Rants

We have ceiling fans in every room in the house (except the bathrooms) and they rotate slowly keeping the air circulating. Yesterday morning I noticed it seemed kind of dim at the breakfast table. The fan in the dining room has four glass shades with gas lamp looking bulbs hanging from the bottom and one was burnt out.

Last night I unscrewed the dead bulb and it spun way too easy. The glass came out leaving the metal base still screwed into the socket. No big deal, it has happened before, so I went to the tool box and got my needle nose pliers. It is usually an easy job to pry away the metal rim a bit, grab the socket and unscrew it. Not this time. That bulb base was snug, almost seemed like it was cross threaded. I spent 15 minutes grabbing and twisting and instead of backing the base out, all I was getting was little bits of the metal in the jaws of the pliers.

I was going to have to remove light fixture from the fan to get this thing out. I unscrewed the three screws around the outside of the light fixture and dropped the light down some so I could get to the wire nuts that connected the fixture to the fan. While holding the light up with one hand I found one wire nut, but the black wire went up into the fan. Dang, the connections must be inside the bottom part of the fan.

Still holding the light fixture up with one hand I unscrewed the two screws holding the top plate of the light to the fan. It didn’t come loose. It must be held on by that threaded tube in the center. No amount of spinning loosened it. Tiring of holding up the light with one hand I made a command decision, I cut the black wire.

Now that I have the light fixture down at my level, I recommenced to removing the stuck bulb base, unfortunately no amount of grabbing and twisting the base would free it. I tried to back out another bulb and it did the same thing, glass part came out easy and the metal base stayed in the socket. I guess it is time to buy a new light fixture.

I then disconnected the cover on the bottom of the fan so I could get the light fixture base plate off. As I removed that piece from the fan I noticed that the plastic fan speed switch was broken where it came out of the housing. I grabbed some glue I have in the garage and tried to piece the switch back together. A few minutes later when everything was dry I put the switch back through the hole, but it came apart again as soon as I tried to screw the nut on. I gave up at that point figuring we would just go buy a new light fixture and new a switch on Thursday.

This morning I took the switch to work to try using some super glue. It work a lot better than the household cement I had, but it didn’t last through a good solid tightening of the nut.

So today after work we visited a BBHIW for a switch & light fixture. The replacement switches were not in the first couple places we looked, so we had to resort to asking for help. Felt kind of bad about it, not so much because I had to ask for help, but we seemed to have interrupted a personal conversation between two employees to do it. She led us to the switches, one aisle over from where we found some other repair parts, and while we had her attention we asked where the ceiling fan light fixtures were as well.

Because most ceiling fans these days come with the light fixture already included, the selection of add on lights was very limited. They had some 19.95 school house lights, but none were in bright brass which is what we needed to match our fan. As a matter of fact, the only one that came in bright brass was a multipurpose one with 4 different colors, but it had a price tag of $39.95! That and the cost of the switch, $6.95, put us close to $50, to just repair something. A brand new Hunter fan with light fixture was $65.

So, because one light bulb burnt out, we ended up buying a whole new fan.

If you have ever worked in a office environment you have probably had the post title asked of you. Standing there at the water-cooler in your khaki pants and blue polo w/ white horizontal stripes, talking to a co-worker similarly attired, when person #3 dressed in black slacks and a maroon dress shirt asks… Your response comes automatically, “Didn’t you get the memo?”

Well, now, at The Valve Store(TM) that question actually has merit. A woman in the front office has taken it upon herself to actually schedule certain colors for certain days, with the help of some of the participants. And there are days where you will notice 4, 5 or 6 folks dressed in the same color scheme. Donna and I have always gone out of our way to make sure we don’t dress in the same colors, so you can bet that if a Bogardus happens to randomly match the color of the day, the other Bogardus will not match.

I get the start of my online news at Google. It is kind of neat in that you can customize it to your needs (you just know I’ve a Red Sox section), but the flip side is it creepily customizes itself to you from what you click on.

Browsing there just now. As I scanned down the page and got down to the Entertainment section, this headline was one of the two there, “Robyn Gardner Goes Missing in Aruba: A Maryland woman has vanished in Aruba after taking a snorkeling trip with a friend, MyFoxDC reports.” This is entertainment?

