The Aerie
I bought a DVD player last night to replace our broken old DVD player. Not a very notable event until I reveal that I bought it... no, not at Best Buy, I haven't sunk THAT low... but at Radio Shack!
[Moe Szyslak]"Bwaah?"[/Moe Szyslak]
Yes! It was amazing. As you know, most of the Time Radio Shack is like some nightmarish netherworld of incompetence and boobery. My past experience has been that if I go into a Radio Shack for item X, I will be accosted upon entering the store.
"Can I help you?"
"I'm looking for item X"
Look of confusion, as if they have never heard of item X, whether item X is a thumb drive, a resistor, or a stereo cable splitter. The salesperson looks at the other salesperson as if to say "It answered! None of them ever answered before! What do I do now, and what's item X?"
I am usually then handed off to a more senior salesperson, while the first salesperson takes a break to calm their nerves. Senior salesperson wanders with me around the store in absolute confusion, then goes off to check "inventory."
Left blessedly alone for a moment, I find item X in a drawer on hanging from a rack. About that time the salesperson comes back.
"I'm sorry, we don't have item X"
"Yes you do, I have it right here."
"Oh! Item X! I thought you said item Ecks."
Then, ringing out, they ask for my name, address, phone number, social security number, mother's maiden name, hat size, date and time of last bowel movement, and preferential arm for injections. Questioning these interrogations usually restarts the terror-and-substitution process that occurred previously, so instead I lie.
Then, a brief upsell later and a refusal of a Radio Shack Credit Card offer, I find myself out the door, half an hour older than I needed to be.
But all that is past.
Last night, just to price check, mind you, I stopped first at Target and then at Radio Shack, intending to proceed on to a real store to buy the DVD player. In my pocket I had a number of DVDs with different video formats in order to test the DVD player.
In Radio Shack I found a very affordable DVD/VCR combo. Usually i swear off such things since, if one half breaks, you have a half broken piece of equipment. But in this case it was so darned cheap that I could never use the VCR portion and it would still be a good buy.
The salesperson did indeed panic-and-swap when I proposed actually TESTING the device by hooking it to one of the many flatscreen monitors displaying college hoops, but the substitute salesperson was not so squeamish. Some wiring and testing later, and I was looking at all sorts of different video formats, all properly displayed on the screen.
While this was going on I checked the internet for the model number, and found the price $30 higher in all cases.
Low price, actual courteous service, and the guy even doubled the warranty coverage in exchange for taking the display model. So I actually bought something at Radio Shack! And enjoyed it!
Of course, I didn't enjoy rewiring the living room entertainment center. Not that it was terribly difficult, but it was tedious and dusty. It didn't help, either, that the cat went nearly insane at the phenomenon of the entertainment center, moved away from the wall, and the TV taken out of it. He kept battling the dust bunnies behind it, and then leaping up into the TV hole as if to say, "Ta-daaah! It's the dusty cat show!"
Then of course there was the fun of trying to wire up the DVD player while the cat went into excited convulsions at the idea of something scrabbling around inside a small dark hole. I'm in there trying to thread the coaxial onto the back of the box, and suddenly a clawed paw shoots into the hole and attempts to make short work of my index finger. Cursing I look up to find the cat, dangling head down off the back of the cabinet in order to reach the hole for the wires, fairly vibrating "Prey! Prey! Live prey!"
He meowrled forlornly when I locked him upstairs.
Reassembled, the dust bunnies vacuumed up, the wires freshly strung, I was all ready to test the setup, when my wife arrived in search of her fix on NBC's "Medium." But an hour later, one mad serial killer later, the tests worked fine, and I was able to watch "Troops," downloaded from the Internet, on a real TV screen, for the first time ever. Yay!
Earlier this week I had occasion to use the downstairs, main floor shower for the first time in a long time. Oddly enough, the water drained very very slowly... os of course this meant a clog was building up in the drain. Having been through this drill before, I knew what was next: a day spent unclogging the pipe.
