Month: June 2005

Curse You HGTV

We have one of those single arm kitchen faucets and it has developed some leakage. Anywhere from a drip to a small stream depending what the angle of the arm is when it gets pushed down. The work around for this bit of annoyance is to shut off the faucet and then lift the arm ever so slightly. I am perfectly happy with this arrangement, Donna is not.

All it probably needs is a replacement washer inside the faucet. Because she watches a lot of HGTV, Donna sees a 15 minute job rated 1 screwdriver at a cost of under a buck. I see an all day job costing hundreds of dollars because I know my limitations and luck.

Here is how I see it going: I turn off the 50-year old shut off valves under the sink so I can work on the faucet. Because they are so old they don’t shut off the water completely. So I then have to go outside to the main water shut off. (Fortunately this works because it was replaced 4 or 5 years ago when we had lawn sprinklers installed.) I now disassemble the faucet and extract the mangled rubber piece. I will then spend 15 minutes looking thru the junk plumbing bits I have in the garage in hope of finding a match. With no success, I head over to the local mega home repair place and spend 30 minutes wandering the aisles and pulling open plastic drawers looking for a match. I find something I think might work, spend $2.98 and return home. With the new piece I reassemble the faucet and close the outside valve and am greeted with barely any water pressure. Oh, yeah, the inside valves. I open them up and the faucet now leaks all the time because the rubber piece I brought home was not an exact match. To compound matters, now that I have disturbed one of the inside shut off valves from its comfortable spot it proceeds to start dripping from the packing around the handle. Outside to shut off the water to the house again. Back to the mega home repair store. This time, in disgust, I just buy a whole new faucet. Back home I spend the next 3 hours pulling out the old faucet, scraping the old caulking and plumber’s putty off the sink and installing the new one.

The nice new shiny faucet won’t drip, but it will make our well-worn kitchen sink look, well, well-worn. This will bring about talk of replacing it. But to do that, the tile counters will have to be replaced which would then make our well-worn cabinets look, well you get the picture?

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 167

The Snack

All I had was a portrait of Andrew Jackson and I wanted a candy bar to brighten up my ever so dull afternoon. I headed down to accounting the get the clerk to turn the one bill into several, and at least one of which should be one the vending machine would digest. As I stood in front of the counter where the clerk should be I heard the Accounting Manager call me into her office. She said, “I’ve got something for you,” and reached into her top desk drawer. She pulled out a plain brown paper bag and handed it to me. I knew instantly it was food, we’ve been down this path before. She said she bought two and after finishing the first she knew she shouldn’t have the second, so she hoped I would be so kind and remove the temptation. Being the gentleman I am, I was happy to oblige. Inside the bag was a 4″ x 4″ by 3/4″ thick chunk of candy/cookie thing. It had to be good because it felt like it weighed a pound. After I finished, I sent her a thank you email with the subject of

In this Issue: Perfect Timing, Not For Me, Heavy Burden.

Perfect Timing:
I was down there looking for Sally, so I could have her break a twenty dollar bill. I wanted an afternoon snack, but you handed me something much better than I could have gotten from the machines. I was in the right place at the right time.

Not For Me:
When I left your office I went to share with Donna. I broke “the snack” (at this point I don’t know what it is called, so I’ll just call it the snack) in half and gave one to her. She felt it and decided that was too much, so she broke the half in half again and handed me back one. She took a healthy bite out of the 1/4 of “the snack”, probably half of it, and chewed. She made a funny face. Donna likes chocolate and was fooled by the coating of that on top, but she is not much for sweets otherwise. She handed the 1/8 bit of “the snack” back to me as she finished chewing. She reached out and took the 1/8 of “the snack” back, then carefully, using her teeth, scraped off the chocolate coating and discarded the remainder.

Heavy Burden:
I was now stuck having to eat 3/4 of “the snack” all by myself. Truly, both literally and figuratively, a heavy burden. I was up to the task though and had no trouble devouring the remainder of “the snack.” It was delicious. Unfortunately “the snack” had enough calories to feed a small island nation and now that my body is working to digest them all it is a heavy burden just to keep my eyes open and head up…

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 165

Red Five, Where Are You Red Five?

Rare night off from blogging last night.

All this hoopla over Star Wars: Episode III – Anakin Goes Bad has made me want to go see it, but somehow I feel I will be disappointed, so I hesitate. Yesterday while channel surfing I stumbled on something on VH1 entitled, When Star Wars Ruled the World. An hour long retrospective of the original trilogy. Jonsing for a Force Fix, I decided to pop in the DVD of Star Wars: Episode IV – The One That Started It All. Even though I could do the all the dialog right along with the actors, I still enjoyed it.

The final battle to destroy the Death Star got me thinking. Maybe I need to change out my current Share the Road license plate for a personalized tag that reads “RED 5” for Luke’s call sign in his X-wing. It is probably long gone as I can’t be the only one in South Carolina to think of that. Maybe “REDFIVE” or “RED V” is free. In some states you can check online if a plate is available, but not here…

WEEI III

I called and complained to to MLB.com’s Customer Service on Thursday morning. Talked with a nice fellow named Victor, who while sympathetic, could not do anything about a refund because their policy is they are only available for 10 days after purchase. He asked if I would email him a description of my issues and he would pass them along to his supervisor. I sent him a novella generated from my ranting posts here and earlier email traffic to someone else in their customer service department.

The Red Sox had an afternoon make-up game with the Orioles and wouldn’t you know it, the audio was nearly flawless. But tonight’s game against the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim was one of the worst ever in the quantity of sound gaps. I’m listening to the game on the Angels radio station, ESPN. I’d really like to listen to the Bosox’s announcers, maybe if I tried the Spanish language broadcast, might learn to speak a second language…

Started up, went down, back up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 165

Mmmm…BBQ

The monthly meeting of the Master’s Miata Club was tonight and we held it in a back room at Bobby’s BBQ just west of Aiken. I like the food here and managed 3 trips to the buffet, before getting dessert. I don’t heap the plate or anything, but I do get my $6.95 worth.

The weather has been downright dreary around here the last week or so, but today we did manage to get the top down for the drive in to work and the ride home. We put it up while at the meeting as radar looked ugly, but it didn’t rain while we were inside. So the top went back down for the drive home. We almost made it home with it down, but about 2 miles from the garage we had to put it up as the slower city driving allowed the rain to get us wet instead of just the windshield.

Started up, went down, back up, back down, up again, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 162

Happy Birthday Mom

Wow, 79 years old today. I know what you are thinking, if you knew you were going to live that long you would have taken better care of yourself. Well, hell, I don’t smoke, don’t drink, I’m taking blood pressure pills and now cholesterol lowering meds and sometimes I’m not so sure I’ll make it to 50, a mere 4 months from now. 🙂