Amateur Auto Mechanic

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.

October and Cooler Temps

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.   

Weather fixation

Yup.  I'm totally fixated on the weather these days.  It's not as hot as it had been, although we did break a record by having 70 days of 100 degrees or more this year . . . so far.  I'm not totally convinced that the weather is through with its super-heat yet, but the last few days have been nice, comfortable mid-80s to mid-90s.  Which tells you how hot it's been . . . that I think mid-90s is comfortable.  I mowed my back yard and didn't even break a sweat hardly.

Thought I'd throw in a picture of my twin peach trees.  You'd never know they were once the same size. 

So the temperature has been 'decent', but we're still severely dry.  It actually rained Friday evening.  I was standing in my doorway, literally trying to will it to rain before it started.  Me, the sun-lover, trying to will rain.  It's just not normal.  It did rain though.  It was only a few hours of a pretty soft rain at my place, but I was just so happy to see moisture.  Of course, I'm still watering today since Sunday is one of my watering days.  It'll take more than that little bit of moisture to counter the effects of our long drought.

So see?  Fixated on the weather.

I survived my first work week back from vacation.  It wasn't too bad since I had cleaned out all those emails.  I'm actually mostly caught up, which is kind of amazing.  Of course, I partly owe that to the fact that the new instruments didn't get installed while people argued over who pays to run the water and power for them.  So they're still sitting waiting on installation, and I have only a few validation studies waiting for me to reveiw and sign.  Those came from the new tabletop instrument that didn't require any rerouting of systems.  Other things seem to be moving along nicely.

I interviewed medical school applicants yesterday.  This is about the fourth year I've volunteered to interview the applicants.  I enjoy it, but I only volunteered for four weekends this year since I'm fairly busy with other stuff.  I have another meeting in Washington DC at the end of the month . . . coming up fast come to think of it.  I just had a meeting in DC just over a week ago, so DC twice this month.  Keeps me out of trouble I guess.

I've been sorting through vacation trips and pictures and trying to figure out what I did what years.  I know the first long vacation trip I took was in 1993, and that was a 17 day, 7100 mile jaunt around the western US by myself with my camping gear in my car.  Then I went back to the Utah parks  (Zion Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Capital Reef, Arches) for the next five years (1994 through 1998), although I didn't do all four parks every year.  In 1999, my sister Monica and I went and we went to all four parks.  In 2000 and 2001 I didn't take the long vacation, as far as I can remeber.  In 2002 I went by myself.  In 2003 and 2004 Yasmeen started going with me.  2005 was by myself.  2006 was with Yasmeen.  2007 was Monica, Yasmeen and I and that was a fun trip!  They were all pretty fun, but that one especially was.  Yasmeen went with me in 2008, and Monica has gone now in 2009, 2010 and 2011.  So although I used to go alone all the time, after Monica went with me in 1999, I've only gone alone twice.   They've all been pretty great trips, each memorable for different things.  One of these days I'll have to transcribe all my hand-written journals from those various trips into the computer, and maybe intersperse them with the pictures from the trips.  Someday when I'm bored for something to do.

Anyway I guess that's about it for now. 

Almost time to work

Yes, the summer has totally gotten away from me. And vacation has totally gotten away from me. Today is my last day of vacation, and tomorrow I return to work after three weeks off. It's going to be hard to go back, but at least this week I remoted in and cleaned out 700+ emails. Tomorrow shouldn't be too horrific.

Vacation has been wonderful. Monica and I did the Utah parks again, and even though it was a shorter trip than we usually take out there, for various reasons, it was great. We hiked Angel's Landing again, of course. The picture here is the trail near the top of the hike. We also did a hike in Bryce. Those were our only two hikes though. We skipped Capital Reef completely this year, and opted to shop in Moab rather than hike in Arches. Easier on the body; harder of the credit cards.

We did things a little differently this year in a couple of ways. Usually we take the roads up through the panhandle after Amarillo, and then take roads across northern New Mexico. It's an incredibly scenic drive . . . once you get past Raton. Nothing "incredibly scenic" about most of the Texas panhandle nor eastern New Mexico. Instead of taking that route though, this year we took I-40 straight west from Amarillo to Albuquerque and then headed northwest to Farmington. It wasn't an especially scenic drive but it was 2 to 3 hours shorter!! I really liked that! Yes, I know that interstate is going to get you places faster than back roads, but I've almost always opted for back roads to see the scenery. However, given that I've made that drive almost every year since 1993, I figured I could skip seeing it this year. And I did really like hitting Farmington in daylight and not exhausted from 15-ish hours of driving.