The bathtub drain is original 1943 iron pipe, and it had been my hope that the tub would not clog for a couple more years. Sometime in 2008 we'll probably completely tear out and replace the bathroom, including the piping. But the tub was actually overdue to clog again - it had been probably seven years since the last one - so it didn't surprise me when this morning the tub failed to drain at all.
I headed downstairs before church to check out the situation but didn't get far: that's because when I got to my workroom I found that somebody - somebody feline probably - had knocked over my big box of fluorescent bulbs. Note to self: store bulbs down from now on. Alberti's Droppage Principle: things can't fall if they're already on the floor.
Instead of unclogging the pipes, I cleaned up hazardous waste - all the while trying to keep the cat out of the shards of broken glass.
Instead it was after church when I opened up the piping in the basement and snaked out the line. It went surprisingly quickly and easily, I guess because it was the third time. Despite being the easiest and most straightforward un-clogging I've done, it still took all afternoon. Nevertheless by four thirty I had removed two giant hair-wads from the drainpipe, both of which looked like giant black rats.
That accomplished I cleaned up, everything except for the smell from my skin. Scrub as I might my fingers still smell like I've spent the day doing handstands in the sewer.
So the shattered bulb was cleaned up, the tub was unclogged... time to rest, right? No! Because I still had to dig out my car from yesterday's snowstorm. I could do it this afternoon, or I could try to do it at 7:00 a.m tomorrow, before work. I think not.
So I trudged out and started digging. Forty minutes later the car was extracted from the icy crypt which the plow had constructed. Hopefully I ought to be able to simply pull out and drive away tomorrow morning. Unless the plow goes by again and seals it back in.
So dinner is done, the car is ready, the tub is draining, it's eight thirty and I'm typing while I liveblog the Oscars with the crowd on Firedoglake. And that's the weekend!
We were down for about 12 hours due to a mixup with Qwest. Interestingly, i'd switch to a different LATA to handle my Internet connection... except there AREN'T any! Ain't regulated monopolies grand?
To add to this, I left my cell phone at Professor Barker's last night, requiring a return visit today. When I did so he asked me to pick up a telephone for him - his home phone wasn't working. It turned out to be a mechanical problem with his cable service.
When I arrived at his house it seemed everything was broken: my phone was somewhere in his house. His phone service was not working. My home Internet wasn't working. Thankfully we got it all sorted out, and by noon I was back at work, cell phone hanging uselessly on my hip, everyone's phone and Internet working. Thus you can read the messages here.
Now about Torchwood...
Torchwood is an anagram of "Doctor Who," which shows just how clever the folks were who put the show together. How many cool titles can YOU make from the letters in existing cool titles? Okay, you can turn "Tron" into "Torn," but what else?
As a Doctor Who spinoff, Torchwood can best be described as "X Files meets CSI Cardiff," and in fact the joke "CSI Cardiff" is made within five minutes of the pilot's opening. Accelerated helicopter pans and snappy dialogue combine with acceptable special effects and sometimes tortured writing to make for a charming, quirky show.
I won't go into it too much - if "Doctor Who/X Files/CSI Cardiff" doesn't get you there, nothing I can say will change that much. But it is a very fun show, and it bravely takes from Jasper Fforde the hand-off baton of Welsh Science Fiction and runs with it.
The first episode steals its opening scene directly from a cyberpunk novel that I will edit in here when I remember it. A murder victim is temporarily revivified in order to learn the identity of his killer, and has two minutes of reanimated existence in which to deal with his recent and impending death. The second episode features an alien that comes to Earth to consume the erotic energies of people engaging in sex... which is the plot of the movie "Liquid Sky."
While this displays a tendency for inadvertent if not deliberate plagiarism, it also shows that the writers are well-versed in the science fiction genre. You'd think that would be a requirement for science fiction programs, but any review of mainstream SF shows that a lot of it is written by people who don't understand why a starship can't decelerate at a greater rate than it can accelerate (see Stephen Donald's "Gap" series...), or why alien species ought not be having sex with each other (see Star Trek, any variety, any season, but most egregiously this episode).
