It's an incredibly lovely Sunday morning. The weather has settled into it's Texas Fall mode with mornings in the low 60s and high temps in the mid-80s. Perfect temperatures. Now if we would just get a little more frequent rain, it would be ideal. The rain last weekend wasn't enough to break the drought of course, but much of Dallas looks green again. That's a nice plus. My sister in the high country in Colorado got about 10 inches of snow last weekend when I was getting rain. I'm glad I'm not there, although the Fall colors are gorgeous, from the pictures she's sent me.
Today is a beautiful day here. It's still cool right now, totally blue sky, bright sun. I'm taking advantage of not having to be anywhere today to do a bunch of puttering. Plus Sunday's my watering day, so I've been out watering the lawn and starting to cut back some of the dead shrubbery. Amazingly, a bunch of green is showing in the interiors of those shrubs. Looks like most of them will make it.
My car is fixed. It spent 3 days in the shop and is all back together now. I'm happy about that. The rental I had was a BRIGHT red Chevy Cobalt. Not a bad car, but it doesn't handle like my Subaru. I was glad to have my car back.
Friday at work I might as well not have gone in. Computer issues made the day less than productive, although I did attend three meetings I really needed to be at. Given I had three meetings I suppose my day would have been fairly disrupted anyway. The computer issues revolved around missing files. I've spent this last week working on several PowerPoint presentations that I have coming up, and like a good girl, I saved and closed them before I left Thursday evening. Friday morning they were gone. Along with two excel files I had saved and four file folders full of files I had created recently. After a minor panic attack and major ranting, an Information Systems guy came to my office to tell me that they were migrating things to a new server. My stuff wasn't gone, I just couldn't access it. They predicted I'd be able to access it again in, oh, eight hours or so. *laughing* Talk about your mixed emotions. Vast relief that I wouldn't be required to recreate files from scratch, relief that I didn't need any of those PowerPoints on Friday, vast irritation that I couldn't work on anything current. Life on a computer network, ne?
Anyway, not much going on. Just thought I'd put in a picture of my pretty red roses. The yellows are blooming too right now, but aren't as big and full as the reds. This may be my shortest blog post ever, but that's it for today.
My poor car. It takes a fair amount of abuse from me. Not that I purposely abuse it, but I drive long distances and I like to drive fast. Almost two weeks ago now I had an unexpected meeting with some road debris.
I was commuting to work at 5:30 am and in fairly heavy traffic for that hour. I was traveling "above posted speeds" in a group of cars three lanes across and several deep and I was moving along next to an 18-wheeler. All of a sudden he threw up a large piece of road debris of some sort. It came at me too fast to really tell what it was and I had nowhere to go. Just the luck of the draw that it happened to come at me. So I hit it on the right front (passenger side) bumper and ran over it, and my car started making 'unusual' noises. Damn! Was my thought. (okay, it was more colorful than "damn", but you get the idea).
I worked my way across traffic, took the next exit and looked for a street light (not much out there where this happened). I got my trusty flashlight and went to look and originally thought I was dragging the debris. A big chunk of stuff was dragging and rubbing on the front tire. I tried to pull it loose and discovered it was attached! It was part of the undercarriage of my car. So I twisted it around and stuffed it back up in there and drove the rest of the way to work. The car didn't overheat or lose gas or make any more unusual noises except it was (and is) very loud when I accelerate. When I left work, there were no drips or fluids under the car, so since I had to fly to DC the next day, I put off taking it to the shop until I got back.
Turns out that piece of debris ripped my engine shield off the bottom of my car and loosened or damaged other pieces. The good news is that it missed my fog light and headlight on that side, and it looks like the front bumper (which wraps the whole front of the car) can be salvaged. Tomorrow I'm taking it to the shop to be repaired and renting a car for the three days they will have it (hopefully only three days).
So where does the amateur auto mechanic come in? Friday as I was leaving work I approached the car and thought "what the hell?" A large piece of the undercarriage on the driver's side was hanging down to within about 2 inches of the pavement. I got down on my knees (thankfully I wasn't wearing a dress) and determined that it was fairly solidly attached and then drove the car home that way, carefully skirting any road conditions that would cause the car to bounce. When I got home, I waited for the car to cool down and then laid down on the ground and got under it to see what was going on. I even got under the car on the passenger side to see how the same piece on that side was attached. Scarily, it's not attached. That's apparently the broken piece that I stuffed back up in there and it's just sitting in there! Anyway, when I pushed the hanging piece back up into place and looked at it by looking in the wheel well over the tire, I found a place where the hanging piece has a hole that matches up with a hole on another piece of the car. So I found a nut and bolt (almost too small so I put a washer on it to make sure it doesn't come through), and bolted the hanging piece back up in place. I have no idea if it's intended to be bolted there, but it's working fine, and I have my car to get around in until it goes to the shop tomorrow.