Oh yeah, I forgot, it *is* entertainment. And I bet Nancy Grace is just overjoyed, this comes around in the nick of time because the public’s interest in Casey Anthony is really waning.

We got home from work yesterday and were surprised to find we had no new email. We then realized there was no internet access. That explains that. I went into the living room and turned on the TV, nothing but snow. Because I already had an errand to run and the Cable Co office is like a 1/2 mile away, I opted to stop by instead of dealing with voice mail hell.

The woman at the office tried some things with no success, so we set up a repair appointment for today. When I got home I went over to check the junction box and what do do know, cable wires coming out, but nothing going in. I looked up at where the cable runs through a hook on the soffit and the hook was bent straight. Odd, the junction box nor the splitter inside looked damaged, did someone need a 100′ of coaxial cable? I walked to the street, crossed it and walked up to the pole where the cable comes from. Somebody didn’t steal the cable, it still headed up the pole and the length of the cable was neatly coiled at the base.

Tuesday was trash day and I figured that the truck the city uses to pick up the yard waste, AKA: The Jaws of Death, most have somehow yanked it down while picking up vegetable matter from in front of the house across the street. I called the Cable Co and let them know what I had discovered.

Today at 12:30 a tech called me at work to tell me he was just leaving my house and he let me know he replaced the cable from pole to home as it had a couple of squirrel induced damage spots. He could see my modem was online with his computer, so he figured he had the thing fixed, but to give a call if when we got home the TV wasn’t working (it was.) He modified my theory of the incident slightly because the cable end wasn’t damaged and it makes a lot of sense. The truck probably hit the cable just enough to yank it out of the hook on the soffit, leaving it dangling low across the street. A city worker probably manually disconnected it from the splitter and rolled it up under the pole so as not to endanger any traffic on the street. It sure would have been nice if they reported the issue to the Cable Co, the issue might have even been fixed before we got home…

The back deck project is finished for all intensive purposes. I have to try one thing and if it works out, there may be about an hour of staining left to do.

Saturday morning we got an early start to beat the heat. Donna and friend Joan went for a walk and I went out to put the top trim boards on the railing around the deck. I didn’t buy any screws because I had a bunch of 1-5/8″ deck screws left over from a long ago project. The first thing I did was to drill pilot holes in the already cut to length and shape boards. I used the old boards as a guide to get the right amount of holes but made sure I was slightly off so as to not try and use an old hole for the new screw.

I grabbed my old screws and instantly thought they are too light in color compared to the dark brown (Brazilian Walnut) decking boards I had purchased at Home Depot. But I opted to try a couple to see if they would be that noticeable after they were sunk in the piece of decking. Two screws were all it took to realize that they didn’t get hidden enough and really stood out.

So I drove the 1 mile over to Home Depot to buy some darker screws. They had on the shelves screws in gray, forest green, silver, tan and my best option choice – brown. I took my 1lb. box of brown composite deck screws home and tried a few. I started the first two in the holes of the previously tried tan leftover screws. Not bad, but they will have to do considering what my options were. The third screw I tried, in a virgin hole, went down and stopped with he head above the board before spinning uselessly stripped. I tried one more with the same results. I backed out the 1-5/8″ screws, tossed them back in the box they came out of and drove back to Home Depot to return them.

This time I bought 2-1/2″ screws. The color selection was the same, so I took them home in the same brown color. Wouldn’t you think that a store that sold two kinds of composite deck boards, both in a dark brown shade, would carry dark brown composite deck screws? The 2-1/2″ screw heads sunk in just fine while holding down the top boards, but they were about a 1/4″ too long for outside trim boards and they stuck out a bit from the bottom. Once I finally got going, I finished the job in about an hour. The one pound box turned out to hold just the right amount for my job as there were only three screws left over.

When I opened the second 1lb. plastic box, right there on top, was a brochure showing all the variations of the Grip Rite Prime Guard Plus composite deck screws. The second color illustrated was dark brown and it would have been a perfect match. To add insult to injury, they also offer it in a #8 x 2″ long version that would have been the perfect size. So I guess in 20 years when the composite boards need replacing I’ll pre-order my screws.