Taking writing lessons from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," the show spends a lot of time exploring the relationships of the ensemble cast, rather than fixating on science fiction gimmickry. This will be a good idea, assuming the continuity editors keep their wits about them: one character is an unkillable person who is at least a hundred years old, and keeping straight what such a character did when can be difficult. Unfortunately, fans are unforgiving: if a 100-year-old person says "I've never seen a rugby match," any subsequent rugby-match flashbacks will result in a flood of angry e-mails.
Since it's British it's a little more sexually edgy than American audiences are accustomed to. One character is revealed to be casually bisexual in the first episode, defusing a jealous lover with a spritz of extraterrestrial 'Axe' that yields a same-sex kiss. In fact, the first two episodes have rather a lot of same-sex kissing, now that I think about it. The explicit sex means I'll either figure out a way to edit the second episode's bathroom sex scene, or just leave the second episode out entirely if I make the series available to the kids. After the first two shows, calculated to jumpstart an audience, the sex seems to throttle back to reasonable levels.
I'm only a few episodes into it, but it looks like a lot of fun. It's not 'Battlestar Galactica,' but it it clever and sometimes poignant, and it goes the extra mile to pursue character-driven stories rather than settling for ray guns and rubber suits to entertain. Well worth watching when it finally gets to America...
So this latest client is a tough nut to crack.
Unlike the other clients I've been at, these guys actually seem to have their network reasonably secure. At least secure from wasting productivity, or letting users out of the network. Attempts to access innocuous popular blogs, or even Wikipedia, run into a content filter. Forget about accessing my server over an SSH session. And as it turns out, my T-Mobile cell phone service is legendary in its awfulness here. So how to escape?
Well as it turns out, if I go through rabbit-ear-TV-antenna circumlocutions with my cell phone, I can occasionally get two bars of coverage. So I got it connected to a weak signal, and then tried for the umpteenth time to get the thing working to link my laptop to the Internet.
For a miracle, I actually got it working! It was dog-slow, but I managed to open a connection into my server, I managed to send my wife an IM, and I managed to check my e-mail remotely. All over my cell phone! Now I'll never need to be Internet-less again... as if that's a good thing.
So I've got that tiny thread connecting me to the outside world, what else? Well, my client also filters a lot of web pages... including the well-known proxy sites. Fortunately, I have my own webserver, so I did a little research and found a very simple proxy program: I put my web page request into it, and it pulls the restricted site itself, and then redirects it to my web browser. Voila! I can now browse restricted web pages at work - until such time as they somehow detect what I'm doing and restrict my own system.
Finally, streaming audio: I like to start my day with the Stephanie Miller radio show, but unfortunately the local AM station that carries it is powered by one of those little light bulbs in the nose of the patient in the "Operation" game. It's impossible to pick up the signal if there are thunderstorms, concrete barriers, steel walls, gypsum board, cardboard, rice paper, humidity, or air between you and the broadcast antenna. So, as I did in Germany, I listen over streaming audio over my cell phone. Of course that introduces an additional restriction: I can't both use the cell phone to connect my laptop AND also listen to streaming audio. I have to choose one or the other.
Nevertheless it all works out, and I am pretty much connected to the Real World again, despite being imprisoned inside the client networks. The only thing left to do is to figure out how to set up an https server so that my proxy can connect to other secure websites.
Tomorrow I review something wonderful... Torchwood!
Yesterday's First Day of Work went quite well, thank you. Alberti's Axiom was borne out quite thoroughly: "A pessimist is never disappointed, and only pleasantly surprised." In this case, my mood regarding the job was so dour, the simple fact that the building didn't burn down on my first day was enough to cheer me up.
And they did better than that. Their "onboarding" process was well organized, and I quickly had all the information I needed to get work done. In fact by about noon I had everything except my voicemail working. And by the end of the day I actually attended a meeting and got real work done. My first day!
But the best part of the day were the valuable parting gifts left for me by the former occupant of my cube.
The first gift was the mess: I spent a considerable period of time just scrubbing coffee and food stains off of most surfaces. I wondered as I did so how one could sterilize a keyboard. Here I was scrubbing coffee stains off a shelf in the cabinet (I kid you not), and yet I all-too-eagerly set my fingers to the keyboard without considering what was on those keycaps.
