I want to apologize to everyone who has provided suggestions on my first music post. I haven’t forgotten about you, and I’m going to get around to listening to your suggestions. Life has just caught up with me a bit these last few weeks, and I’m only slowly digging out.
First was the expected stuff: as most of my readers know, I had my wisdom teeth out a week and a half or so ago. It went amazingly well, considering what had to be done, but even a quick recovery from something like that tends to take a few days.
That meant that I was behind on something else that needed doing: yard mowing. Before I could do that, I had to pull a wheel off the mower and get a tube installed. Fortunately, getting the wheel off was easier than I expected. I managed to get that chore done and ran the riding mower on (I think) Wednesday. That left the areas that I have to use the push mower for. Unfortunately, that has to wait until I can spend time getting the thing to start. That was supposed to be this weekend (along with looking at the weed eater, which wouldn’t start either).
Well, on Thursday, I replaced the tires on my bicycle with ones that are more suitable for pavement riding. My hope is that I can use that to begin having more fun with my cardio workouts (something else that has been pretty much completely interrupted). That went really well, but then as I was cleaning up, I closed the garage door on the tailgate of the pickup. That shouldn’t have been that big of a deal, but whoever originally installed our garage door opener didn’t do a good job of reinforcing the door. The strut where the opener attaches was never in great shape, but my stunt pretty much finished it off. Overall, the door was okay, but we couldn’t use the opener until I figured out how to fix it.
So… I spent a large part of my brain power Friday figuring out how to fix the door. I got my ducks in a row pretty well, and to make a long story short, this weekend was spent making the fixes to to the door. It turned out pretty well. Some of the upper panel is still a bit bent, but the frame is now much stronger. I thought I was done this afternoon. I even managed to find (and hopefully permanently unstick) the sticking relay in the garage door opener that was making the automatic light feature not work. I should have known that was too easy…
My last task was to readjust the garage door opener so that it would properly reverse itself when it encounters an obstacle (rather than trying to rip up the door). Doing that involves opening and closing the door a lot (some of it with a 2×4 laid flat under the door to test it). Apparently, the amount of work involved in that testing process was a bit too much for the motor’s starting capacitor to handle. It failed pretty spectacularly (lots of smoke and hissing). So… dead garage door opener. I found and ordered a replacement for the capacitor, but that will probably take a few days to get here. Once it does get here, hopefully I can do my tests more carefully and keep it running.
So… the house and yard are still up by 2 on me, and the weekend’s already gone. The good news is that I have a bicycle that’s ready for cardio, and I even managed to fix the really nice Fluke 87 multimeter that was a gift from my grandfather. Hopefully I can get the garage door sorted out one night this week and start looking at what I need to do to get the push mower and the weed eater going. That will allow me to get caught up on the yard. That may be work for this weekend while Amy is visiting HouseXP at the geek farm. At some point along the way, I have to get back into my workout routine.
So… I promise I will get to the music suggestions sometime. I haven’t forgotten, but after-work life has just been a bit busier than usual. Don’t give up on me. 🙂