and I dropped Keaton off with friends and made a date-night out of dinner and test-driving some of the top prospects in our new car hunt.  Right now, we’re pretty much bottomed-out on the GMC Acadia / Chevy Traverse – and I’ve moved into super-nerd pricing calculation phase on both, making sure we get the best combination of Obama’s stimulus, dealer incentives, and discount programs.

If I’m buying a new car, I want to steal a new car… the prospect of having car payment again after years without is daunting.  I hate debt, even the so-called “good” or “acceptable” kind.  So, if we’re taking on some financing for this vehicle, I want to make sure we can pay it off tout de suite.  I know I’ll pour cash at it, even at 0%… it just bugs me like that.

Anyway, the new car is close.

Tonight I finally took the time to box up all the old family photos I stole from my folks’ place last time we visited.  I’m sending them into a bulk photo-scanning service to get them all on a DVD for longevity (and just to have them, since the only copies, before the forthcoming, exist in my parents’ closet).  I paid for a bulk box, which I can fill to the brim with photos.  The hundreds I chose from the albums at my folks’ place filled the box about half-full, so Sharaun and I are going through a ton of her/our old photos and adding those to the mix.

When this DVD gets back… it’s gonna be a treasure trove… and oh how I bet there’ll be more than a few bits of blog fodder in there.  The goal is to send them off for processing before we leave for the extended weekend, and perhaps get them back sometime that next week.

Goodnight.

Thursday night; which means Friday in blog-time.

We went out for dinner to celebrate Kerry’s birthday, and Sharaun dropped Keaton and I off at the house so I could cover bedtime duty while she joined the others for a little afterparty.  With Keaton in bed, I have the house to myself.

As always, this means some uninterrupted music-and-computer tine.

The iPod fortuitously shuffled up a song that I absolutely adore: “Queen of Hearts” by Gregg Allman, specifically the impeccable live version from 1974’s Gregg Allman Tour record.  If you’ve never heard this song; you simply must.

[audio:02 Queen Of Hearts.mp3]

Stick with it, I know it’s long… but wait until that saxophone comes in.  Is that not passion? Tell me that doesn’t soar.  Because, it does.  It totally does.  Wives, share that one with your husbands… there’s something soulful and wanting about it that I think all men can identify.  Or, I suppose it could just be me…

And… it’s near eleven and I’m having trouble keeping my eyes open.  Goodnight.

Good evening friends.  Hope things are well with you.  Here, they are just fine.

I got the air conditioning fixed after work this afternoon (for those don’t who read daily, or catch up sequentially, check yesterday’s entry for context).

After some quick lunchtime troubleshooting with a more knowledgeable friend, we deduced that the problem must be in the power to the furnace/handler in the attic.  What a coincidence!  The power to that unit is exactly where I’d tied into power for our new ceiling fan and not finished up the wiring to snuff.  So, after a sweltering trip into the attic around five o’clock where I did some test rewires (and got a nice 120V jolt because I flipped the breaker marked “AC” instead of the one marked “furnace”), the whole thing was up and running again.

Once running, I had a few hours of complacency where I left things in simply a better-connected version of what I had rigged before (albeit still not to code and therefore technically unsafe) and enjoyed the cool air flowing from our now-functioning vents.  Then, around 9:30pm I decided that if I didn’t finish the thing tonight I might never do it.

And that’s how I found myself at the local hardware megastore a mere fifteen minutes from the shuttering of the megadoors.  I picked up the necessary work boxes to finish the thing correctly, and reluctantly climbed back into the attic around ten o’clock.

I hate working in the attic.  You can’t put your weight in a comfortable place when you’re working in the rafters (tacking wire to board every sixteen inches or so), the angles are wrong and you have no leverage when you need to hammer because the space is so cramped, and it’s hot, stuffy, and itchy from all the insulation. Seriously, I’d rather work outside on a yard any day of the week then be shut up in that claustrophobic nightmare of a crawlspace.  You can have it.

But, it’s all working again… and for that I feel some small measure of accomplishment.

So, I wrote about working in the attic, went away from the computer intending to write something more interesting to close – and then lost all intent.  Sorry.  This is what you get.

Goodnight folks.

Is it only Monday?  How the… seriously?  Because it feels like it should be a Thursday right now, for real.  Lord a’mighy; land a’Goshen…

It’s beginning to heat up in California.  A few weeks ago, on another hot day for early Spring, Sharaun called me at work and said that the air conditioning wasn’t coming on.  Now, usually, when she calls with these kinds of “problems,” I shrug them off and recommend a few troubleshooting tips.  “Did you check the settings?,” I asked.  She had.  “Is it on ‘auto’ and in the ‘cool’ position?”  It was.  OK, so, the easy stuff down… I pointed her to the fusebox outside.  She checked, nothing amiss.