Yes, the cube has a cabinet. Actually it's quite a nice cubicle. It doesn't have a window like my last cube, but then neither am I sharing it with a silent Indian immigrant, nor is it next to a loudmouth Brooklyn bully, and it's not stalked by a manager looking for an excuse to can me.
It's an aisle cube, meaning that one wall is solid and five feet high. The hallway noise or slightly smaller size could be annoying, except that it means the cabinet is moved to the end of my desk, which in turns offers me a quiet nook into which to place my own laptop. I can't put it on the company network, but at least I can listen to music on it or access my own files.
Anyway, I got the cube cleaned, and in so doing I found a lot of stuff left behind by the prior occupant of the cube. First, a nice black coffee mug, unadorned. I cleaned it and used the microwave to boil some water in it and it serves quite well.
Second, a mostly-full box of Lipton's Green Tea. The coffee situation is not terrific here - you basically have to walk a quarter mile and pay a dollar for each cup. So I suspect I'll be taking up tea again, as I haven't the funds or patience for all that.
And third and best... well...
So I'm sitting there during one of the "onboarding" briefings, and I spot this small green light underneath the desk. "Funny," I say to myself (losing track of what the HR person is telling me), that is just like my laptop power supply. I haven't yet taken out my laptop at this point, so I know it's not mine, and I forget about it during the rest of the briefing.
A couple hours later I'm getting the desk cleaned, and I spot the light again. So I lean under the desk and pick it up. A power supply. I turn it over. Sony. I pull out my laptop and look at the requirements: 16 volts. I look at the power supply: 16 volts. I take the plug from the power supply... and it plugs into my laptop.
WTF? What are the chances? This is a $50 power supply, and I find it under my desk. I could have been placed at any of 10,000 desks in this place. I could have found any of 10,000 power supplies uner my desk. But I find the one desk with the one power supply that happens to fit my laptop? The mind boggles.
So: tea, teacup, power supply. My prior occupant left me some valuable parting gifts when he or she left the building.
Today I'm back at work early, trying to recoup some of the hours lost to the President's Day holiday. I ran into one former colleague, and he informed me that another is working here as well.
Of course, that former colleague used to be my manager, and while we got along just fine at that workplace, after the last experience re-encountering a former manager - where I ended up losing my contract? - I'm a little shy to re-introduce myself! But no, he's not managing me here, he's just a coworker, so I expect things shall be fine.
Anyway, back to work...
Well tomorrow's the day. Back to the slog. I've tried to have a good attitude, but earning 20% less for the same job as I lost, well, that's hard to swallow. Better than no job I guess.
I wish my attitude were better, but there you are.
It doesn't help that the England job fell through, sort of. As of this morning it's no longer nine days in England in March, but five days in Amsterdam in April. Pardon me if I insult anyone from the Netherlands, but not being a consumer of grass or ass, even legally, the city doesn't hold as much appeal for me as would London.
it's not so much the change in venue as the slapdash feel of the operation. Thursday's call seemed decisive and professional - we need you, you have the skills, let's do this. Today's call shot that down, now the company seems unorganized and unprofessional.
So we'll see. The shot of hope is nice, I just wish to skip the disappointment chaser.
Spent the day wasting time and not thinking about the job. Sorted music files, went for a constitutional around Lake Calhoun, took the family out for dinner in the evening. My only concession for tomorrow's reality was to spend a few minutes trimming my beard before bed.
And now even THIS procrastination is exhausted, and it's time to set the alarm and reset my attitude and face tomorrow with a smile. And not a grimace.
I'm lucky to have a job, I'm lucky to have a job, I'm lucky to have a job...
On one of my final days of unemployment the spouse and I were headed to coffee and books at the local Barnes and Noble, made possible by a very generous gift card provided by our friend Terry. As I was parking my cell phone rang - would I like to spend a week in London teaching an information security course?
