sounds familiar

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.

You guys came back!  Cool.

Thursday night in our living room right now, and I cut the air Sharaun’s been running all day.  And now, I’m too proud to admit that it’s hot in here and I’d actually be more comfortable with the air on, because of the big stink I made about it “being nice outside” and “not wasting money.”  So, we swelter.

Today was a good day.  We had an “offsite” at work, where the troops all get together at the lake and barbecue chicken and hot dogs and hamburgers and whatnot.  I was in charge of chicken, and it came out well.  Then, around 10pm Jeff texted me to share that the Senate had passed the Cash for Clunkers legislation I’ve been waiting on (read more here and here).

In an attempt to figure out which version of the bill actually passed, I contacted a “connected” friend via some late-night IMing, and she was able to help me find the final approved language on Thomas here. Luckily for me, the House version I blogged about before is the language that passed the Senate  – and that means we’re eligible for $4,500 for the busted Ford, as long as our new vehicle averages 19MPG or better (and yes, I already have an Excel spreadsheet).

Additionally, one of my favorite bits in the text reads, “Combination with other incentives permitted.”  Hear that?  “Permitted!”  That means in addition to the $4,500 credit I might be able to double up with some other “hookup” deal (either through work or well-connected friends).

Now it’s off to Obama’s desk and then into the implementation phase, which the bill specifies should take thirty days (meaning dealers should be ready administer the program in that amount of time post-Obama).  Thirty days then; thirty days for Sharaun and I to figure out what vehicle we want and how to outfit it.  Thirty days and Obama gets us a new car.

And, despite some shame, I’m ready for the handout.  Goodnight.