Okay, the dust has settled from this morning’s freneticism.
Nothing has been decided about the bathtub drain, although I did determine, by poking around with an orange stick, that the exit hole in that drain is amazingly small. It may be that the drain is slow because it’s just built that way. This is something I will think on.
The dogs have settled down, apparently having yapped themselves into a stupor. As Catseye pointed out at this morning’s post, there’s nothing like a barking dog to spike your blood pressure. Indeed, that was the reason Cassie’s previous humans cited for dumping her at the dog pound. Ruby, however, is not a barker; she usually will not rise to the barking bait even when Cassie is baying. There actually has to be something going on to cause Ruby to bark.
The going-on, as noted, was the joy of young children playing on the street, it being a school holiday. Arf!
The kids have now gone even further on to bigger and better things, probably televised, and so the hounds are napping.
Out at the pool, which has been shut off for the past several days pending arrival of a repairman, the following Discoveries were discovered:
• The pressure gauge is not, after all, busted. With a little fiddling, I fixed it.
• Harvey the Hayward Pool cleaner stopped dead in the water NOT because the pressure gauge was broken or because much of anything else was wrong with the pump and filter, but because he had ingested a pecan, kindly dropped into the pool by a passing bird.
Those birds do that all the time. My challenge is to train the critters to deposit the pecans, preferably un-nibbled, right outside the back door, thankyouverymuch.
So with great pleasure I called off the pool repairman.
Planning to dump a bag and a half of pool shock into the drink, I tested the pool water first. Good thing: Acid level was normal; chlorine level was so high it turned the yellow test color to orange. Ooohkay…that explains why no algae has been growing in those much-neglected precincts. It also excused me from having to shock the pool, lhudly sing huzzah.
It further excused me from the planned trudge to Home Depot. Main thing I needed to buy there was chlorine tabs, at an elevated (not to say “extortionate”) price. Clearly, with chlorine levels high in the toxic range, there’s no need to add more…
The effing Venza (the more I drive that car, the less I like it) has again developed an infuriating rattle, somewhere in the vicinity of the dashboard. This, it develops, is a known issue with the Venza…and with several other other late-model Toyotas.
When I say I will never buy another Toyota as long as I live, I am not kidding. If I could figure out how to trade this thing in on something else without bankrupting myself, I would do it. Today.
The last time (which is to say the first time) I noticed this, I made an appointment with Chuck the WonderMechanic, who thought he could fix it. But before I could get the car to him, the rattling stopped. And…interestingly…here’s how it happened to stop:
I’d driven out to lovely Sun City at SDXB’s dinner invitation. When I got into the car to drive home after dark, it suddenly started rattling — and I mean make you CRAZY rattling.
The weather was much like it is right now: crisp and rainy.
A couple of days later — before the appointment at Chuck’s — I rattled on down to a Costco. Left the car parked in the lot for half an hour or 45 minutes. Then moved on to a Target, where the vehicle sat in that store’s lot for another 45 minutes, give or take.
In the Target lot, it was parked facing the sun. As today, the sky was patchy: sun and clouds. That meant the sun had at least some opportunity to shine directly on the black plastic dashboard.
Ohhhkayyy…now I come out of the Target, climb into the car, drive away…and realize it’s stopped rattling!
Huh. I surmise that the sun has heated the black plastic enough to cause it to expand, and in doing so has tightened the joints between the several plastic parts that comprise the contraption’s dashboard.
I do not take it to Chuck.
This was several weeks ago.
It was fine until yesterday. But weirdly, the weather conditions are almost identical: it’s been raining, it’s been cold.
So, when I rattled on home, I parked it on the driveway facing into the sun, and left it there for an hour. Figured if it worked before, maybe it’ll work again.
Well. It might have sort of worked: after letting it sit for an hour, I took it out again. The rattle seemed less egregious. But…it still rattles.
Okay…if a little solar heat is good, a lot must be better, eh? Left it parked in the driveway again. Whenever I feel like getting up, I’ll drive it around the block again.
It looks like little can be done about this. When you get on the Web, you see a lot of crazy schemes indulged by do-it-yourself aficionados. Some worked, some didn’t. But none of them are things I care to bother with.
This would explain why the vehicle was turned in after two years, wouldn’t it?
Friend came by with her books in hand. We’re going to donate them to the church’s fund-raising book sale, with stickers on the inside front cover directing readers to where they can find more of Friend’s work.
These are children’s books, and they’re really pretty cool. She is a grade-school teacher and a special-ed expert. The books are precisely targeted to specific grades. As part of her marketing campaign, she has gotten herself invited to classrooms to work with the books and the kids…and as she was describing the things she and the teachers were doing with them, I realized she had a kind of de-facto lower-grade textbook-like tool. I suggested she write teachers’ guides describing the various insightful and innovative ways she had for working with them. She liked the idea.
Another fucking robocaller jangled as I sat down to eat lunch, drink, and write this.
Checked into Ooma again. It still looks dauntingly technophobia-inducing. To hang onto your phone number (which I really need to do, since it IS my business number), you have to ask Ooma to switch it over. It takes three to four weeks, they say, to make the shift — though you get to use your number, you apparently also get to pay Cox for the privilege (as well as paying Ooma) and during that time, obviously, you wouldn’t be able to engage NoMoRobo.
It doesn’t exactly defeat the purpose…but it sure as hell makes it more difficult to achieve the purpose.
So I remain undecided about whether I want to subject myself to the hassle of changing carriers.
Most of our paying work is under control just now. Returned one article to the client this morning. The Kid is working on a second. So from my perspective, nothing remains to be done. We’ve read over 300 pages of the 475 pages the project is said to comprise, and now we have a lull. I should be able to goof off.
Which, you could say, is what I’m doing now.