So the last 24 hours have therefore been a scramble of activity, examining the feasibility of taking this trip. First we considered taking the family if we could find a home-swap. No luck. At last discussion, my spouse has declined the idea of coming with me herself, to my disappointment. But finding someone to watch the kids was going to be a big challenge. Meanwhile I'm waiting for solid confirmation of the underlying training. But if things work out, I may get to spend a week in Ol' Blighty.
Aside from that, I finally did get some homework done, and tomorrow is another class session. Hopefully I can get my brain working in time for class.
And I got my full pay for the very brief job I did for a firm last week. This place has brought me in on several jobs, each one of which was a botch for some reason or another, and usually they're about two years apart, so I'm pleased to get this check and be done with them til 2009.
Now it's Friday, and time to start mentally gearing up to return to employment on Tuesday. It will be good to have some income... too bad I have to work for it!
I'm here at the Red Cross, typing with one hand again. The call came as I was driving home this morning right after my big job interview: they'd had a 1:15 p.m. cancellation and could I fill in? Sure, what is unemployment but the freedom to donate blood at a moment's notice?
The interview went fairly well, it seemed. It's for a new position at this (I started to type "client" but this would be a permanent position) company. Since it's new, they aren't 100% sure what I'd be doing, and their questions reflected that uncertainty. So I did what I do best, and basically took control of the discussion and described my best guess regarding what I'd do if hired.
This seemed to suit them, as they are looking for guidance in this area. The first guy who talked to me was very professional, controlled and reserved - the second was more open. Both seemed fairly open and the discussions seemed to go well.
We still haven't gotten into the sticky question of compensation, which is where I expect this could all fall apart: their uncertainty may extend to pay. I know what a Director of Security is worth, but do they?
So I had the interview, and we'll see how that goes. I got the call for aphersis on the way home, so I changed clothes and came here. My donation is taking a while. I'm used to coming in early mornings, and by mid-afternoon the day's delays have accumulated so that I didn't start until more than half an hour past my appointment, and I've still got 45 minutes to go.
Still I'm hoping that the karmic benefit of donating immediately after my interview will help the whole job thing work out. That's silly magical thinking, but whatever works!
Then it's home for dinner, and off to the twin's high school to learn about how they can take college courses for free while in high school. And that's the day!
I went yesterday and did the humiliating drug testing for my upcoming not-very-excited-about-it position. It's the equivalent of Mr. Burns giving Homer the plague, a demoralizing and soul-crushing means of making sure new employees realize just how desperately they need this new job.
And I do need it: after six weeks of unemployment the bank account is getting a little thin, and there's always that lag between when you start working and when they start paying you. In the past I've had to wait as much as six weeks for the first paycheck. While that does suck, there is a corresponding lag on the back end, so when you leave such a job you have six paid weeks in order to find a new one. Unfortunatey my last contract paid very promptly, and we haven't seen a check in quite some time now.
After peeing in a cup in one room and being fingerprinted in another I found myself in the lobby of the client's downtown office building, right next to a store selling suits. Now, I do need a new suit: I don't think I have purchased a new suit in ten years. And on Monday I have an interview for an executive level position in which I am quite interested. That, along with the aforementioned soul-crushing humiliation, caused me to lay down my tired, battered, threadbare credit card in order to buy myself a new suit, a charcoal-gray Calvin Klein with a gold "power tie," shirt, belt, and shoes. However I put my foot down on buying the extra-thick moth-repellant cedar hangar: I'm no sucker for the upsell!
If there was any doubt in my mind about getting the new suit, it was polished off in the middle of the fitting when by text message a friend notified me that she had just lost her job. Somehow her getting canned just made it even more sensible for me to be ready for Monday's interview. Anyway, alterations should be done tomorrow, and the suit ready for Monday's performance.
I don't start the un-wanted job until the following Tuesday, so hopefully if I'm going to get the one that I am hoping for I may receive an offer during the intervening week. As much as I hate trying to get one job when I've already accepted another, that's just a harsh reality of business: worse would be to work there for two days and then leave.
Worse yet, however, would be to have to work at the unwanted job on an ongoing basis - but I'm the dad and the guy with the responsibility, so I'll "Do it for her" if I have to!
