The Manic Mechanic

Thanks to Irene, the hurricane that so many poo-poo for not being intense enough, I am still without electricity. Well, at least that which I am not creating myself. This is by far the longest I have been without power since I built this place 23 years ago. Ice storms, hurricanes, etc, the longest I can remember being three days. When I contacted the electric company they could not give me a definite answer other than Friday before 11:30am. Despite there being minimum damage in my own yard, further down the road there is a large tree pulling the old, shabby lines down. Also, the main trouble spot of the area where the road (and the utility lines on short poles) wend their way through a little valley lined with old, tall trees. Almost every major storm drops at least one tree, either in the road, into the wires, or harmlessly into one another. That area is a mess at the moment, with at least five large trees supported over the road by the electric wires.

I hope this time the power company doesn't just take away the troublesome timber leaving the rest to take a future tumble. Some serious work needs to be done, and it has been neglected in this immediate area for years. Recently the power company did go on a trimming spree, clearing troublesome trees from the utility lines and poles. Some areas, like here, only got a lick and a promise at best. I hope they get their act together soon.

The generator has been totally awesome. While fired up, life here at the house is absolutely normal. This house is all electric. The stove/oven, the installed heat and hot water are all electric. I also have a private well, so having water at all the fixtures depends entirely on having electric power. The generator can power the house and garage, running everything except for the central air conditioner and the huge air compressor in the garage. This is all according to plans I laid out many years ago. I have connections available to attach the generator and in less than ten minutes, life is good while everything around me is dark. There is a downside, however, and it's a biggie. Said big generator has a 16 gallon gas tank. In typical use, it burns about a gallon of fuel each hour, a little less when loads are minimal. I've been pouring about 20 gallons into the thing each day. It's starting to hit our wallets hard, and I was getting rather peeved this afternoon. I told Jeff I was tired of hearing the thing and pouring fuel into it, so I shut it down saying I'd rather let all the food rot in the freezers. It did not help that a garage project turned out for the worse after being a breeze just prior. I fired the beast back up so we could make dinner, and started watching TV. The news was all about so many unfortunate souls with things going a lot worse than we have here at Chateau Mayhem. Perspective reestablished, after dinner we went once again to the gas station, with thirty gallons worth of empty jerry cans and counted our blessings.

I let the beast roar through the night last night. Since my neighbors are hundreds of feet away, noise is not a problem outside the yard. Tonight, now that all the freezers are deeply chilled I will shut off the thing and restart it tomorrow morning for a while, saving more fuel. I can quietly work on my car project with no power, and run some errands before needing to fire the thing back up for the afternoon and evening. I hope the electric company gets their act together over here soon though.

One little bonus is that the cable internet has returned, so I no longer have to use my cell phone's hotspot feature. The hotspot has been handy as all get out this summer during our travels, as well as being a nice backup. My phone can take a break now as well.

So it finally happened. My credit card, or, more precisely, the number, got jacked. I got several calls from the issuing bank on Memorial day Monday telling me that the card has been deactivated because of activity not matching my usual patterns and coming from overseas. Great. Of course, I am not on the hook for these fraudulent charges, and they are sending a new card out. My only concern is I have some recurring bill-pay charges that drop monthly, and I now have to call all relevant parties and give the new info, not to mention clear the old card from various online outfits. People suck.

In other news, I've been hit with a nasty sore throat. My visit to the doc today netted me some antibiotics to help clear it out, it has been ruining my past few days. The weather here has been scorching, and I've been managing, but having a mild temperature makes it that much worse.

Yesterday Jeff took his truck for emissions testing. On his way home I was talking to him on his cell phone as he stops at the post office, he tells me that he smells antifreeze around his truck. I tell him to bring the truck down to the garage, where it proceeds to puke coolant from one of the water pump gaskets. Again. This is a new water pump, but I've had problems with the gaskets basically coming apart and the coolant furiously leaking. I'm going to toss this new pump, chalking the problems up to poorly machined mounting surfaces and/or a casting that moves too much with temp changes and get something different. I've never had such issues with a simple Chevy water pump before. The original went well over 100k, this one has been in and out of the truck twice to repair the gaskets.

Jeff has been having staff problems again at work, and he's gotta weed out more bad apples. This means, of course, more work for him, but he says he can manage. It should not be so damn difficult.

My illness du jour has slowed me down on things I wanted to take care of this month, couple that with the sudden dog days-like heat wave and my energy levels are practically zero. I hope this weekend is more seasonal. More record-breaking heat for the area. But, hey, there is no climate change, right?