Another different thing we did was after leaving Moab we drove straight to Denver to visit with my nephew, niece and great-nieces. That drive was only about 5 1/2-ish hours, less than it usually takes us to get to my sister's place. Interstate again.

The weather was fairly warm this year out there. That's probably not surprising, given the national weather, and it was cooler than Dallas, which wouldn't have been difficult. But Zion hit 103 the second day we were there. Bryce was nice though. Not too cool for me, for a change. We got thunderstorms both nights we were in Bryce, which didn't make Monica very happy, as she has a pretty good lightning phobia. The days were picture perfect though, so I have to say I'm glad the rain and storms came at night.

Both hikes were great. We saw the peregrines and condors both at Angel's, but didn't get near enough either of them for pictures this year. This little guy hanging onto my boot and his friends were about all we got close enough to take pictures of. In Bryce, we did the loop section of the trail in the opposite direction that we usually hike it, and I think I like it better that way. We missed sharing the trail with the horses that way. Picture below is from the Bryce hike.

Another different thing we noticed was that there seemed to be less people this year, in many of the places we went and on the roads. We wondered if it was because we started a week later than usual. Perhaps more kids were back in school and we were past the peak season.

In general I would say that it was another wonderful Utah vacation, with a finishing touch of getting to spend time with my Denver grand-nieces.

Today I'm doing stuff around the house in preparation for going back to work tomorrow. Plus I'm watering my lawn. The county has restricted water usage because of the continuing drought. The temps finally broke and have been lovely (80s), although we're supposed to get three days of 100s again this week. But we've had no rain. Not a drop since we had a brief morning rain on Aug 14th. And I think that was the only rain in the metroplex for the last 60+ days. So I can currently water my lawn on Thursdays and Sundays before 10:00 am and after 6:00 pm. That will help my water bill, but my lawn is going to look worse than it does. Can't be helped. I may not be able to keep it alive if we don't get rain, let along looking good.

The dogwoods succumbed to the heat and drought this year, and the holly might have also during the time I was away. I'll give it some time to come back since it's managed a previous comeback. The peach tree-lets look good still. Well, the big one looks good, the tiny one is surviving still.

That's it for now.

HOT!

Geez! I am SO over this heat. And I'm not just saying that because I just mowed my lawn. It's frigging HOT outside!

According to my newspaper July was the hottest July on record. Nice to know. What else I know is that this last week we've broken the daily high temperature every single day. 107 on Monday, 110 on Tuesday, 109 on Wednesday, 108 on Thursday and 107 on Friday, every single one a new daily record for hot. And we're now on day 36 of consecutive daily temperatures over 100, quietly creeping up on the 42 day record from 1980. *sigh* Have I mentioned that I'm tired of this heat?

I just mowed my back lawn today, which is one of the reasons I'm bitching about the heat. It really looks nice when it's freshly mowed though. It's filled in amazingly from the patchy lawn I started with this spring and in places it's really thick. You can see from this picture how nice it's looking. The front lawn is still patchy and struggling, but that saves me on days like today when I only need to mow the back and not both yards. Even though I started at 10:00 am, it was miserable mowing. This picture is actually here to show the remains of the peach tree trunk. It's splitting! Right down the center. Weird.

I started the lawn work a little late this morning because I wanted to get the inspection sticker on my car first. It's due this month and in two weeks I'll be leaving on vacation. The car's now ready to go, even if I'm not. I'm going to need to spend next weekend doing all the stuff I really don't like to do . . . dusting, cleaning bathrooms, etc. My sister will be coming here and then we'll leave from here for vacation, so I need to do a real house cleaning instead of the usual lick and a promise. I need to start pulling out all the camping gear here pretty soon also.

A funny thing, when I drove off from the car dealership this morning, I realized they had left a package of those car air fresheners on my dashboard. *laughing* I couldn't decide whether to be insulted or not. I mean, maybe the guy who drove my car out front left them there by mistake. Or maybe it's like how they always wash the car before they give it back to me, it's meant to be an 'after service' nice thing. They may not be trying to tell me that my car stinks . . .which it doesn't actually. Still, if it's meant as a nice 'after care' gesture, they should pick one that's slightly less ambiguous.