Hooray! One of my favorite things is back, the Yahoo Random Link. An old, old Internet fave, it wasn't working, for me at least, for a long time. I would click on my ancient bookmark, and instead of showing me a random page out of Yahoo's database, it would show me the URL. Instead of taking me to the site, it would just show the address of the site.
Why? Dunno. I thought maybe that Yahoo wanted to step back from any possible responsibility for the content of the destination page: if you have to copy-and-paste the link in order to reach the page, Yahoo can hardly be solely responsible for taking you to "www.reallyoffensivewebsite.com" or whatever.
Regardless of what changed, the Random Link has started working, and is already offering up gems. Today, for example, I was offered an Alan Ruck fan page, the dreadfully-in-need-of-updating Cristine website, and everything you ever wanted to know about Crocodiles.
It was the Yahoo Random Link that took me to the website for Drawing Down the Moon in the middle of my brief association with aikido many years ago. The film is fairly bad - which is to say, pretty good for an independent film - and features the use of that martial art, as well as the guy who played Chekov on Star Trek. How long ago was that? Well the movie was delivered to me on video tape...
I think I was still working at Network Systems Corp the first time I used the YRL, . I had at that time a calendar of "Earth from Space," and the link brought me to a real estate sales site in Hawai'i. Coincidentally, the calendar entry for that month was also Hawai'i, so I could look up from the real-estate site and pretty much see the house being advertised on the high-resolution photograph of Oahu. Weird coincidence!
The other thing that the Yahoo Random Link is good for is telling when I'm wasting time. It used to be the case that when I found myself clicking the Yahoo Random Link, it was because I was supposed to be doing something else.
For example, blogging about the Yahoo Random Link.
I have a job lined up... so why aren't I happy?
Well, because I'm spoiled. The job is basically doing exactly the same thing I was doing at my last client, but unfortunately it's for 20% less money. The money part doesn't make me happy, but it's the doing-the-same-thing part that funks me out.
Stupid, I know - I should be happy I'm going to have work at all, and here I am carping. Ah well. It doesn't start for two weeks, so I have an involuntary vacation. And if something else were to arise instead, well...
Meanwhile, on the Very Happy side, the report cards came in. The youngest got one "D," but aside from that we're looking at A's and B's. This is all good stuff. My daughter worked hard, my youngest boy worked hard, and my oldest boy worked his ass off. All three of them did an excellent job, and all three of them made me very proud.
We took the kids out for pie after dinner in order to celebrate - an idea that seemed a bit less wise as we shivered in our 20-below-zero van on the short trip to Baker's Square! We had a very nice time once we reached the toasty confines of the restaurant, the height of the evening being my spouse laughing herself silly relating a story from the radio.
Today I did my best to do some writing on my novel. Tomorrow I hope to do some more, then turn my attention to some other things that need attention. For tonight, well, I'm up too late, so it's off to bed. Hopefully my spouse will let me sleep in, but if she doesn't, well, it's my own fault!
Well it seems likely I'm about to pick up another job. Had an interview at 9:00 a.m. today, and they already asked me to come back in at 4:00 p.m. for a second. On my way out my future-boss asked me casually if I was looking at any other positions and the next thing I know they're dragging me back later today.
Unfortunately I'm having a hard time getting excited about this position. It's project management doing pretty much exactly the same thing as I was just doing at my last job, but for considerably less pay. However work is work, and the only other job I've interviewed for has not called me back for a second - granted that was only last Friday.
Meanwhile I have a million things I ought to do, and very few I want to do. I could write the proposals necessary for a chance to get two other jobs, but then why should I if I am about to get this job? I could work on my college homework (which would probably be wise), I could write some fiction, I could go to the gym, I could clean the basement, I could play video games.
It's probably a good thing I might be getting work soon, since otherwise I think I'd go crazy.
To say nothing of the fact that I've reached that point where time is beginning to blur. Weekends still stand out like a buoy on a foggy bay, but the rest of my time is a blur of don't-have-to-but-probably-should's in between.
No, a job would be good. Stave off poverty and boredom. Or at least poverty. At least I only have to do this for ten more years or so until the kids are out of college. Then I'll be free to pursue my interests... if by that time I can remember what they are.