Frustrations. I has quite a few. I continue to be a slave to pain killers, though not as much as I was pre- and post-surgery. Still, getting quality sleep is near impossible, I have mostly skipped anything resembling a schedule and just collapsed when I felt exhausted enough. I will eventually awaken from discomfort, then resign myself to get out of bed in a groggy, cranky state, pop a pill and futz around the house while the aches and pains subside. I've begun some physical therapy which has been helping, that's a good thing. This will run through this month and could be extended if needed. These are frustrations that will abate given time.

One thing that has gotten me more angry at my whole decrepit body situation is the continuing nerve troubles below the waist. The good news is the nerve pinching and inability to stand for more than a few minutes is firmly in the past. The setback is still the annoying tingling from just above the knees down. It's as though I've been sitting cross-legged on the floor for two hours and allowed my legs and feet to go totally numb. Touching lightly brings little sensation. A firmer tap or pressure comes at me in a blast of hash and static. The poor signal/noise ratio in my feet and further up leaves me with an awkward, stompy walk, and occasional unsteady footing. Again, while this is not like before, where I would be slugged with spasms and weakness, this new sensation of a lack of sensation is disheartening. I guess I have to give this time, but there is a chance this is permanent.

Since the surgery, I've been battling a near constant feeling of being cold. Anyone who has known me for a while can attest to my shrugging off cold weather as a minor convenience. It's not even truly cold yet and I am constantly sitting in front of space heaters and heat lamps trying to keep from shivering. With the feeling of cold brings about more pain too, and puts a damper on my day. I hope this corrects soon as well, and I chalk it up to my eating patterns and appetite being still out of kilter. At least food has a normal taste for me now, and my appetite is better.

Some of my frustrations are due to my own poor planning or downright stupidity. My short-term disability ended the day after the surgery, where I was to transition to a long-term plan. Well, guess who messed up in selecting benefits several years ago and has been going along thinking he has a long-term disability strategy when indeed there is absolutely nothing there.. Yep, the last month has left me with zero income, and going forward is becoming a serious drain on my savings. While not in dire straits yet, I've had to completely alter spending patterns and leave a few minor bills unpaid temporarily. The roof project that I had postponed for various reasons cannot go any longer, and with a big chunk of savings pulled out I will be taking care of that in upcoming weeks. I have a roofer lined up, and tonight I ordered up two skylights for the living room as well as one for the main bathroom. I should be able to carefully clamber about in the attic and frame up the three locations before the roofer shows up, whereupon I can cut open the roof deck and drop the skylights in as the roof is being done. I'll save the interior work for later, possibly during the spring. In the meantime, the attic space will be nice and sunny.

My beloved G.E. GeoSpring hybrid water heater seemed to have declined in health along with me, and in the last month has been running for longer and longer periods of time with the fans running at full blast. My troubleshooting found the refrigerant charge becoming lower and lower, resulting in coil freeze-ups (it uses a heat pump - an air conditioner in reverse - to heat the water) and very inefficient operation. It's under warranty, and Jeff and I decided to take our first query back to where we purchased the thing, at Sears. While I knew we would not be able to simply drag the thing back to the store and ask for a new one at this time (we got it in late March), I figured we would be able to get at least some friendly help from the sales staff. Instead, we were greeted with an almost instant defensiveness and downright hostile words from the people manning the post in the appliance section. The manager was not in at the time, and he never did get back with us by phone as promised. This action by the staff has guaranteed them a no-sale for the future, and our next purchase was to have been a fridge. I talked with a nice woman from G.E. who took all my information as well as my techy diagnoses to pass onto the service people who are scheduled to arrive on Friday morning. I'm hoping for a quick and friendly resolution to this issue. There is a price to be paid for being an early adopter of new technology, and this is an example of it in play. The water heater has made a noticeable decrease in the electric bill since installing it, and it also had a side benefit that I had planned on, since the operation of the heater also acts as a dehumidifier in the basement, allowing me to shut off the actual dehumidifier in the basement, saving at least another 25 bucks a month in electrical costs. Everything is set in the plumbing to attach a solar assist system, as well as supplemental solar whole-house heating. As my funds free up (read: I get back to work) I will make the cool heating apparatuses happen.