Another thing I need to do, pre-vacation, is decide whether I think Addy will be okay for 10 days if someone only comes in to put food down every 3-4 days. Or if I should hire someone to come in and put wet food down daily. Addy tends to lose weight when I'm gone and I'm wondering if she wouldn't lose weight, or wouldn't lose as much if she had the option of wet food daily. Her teeth are not that good, so maybe the dry food is hard for her. She gets daily wet food when I'm here. If I hire someone, she won't come out for them, but after they leave she might come out and eat the wet food. Decisions, decisions. Will she be more stressed by having a stranger come in, or by extended time of only dry food?

I got my Kindle. It's pretty cool, I gotta admit. I particularly like being able to buy a book and having it in my Kindle 30 seconds later. Instant gratification! No more waiting for books to ship. This is so going to come in handy when traveling.

Anyway, just random ramblings today. Think I'll go look for something to snack on.

O.O July is gone!

Whew! Time continues to zip by. The summer will be gone before I know it, especially since in three weeks I'll be off for vacation. I have a BUNCH of stuff to get done at work between now and then.

Let's see, what's going on? My big laptop died. The hard drive crashed, taking ALL my pictures with it. I'm told that it's dead enough that it will cost me big time to retrieve them, if they can even be retrieved. Those pictures are the only thing I wish I had not lost. Everything else is replaceable or re-downloadable. Yes, yes, I know. Always back up your hard drive. Everyone knows that. And I'm betting most people are like me and remember to do it after it's too late. So I'm typing this from a new computer. I did try to salvage the old one by replacing the hard drive, but it seems the graphics card was also toast, and the general consensus for replacing those is: buy a new laptop. So I did.

It's hot here. Yes, I know that's typical of Texas in July, but it's really HOT here. 29 days in a row of temperatures over 100 degrees with no end in sight. That puts us in second place as the longest string of 100 degree days, with only the infamous Summer of 1980 having more (42). At the rate we're going, we may break that record too. Despite watering my lawn and shrubbery nearly every day, they are struggling. The Bermuda grass out front is really struggling, and all my shrubs along the front of the house are turning brown. Even with water, the continuous heat is just too much for them. The house faces west so they get all the intense afternoon heat.

I was gone to a convention for 5 days and the dogwoods succumbed. Poor little things are dead, but I'll keep watering that area anyway. The holly is fighting to maintain it's comeback, with its new leaves curling up and turning brown. You can kind of see that in the small picture to the right. If we don't get rain while I'm gone on vacation, my lawn, shrubbery and little holly are all going to be dead when I get back. That's because we've not only had the excessive heat, we've had NO rain. So far they're still letting us water all we want as long as it's before 10:00 am or after 6:00 pm, but considering we're under 'exceptional drought' conditions, I can see that changing in the not too distant future.

My silly peach seedlings are still doing well as you can see in this picture. I suppose it's easier to keep them well watered in pots. The big one is about 21 inches tall now and is putting on limbs as well as leaves, and the tiny one has decided to put on new growth since I transplanted it. It's not noticeably gaining in size, but it's growing little leaves, which it wasn't before.

I'm doing weekend chores today. Since I was gone last weekend, the house needs some attention. Yesterday I was busy setting up the new laptop into the configuration I want and downloading the necessary programs etc. I like the keyboard on this laptop. It's easy to type on and you can turn the mouse pad off if you're using a wireless mouse. That's a boon for me because I have a tendency to hit the mouse pad while I'm typing, with often not good results. So so far I like it. The Windows 7 OS it comes with uses bing as a search engine though, which I had to change. I like Google. And of course I've been busily restoring all my bookmarks and settings. It's pretty close to how I want it now although I'm sure I'll find other things I need to add as I go along.

I also bought a kindle yesterday, although I bought that online and so need to wait for it to get here. I was convinced to buy one by two things: a couple of my colleagues at the convention were advocating it, and the fact that I couldn't take my newest book with me while traveling. It's a HUGE hardback book and weighs too much to cart around, and it's available on kindle. I could have been reading it on the plane. So I broke down and ordered one. I suspect I'll still read books at home, but since I'll be doing so much traveling this next several years, I figure a kindle will come in handy.

I guess that's about all for now.

Long July 4th Weekend

It was certainly nice that July 4th fell on a Monday this year. Long weekend! Yay!! Sadly the weekend is almost over now, but I think I've got time to get a post in.