With no fuses tripped, I realized I’d pretty much walked through the extent of my AC debugging skills right over the phone, and, instead of the usual, “I’ll take a look when I get home,” I said something like, “Well, the AC is one of our most important appliances, you should go ahead and look up who to call and get a guy out there to look at it.”  As I hung up I had daymares about what might be wrong with the system, from the simple to the complex, and what it might cost to fix.  About five minutes later, however, Sharaun IM’d me to tell me the unit just kicked on.  Whew… maybe just an unusual delay.

And, I forgot about it.

Then, tonight, it did the same thing… right in front of my eyes.  In fact, after mucking around with the thermostat controls on the wall, to my dismay I realized the unit wasn’t even kicking on when I set the fan to the “on” position.  Not even after leaving it that way for a while, either. So, two strikes for the AC… something’s afoot.  Now… here’s why I’m worried.

Several months ago, I got all Bob Vila and decided to install a ceiling fan in the living room.  Shockingly, things went very well and the fan went quickly and easily.  At the time, I was quite proud.  Well, except for one little bit of “finishing:”  I tied the fan’s power into the AC and heating unit’s line in the attic, but I fudged the workbox for the new wiring junction (didn’t leave myself enough slack when cutting and splicing in the new line, a common novice mistake, I’m told).  Not wanting to make two more cuts and splice in a new section of wire that night, I left the spliced section just hanging in the unclosed workbox, and didn’t re-tack the wires to the rafters per code.

And, of course, despite my best intentions, that’s the way the wiring still sits up there today. Now, I have to wonder… is my lazy connection iffy?  Could the limp wires be tugging on the unsecured wire-nutted connection and causing some kind of intermittent power loss to the AC unit?  The fan works consistently, so you’d think not – but still, the timely seeming “failure” of the AC worries me.  Worse, if my connection is dodgy, in addition to being inherently unsafe to begin with, I’m worried it could start a fire.

So, this week it’s into the attic I go to repair the connection properly – giving me some peace of mind and eliminating it as a potential source of failure for the AC.  Wish me luck.

OK, let’s talk about Obama…

Looks like the “cash for clunkers” plan has been rebranded as the “Car Allowance Rebate System” and even has a fancy new website for the curious.  And, as things get more real every day, I’ve been spending some time thinking about what kind of bumper sticker might look nice on my new Obama-financed vehicle.  Tonight, I did some quick mockups in Inkscape just to get a feel for them.  Imagine us in a new car riding around town with one of these babies stuck to the back:

Not bad, but needs a little color…

Eh… the logo is too temporal and will be obscure and forgotten before the funny fades…

Oh yeah, that last one is definitely my favorite.

That was fun.

Oh, and it looks like the administration either finally got around to, or caved to “broken campaign promise” pressure, implementing a national website giving us plebs five days to review any bill passed by Congress before the president signs it into law.  A step in the right “de-mystification” direction, to be sure, although ultimately I question 1) who will care, 2) who is gonna look at the feedback that pours in, and 3) how effective is five days for the public to rally against something anyway.

Well, that’s it for tonight… turned out to be wordy and media-rich.  Who would’ve known.

Goodnight.

Monday again, and it’s always sad to see another weekend go. I’ve been suffering from a semi-permanent yen for non-working days lately, something that hits me every now and again and fades with time (and time off). This too shall pass.

For Father’s Day I did two things I’ve been wanting to do for near a month now: cleaned out and organized the garage, and put the finishing touches on the landscape lighting I installed a couple months ago. You may say those sound like odd things to want for Father’s Day, but having been out of town for three weekends straight it really was what I wanted to do.

So, I put Long John Silver, Baron von Tollbooth and the Chrome Nun, Spitfire, Red Octopus, Blows Against the Empire, Bark, Dragon Fly, and Sunfighter into an “on the go” playlist on the iPod and set to work (props to those who understood the connection between those records without having to look-up the artists).

… is it sacrilege to say that pre-Earth Starship was better than, or at least as good as, Airplane ever was? Anyway…

As the mega-mix of those awesome records washed over me, I hung bikes from rafters, organized the hiking gear shelf, buried low-voltage wiring under mulch, and in general got the lead out of my long-time-wasting duties. I had, at the end of it all, intended to go for a bike ride to get some exercise… but instead I’m sitting here typing about it. In the end, I opted for a half hour or so swinging shirtless in the hammock with Keaton. We listened to more music and enjoyed the evening sunshine. Then before bedtime we all three walked down to the frozen yogurt place and had a little Father’s Day treat to cap the day.

Good stuff.

Saturday we made a pilgrimage down south to see Anthony’s long-lost daughter, who had been studying abroad for the past year. Keaton got to go swimming, eat fruit salad, and play with big cows and baby cows. Sharaun and I carpooled down with Ben and Suzy, and the ride was better than driving (thanks guys). It was fun seeing Anthony’s daughter again, and a personal relief for me, as the father of a girl myself, that, despite having aged a year abroad, she still seems not that far off from the eight year-old she was when we first met her. Here’s hoping Keaton can weather her teens as well.

And, with that… goodnight internetizens.