Frustrations
It seems like the past two weeks have dragged on like a hobbit pulling a tied-up cave troll through the Misty Mountains. The weekend can’t come soon enough, and it’s only Tuesday as I write this.
Lori has been working long hours. Her team at work has started their annual killer project a few months early and so it’s been pretty rough. She had to work all last weekend and I was stuck at home. I feel bad for her; she works 9 hour days to begin with and they expect her to come in on the weekend for a project. Ouch. I stayed home this weekend cleaning the house and catching up on some projects of my own. I have a few side programming tasks I’ve been working on so I got a chance to work on those.
To top off the frustrations of late working hours, I came home last Wednesday to a broken air conditioner. It was 94 degrees in the house making it very uncomfortable. My poor cats were in the house the entire day without any AC but they took it in stride. They were lounging around like nothing was wrong. At least they had plenty of water and cool tile to lay on.
I tried a bunch of troubleshooting tips like checking breakers, kicking the compressor, and I even replaced the thermostat but still I couldn’t get it working. The problem was the outside unit thingy (that’s a technical term) wouldn’t come on. The compressor inside the furnace was working just fine though.
We ended up calling a couple people to come and look at it, but they all wanted an exhausting amount of money to make a trip to Centerton after hours. So we suffered through a night of sweltering heat to save some money. I’m glad I did, too. The next morning we got Vista Heating and Air to come and look at it and they only charged us $60 to fix it. The problem was an electrical timing circuit in the outside unit that went bad. The technician had it up and running in 20 minutes. w00t!! Now the house is nice and cold.
Yesterday was another frustrating day. Lori called me around lunch time and she couldn’t get the Cavalier started. I had her check the connections to the battery, and the battery cable had a lot of corrosion on it and wasn’t connecting very well to the battery. She was able to get it running but after work we spent the evening replacing battery cables. That’s the first time I’ve ever done anything like that and I feel like I did a good job. I had to crimp a new pigtail connector on the ground cable and put a different connector on the end of the positive cable, but in the end the cables look nice and neat, with no exposed wires. The car now runs and seems pretty spunky.
Hopefully the rest of the week is a lot easier on us. I could use a break in the stress patterns life sends down the line. The weather has been cooler so maybe we can do some more Geocaching or just veg out in front of the TV.