My Blog

I get a few days off!!!!

Okay, I am finishing seven 12-hour work days in a row. Ick. It’s really been hard to get anything done.

I am not as physically tired as I was earlier this week. I have plenty of things around the house that need attention this weekend. My blog, for example, has suffered while I was working so much. I am planning to work on stuff around the house and rest up a bit on my days off.

I was able to repair my broken treadmill, so things around the house are normal again. weld.jpg I MIG welded the broken pivot for the treadmill deck back to the frame, adding some extra metal to make sure that it doesn’t fall off again. I first purchased a treadmill from Keys Fitness in 2000, and I put about 4400 miles on it before the very same thing happened. Keys replaced it with a new one (lifetime guarantee on the frame!!) in 2004. Less than a year after that, we had to replace the DC controller board (also under warranty) and now the frame has failed again. I contacted the manufacturer and sent a digital picture of the hole where the deck pivot pulled out of the frame. broken.jpg   Boy, that flash sure makes the dust stand out, huh?  Should have wiped it down first…..  The e-mail that I received back indicated that the service rep was waiting for a supervisor’s approval before sending me out a new treadmill again. Most folks use their treadmills as clothes hangers. I walk on mine every day (although I don’t run on it). In any event, I feel that I’ve got my money’s worth from them. The weld repair may last years, and even if it didn’t, the manufacturer now makes their treadmills in China instead of the US. The replacement may be of lesser quality than the one I have now, amateur weld job and all… I’ll let you know how that works out.

No word yet on the transmission rebuild job on my Explorer. It’s been in the shop since Monday, and since it’s a second car, I told the mechanic that he could take his time. I’ll check back with him on Monday if I don’t hear from him before then. The trans has been less-than-perfect for a long time – it’ll be nice to have that done. Automatic transmissions are great, but they can be expensive as well. My Focus has a manual transmission, and I love that little car.

It’s been a little difficult getting sleep lately. I have been working at night and the construction work across the street has been a little noisy. It’s amazing how fast those houses are going up. I am disappointed that the new houses have block foundations and crawl spaces instead of full basements. I am sure that that saved some money, but the owners will certainly miss the space and convenience of a basement. Here are some pictures of the progress – taken from my bedroom window. This is from ten days ago, while they were preparing the block foundations. house1.jpg The next picture was taken this morning. They were applying the plywood sheathing to the framing. That’s some noisy work- they were using hammers (noisy) instead of nail guns (a bit quieter, I think). house3.jpg The work is moving pretty quickly. I believe that they are building 13 homes like this across the street. It will improve the neighborhood a bit. The new houses are replacing some vacant, run-down ones. I would like the houses better if they had basements and if there was a better separation between the units. It looks like they nailed up some sort of blue sheet on the first-floor walls between the units (metal?). Will that stuff keep the noise down between the houses? Will it stop a fire? I really appreciate my one hunderd year old brick house. Sure it’s old, but it’s brick…..

I have been working on the house a bit. I installed a doorbell and a light outside the door. I had to remove the panel from my alarm system to do some work on that wall. The system didn’t like that too much, and I find that I will have to re-program it. The programming for one of these systems is really complicated and will take me a few hours this weekend. It will likely rain much of the weekend, so that’s a good opportunity for that sort of work.

I have not seen Andrew for a few days. He had some friends over the other night while I was at work. They trashed my kitchen, ate most of the food and spilled a bunch of the stuff on the floor and tracked it all over. I’ve cleaned up the mess, but I phoned him and let him know that I really wasn’t pleased by the situation. It’s likely that I won;t see him for a while. When I called him, I was still a bit sore from the running that I had to do on Monday, so I was a little less patient than I normally am.

Next week at this time, I’ll be flying to Brasil again. I have a week of vacation added to my normal week off.

Can’t wait. Eu tenho muito saudade.

Greg


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One response to “I get a few days off!!!!”

  1. Monica Avatar
    Monica

    Hey, you said “my Focus”? I thought it was mine….
    Just kidding… I love you!

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