It was another tiring day of unemployment for me. I did something in the morning but I can't remember what it was. That's the kind of day yesterday was. Oh, yeah, that's right, I had reading homework for one of my college classes. I drove my neighbor to the airport at 7:30 a.m., and afterwards I stopped at a Bruegger's, intending to have breakfast and hit the gym.
While I ate I started reading my homework, which is a part of my learning process that is usually very difficult for me. However the reading went so well that I stayed until I finished and ended up skipping the gym. I finished my reading and headed to the bank to get another printout of my June records for my accountant, who is working on my 2006 taxes. Unfortunately I discovered upon arrival that the bank's new lobby hours began at noon. Worse, I remembered getting a letter to that effect, so I had nobody to be annoyed at except myself.
I drove home for a quick lunch and to change. After lunch I had a meeting with a fellow who needs some part-time maintenance and break-fix for his small office network. Not my usual cuppa tea, but it might have some positive application to some other projects I'm working on, so I'm considering it.
Went home, changed out of my monkey suit, and set about some wrapping-up-the-week activities, and cleaning up my office. Then my spouse got home and shouted "The garage door isn't working again!"
Sigh.
The garage door opener has a quick-release catch to separate the pulley from the door in case something gets broken. Unfortunately the catch kept releasing, and when I went out to inspect it the catch was coming loose with every use.
So I started examining the broken garage door, in the subzero conditions of the garage, standing in the open door of the van and using the roof for a work surface.
Two hours later the opener chain was on the floor, the support bar was in pieces, my hat was full of nuts and bolts, and I had the greasy components of the quick-release-shuttle in my numb, bloody fingers. I headed off to the hardware store.
Nobody sells such things. I went to Menards and I went to Home Depot, and both of them looked at me like I was an idiot for wanting to replace an individual worn-out component of my garage door opener. Frustrated I returned home to scarf down leftover dinner, then back out to the garage. There, in the even deeper cold, I used a chisel and mallet to smash the shuttle connector: it had worn to the point where the catch had bent back so far that the connecting tab would slip out of the slot. Smashing that bent metal back into shape caused it to crack a bit, so it probably won't last long, but lacking any other options it will have to do.
Amazingly I reassembled the garage door completely, down to the last cotter pin and washer. The door works without the release coming apart, but now the door hits the ground and rebounds back up and the door opens again. I spent another half hour trying to resolve THAT problem, without success. Frozen to the marrow I headed back inside. To my delight, I found that Zout™ works really well to get grease off your hands.
By now it was 8:30, and my wife was quick to remind me that we were due to attend a performance by our friend Ellis at 9:30. I'd gotten up at 6:30 a.m. and it was now 9:30 p.m. and I'd spent the last four hours in the icy garage. I wanted nothing more than to curl up under the covers and lapse into unconsciousness.
Nonetheless I pulled some clothes on and we headed over to the remodeled Varsity theater in Dinkytown. Basically they had pulled all the seats out, put down a bunch of large carpets, and filled the space with squashy armchairs and couches.
Ellis and her wife and manager Terry were there before the performance, mingling with the crowd. They flew back from New York where Ellis has been recording, and are due to fly back to wrap up recording. I was very nice to see them again.
Ellis' performance was a lot of fun. Unfortunately I was not only very tired, but there were moving stage lights that kept shining into my eyes, threatening to give me a headache. To avoid the headache I would close my eyes, and being sleepy with one's eyes closed is tempting fate...
I didn't fall asleep, but it was a near thing. We straggled through the bitter cold back to my car at midnight and I finally got to pass out around 12:30... only to wake up at 7:50 to get ready for my all-day Saturday class.
Which is where I am now, blogging instead of paying attention. It's almost 11:00 a.m.and I haven't had any coffee yet. Sigh. This runs til 5:00. What happens after that I don't even know. Do we have plans? Will I be doing homework? Relaxing? Lapsing into unconsciousness? I don't even know...
Meanwhile my wife just called - she's trying to get the garage door to close and it keeps re-opening...
Sigh.