I've had a few other things go haywire or break down in the past few weeks and months. Jeff's truck needs (another) new intake manifold gasket, since it has begun leaking coolant (again) furiously. I should be able to deal with that without too much grief in a few more weeks as I heal up. My old truck has still not received any love since last year, so it sits unusable. Likewise, the garage never got finished in order for me to put the Dart back in. I guess the saddest thing is the big spruce tree that toppled in last winter's blizzard conditions is still laying across the garden bed next to the driveway. I could not get any of my friends to help me with this albatross that, were it not for my injuries, would have been at most a three hour job. To make matters worse, Jeff had contacted several people via online ads to come over, give an estimate for the work and hack the thing up. Not a single one of them followed through. The damn thing sits there as a hugely frustrating reminder that, no matter how I slice it (no pun intended), I am completely alone when it comes to dealing with certain things. Not a single friend stepped up to help me with most stuff. I don't expect everyone I know to be, say, a lumberjack. But this would ordinarily have been just like the times where I helped my buds out by cutting down trees at their places, where it was more like a party atmosphere rather than a task. A cooler of beer, some barbecue, and some simple physical labor aimed at getting a job done for one's fellow man. I've done it a bazillion times, and I realize I was never to get a bit of it in return. I guess my biggest frustration was finding so many backs turned on me when I thought I could count on friends returning favors. That alone hurts more than spinal stenosis, or the time I got smashed up in that car accident in '00.

I'm going to chop up that tree if it kills me. And, no, I don't expect anyone to come to my funeral if it does.

Here's hoping that I can have some fun, some work, and some income in the not too distant future.

A couple of wonderful people on my f-list noticed that I had deleted my LJ for about a day on Thursday. While I was mostly keeping myself from posting due to various issues, the reason for deleting my LJ was because one of my PCs got nailed with a nasty rootkit/trojan/virus trifecta through my own stupidity. Rather than risk compromise of various accounts, I took stuff offline as I dealt with the PC and did some changing of login credentials once I had the chance. I cleansed the PC this morning and all is back to normal. So, I am still here. And I definitely appreciate the fact that some noticed my absence and were genuinely concerned. I have not been very forthcoming about things of a more personal nature here, keeping instead to lighter fare like comics, music, memes and such. The reasons are many, but part of me had it in mind that no one would care, electing to pass over on the emo stuff. Granted, LJ has been a tough venue for me lately, it's real benefit being interacting with others on their turf rather than opening up mine. I still am loathe to post here, perhaps that will change.

As for what happened to the PC, my own damn fault. Typical shady pop-up ad that served up a confirmation dialog. Rather than killing it by closing, I answered "no" (or "cancel"), which, as we all know, lets the scum run wild. For my lack of vigilance, I ended up with something ironically titled "Antimalware Doctor", a rogue mess that wrecks the system and holds it for ransom by finding all manner of fake positives and demanding money for the cleanup. Thing is, the money won't get you anything but a compromised credit card account and the program itself installs a rootkit and various trojan droppers during installation. I cleaned it all up this morning and all is back to normal. Well, except for the power brick for a backup drive that died in the middle of the night and smelled bad this morning.

Those who attempt to tell me that having a Mac would have prevented all this will be openly ridiculed the next time they take a trip to the Genius Bar. ;o)

Well, there you have it. The reason for my short disappearance, explained less with personal notes and relying instead on geekery details. Maybe I will spell things out more as they should be. maybe not. Same as it ever was. ;)

Today marks two years since I lost my Mom to cancer. Right now I am too numb to really think clearly about it. We left Hillside early in the morning, and I wanted just to get home. I could not bring myself to walk up to the memorial because I knew it would have caused me to break down completely, and we'd still be there. We stopped by Jeff's parents' place for dinner and to leave the trailer behind. Without the trailer I sped back home, unloaded everything and went back out for the week's groceries with Jeff. After coming back, having a supper of sandwiches and chips, I find my main computer irretrievably crashed. This after having problems before trying to make backups. I am in such a space right now that I might end up sledgehammering the thing, all 3 grand worth just so I dont ever have to look at it again. I am not looking forward to going to work tomorrow, as I had left some issues to be dealt with when I got back from my so-called relaxing trip.

I just dont know how much more of this I can take. I am tired of acting like a duck, with the illusion of gliding along in the water all the while keeping that mad kicking beneath the surface. Jeff is visibly tired of it as well, and I fear he's going to get fed up and leave. After that, there's not much more to go on with.

Sorry to vent, but I am running out of ideas now.