You can see in this slightly fuzzy picture, the shiny new nut and bolt holding the piece in place behind the edge of the tire (lower left corner of picture). I have a tendency to try to fix things myself, although I admit I usually leave car things to real mechanics. I needed to be able to use the car this weekend though. Desperation is the mother of invention. I know it's "necessity", but in my case it was desperation. I had to be desperate to try to tackle car stuff.
So that's my car saga.
On a bright note, it's raining!!!!!!! And the sunshine girl is dancing for joy. It's amazing how good a mood I'm in without the sun being out. We need it so badly. My roses are loving the nice temperatures and with a little help from me watering and now the rain, they're blooming like crazy. Pretty.
How about that? My weather fixation continues. Actually, I just like sunny Sunday mornings. It was 56 this morning when I went out to set my sprinklers. Brrrrrrrrr! I haven't felt 56 in a long time. It's supposed to stay like this for a little while. High 50s to low 60s at night, mid-80s during the day. Beautiful weather, but no rain in sight.
I have seen rain though. Both times I went to Washington DC in September it was raining there. I wish I could have brought it back with me. Still, even with water restrictions my lawn is looking pretty good. The break in the heat will probably save it, although the same can't be said for many of the trees in the area. Flying into Dallas last Friday, everything looks brown, and maybe half the trees are brown rather than green. You can tell there's a serious drought here. It looks like mid-winter rather than early Fall. I'll have to cut back all my dead shrubbery out front and hope to find some green in the center. That shrubbery is usually green all year.
The cat kids are fat and happy. I found a pet sitter for them this year while I was on the long vacation and had her come in every other day. She worked out perfectly. Only Addy came out for her, but at least Addy got wet food every other day. Addy didn't lose weight while I was away like she has been for the last couple of long trips. You can see from this picture that neither of them is in danger of starving, but I didn't see the usual, Addy-dropping-weight-and-Zoe-gaining that I often see when I'm gone long periods of time. Here they're taking an early morning drink at the patio birdbath/cat watering hole.
I have no trips in October, but a lot of small projects to complete. I'm participating in a Webinar this week. Then I have an e-learning project due, a talk for the lab techs, a presentation at journal club, a set of chromatograms to tidy up and submit for a book chapter, a science project to help a local student with and a GC/MS assay to bring up in-house to make our ICU docs happy. That's my list I'm hoping to either complete or get well into this month. The GC/MS assay will probably take more than a month to validate, and the science project I just need to grow up some cells and figure out some basic stuff before helping the kid set up the project herself. The talks and presentations should be pretty straight-forward, so they'll get done this month. I've become pretty good at throwing presentations together.
My promotion went into effect on September 1st and all is good at work for the most part. I had to qualify that because of 2 things: We have a new Chairman of Pathology, and a new Chairman means lots of changes coming along. It will be interesting to see how things work out. The second thing is that the County Hospital is struggling right now and going through lost of changes. I sign out test results over there, and they are working on getting credentialing up to date. I haven't been credentialed over there previously despite signing out for the last 10+ years. So I'm getting credentialed, and in the meantime, someone else is covering my signout duties. At my primary job though things are going very well. New instruments are being installed, and I'm staying nicely busy.
And that's the news for this lovely Sunday morning, October 2nd, 2011. Or something like that.
Friday at work I might as well not have gone in. Computer issues made the day less than productive, although I did attend three meetings I really needed to be at. Given I had three meetings I suppose my day would have been fairly disrupted anyway. The computer issues revolved around missing files. I've spent this last week working on several PowerPoint presentations that I have coming up, and like a good girl, I saved and closed them before I left Thursday evening. Friday morning they were gone. Along with two excel files I had saved and four file folders full of files I had created recently. After a minor panic attack and major ranting, an Information Systems guy came to my office to tell me that they were migrating things to a new server. My stuff wasn't gone, I just couldn't access it. They predicted I'd be able to access it again in, oh, eight hours or so. *laughing* Talk about your mixed emotions. Vast relief that I wouldn't be required to recreate files from scratch, relief that I didn't need any of those PowerPoints on Friday, vast irritation that I couldn't work on anything current. Life on a computer network, ne?