It's been a very productive weekend for me, as well as a very hot one. The thermometer on my back patio read 108 yesterday and 109 today. Yes, it's in the shade, but the patio itself radiates heat, even when it's shaded. So no doubt it hasn't actually been 108 and 109 in the area, but it has been over 100 both days.

I did something new yesterday, or anyway something I've never done before. I washed my house. Yes, the house. I had siding put on the house a number of years ago, and lately I've been noticing that it's pretty filthy. So a couple weeks ago I bought one of those scrub brushes on the end of a long pole, that you can fill with soap and attach to your hose. Then yesterday morning I tried it out. It wasn't hard at all! I started with the front porch and front area around the garage door because that area is in the shade in the morning, and like everything you do outside in Texas at this time of year, you try to beat the heat as much as possible. Then I moved to the back yard and did about a third of the back before the sun got too hot. Then I quit and went in for lunch. My house is partly brick, but the back is all siding, so I knew that would take the longest and be the hottest.

Anyway, I figured I'd quit and eat lunch and wait for the sun to move over the house and enough shade to appear in the back to be able to go out and do the rest. The back is the area all across the back of the house and around the back door and patio. The same patio where the thermometer was reading 108. When there was enough shade for me to be in shade while I worked I braved the heat and went back out to finish the job. I was determined to finish it because I had a lot of odds and ends around the house I wanted to do this weekend, and that was one of them. So I started again and as I was getting into it, and thinking how glad I was that at least I was working in the water if I had to be out in that heat, a couple of huge thunderheads built up! In less than 30 minutes the whole sky was overcast and the temp reading on the thermometer dropped from 108 to 88! It was amazing. I finished the house in relative comfort, and 30 minutes later the sky was clear again, without ever dropping a drop of rain. I was a little sorry about that actually because I could use the rain. But I was really grateful for the heat reprieve while I was working. Of course when the sun came back out the temperature bounced back up to 103.

So, I would say that I'll probably never take a job washing houses for a living, but it wasn't bad. As long as you don't mind being wet and doing some manual labor. I wonder if I may discover I have some sore muscles as time goes on though, reaching up over my head and scrubbing with a long pole scrub brush. The house looks absolutely great! It was even dirtier than I thought and it looks beautiful now. Maybe I won't wait so long in between washes now that I know how relatively easy it is.

This morning I mowed the lawn before the main heat of the day. Even so, it was plenty hot out there. Even the cats are staying inside, and they usually like laying on the patio in the shade because it radiates heat. Just too much heat right now. I hope everyone thinks before using fireworks tonight, given how dry the area is.

Other things I've done this weekend that make it fairly productive include taking my car to the shop for them to replace the heat/exhaust shield, some minor shopping to get more potting soil and pots, some minor trimming of the shrubbery out front, changing all my anime calendars to the new month, basic cleaning and laundry around the house, fixing my door lock so that the deadbolt will work and transplanting the peach seedlings, which I actually did on Thursday evening. This picture is Zoe, also trying to figure out why only one tree is growing. This was before I transplanted them. I put the big one in a larger pot and moved the small one to the ceramic pot. I figure if it's going to grow at all, maybe transplanting it again will help. We'll see how it does. The holly is still putting on new leaves but is also struggling big time in the heat. I tried rigging some shade for it, but I'm not sure it's helping much. I think the only thing that will help the holly is cooler weather, and I don't see that happening anytime soon.

The car trip to the shop was because my car decided it didn't want to start 2 Friday's ago. I managed to convince it to start, both before and after work, but after work I drove immediately to the dealership for a new battery. I figured I'd have them do the scheduled maintenance too and while they were doing it they discovered my exhaust shield was ripped and mangled around my exhaust pipe. I seriously don't know how it got that way. I haven't bottomed the car out or hit any road debris that I'm aware of. Anyway at that time they took off the mangled shield and ordered a new one. So this trip was to install the new shield.

I did something else this weekend which I haven't done in a long, long time. I sat down and read the Declaration of Independence. What an amazing document. Then I sat there trying to imagine the feelings of Thomas Jefferson who drafted it, and the other amazing men, all of whom believed so strongly that we should no longer be British Colonies, but should be our own free Country. They had so much courage of their convictions that they pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to make it be true. Considering all their sacrifices to make the USA what it is today, I think I should try to take some of the freedoms I enjoy a little less for granted. Although, perhaps they would be happy that those freedoms that they fought for are now considered the inalienable rights of every American. Still, I think I'll try being a little more grateful.

Bye, bye, long weekend. It's been fun.