Tuesday, January 8, 2019

Day 3302

What a busy day. The roofing crew arrived early. It took a while to explain what was going on, but once we were all on the same page, the guys found two additional leaks. Since these leaks corresponded to areas inside the house where water was getting in, I felt like we were making progress. When I asked whether they felt confident that the had discovered all the potential leaks, they just shrugged. "We'd have to tear up the entire roof to do that," one guy said. At least the guys made an honest effort to patch the leak. We'll have to see what happens when it rains again.

I got a quote on fixing my office chair. It's going to cost more than it cost to fix the dryer. How can that be? It's only a chair. Reluctantly, I told the guys to go ahead and order the parts. The repairs will still cost considerably less than buying a new chair. Janet suggested just going out and buy a cheap chair at Office Depot, but I like my Aeron Chair. It has served me well and even though I don't spend a lot of time designing websites or editing videos these days, I still like to be comfortable when I'm writing the blog.

Since I was making progress on the roof and the chair, I decided to tackle the driveway as well. I went out and bought a hundred pounds of river rocks at Home Depot and dumped them in the pothole. It wasn't an elegant solution, but it just might work. At this point I just want to stop getting mud all over my car every time I back out of the driveway. Before filling the hole with rocks, I checked to make sure there wasn't a water pipe underneath. Nope. The ground is just saturated with all the rain we've had lately.

The last thing on my list today was an attempt to fix the weird French toilet in one of the bathrooms. This seldom works, but since I can't get parts for the toilet anyway what do I have to lose? Basically I just shut the water off, clean off the parts as best I can and them put the flushing mechanism back together again. This is the most complicated toilet I've ever seen. It was probably designed by the same person who designed Citroën automobiles. Rube Goldberg would be proud.

Dash is still slipping on the bricks, so I went to the storage warehouse and brought back a few more rugs. I've already brought quite a few of these rugs home, but I was surprised at how many still remained. We must have covered our entire house with cheap rugs when Dot was sick. The rugs do make a difference. They help Dash get up when he's been sleeping on the floor and they help him stay upright when he's awake.

Towards the end of the day I got a call from the guy who is restoring my Sequential Circuits synthesizers. He said that one of the synthesizers was as good as new now and that he was making progress on the other two. These synthesizers have been in the shop for over three months now. I didn't even want to ask what this was going to cost me. I still don't feel bad about restoring this stuff. Vintage Sequential Circuits gear is very desirable. When everything is finished, I'll either start playing the keyboards again, or someone will want to buy them.

All in all, it was a good day. I like making progress even if the progress is small. The weather should be nice tomorrow as well, so today's roof repairs should have plenty of time to dry before rain puts them to the test again. Fingers crossed. For some reason I'm slightly optimistic today.

Jordan is today's Dalmatian of the Day
Watch of the Day