DIY 2: Electric Boogaloo

Same room. New challenge.

For as long as I can remember, I've valued my independence. From growing up as a typical 1980's latchkey kid to living in a single dorm room my last two years of college to living on my own for about seven and a half years now, I've always managed to figure out how to do things on my own, from teaching myself how to cook the basics to rigging a TV stand to putting in an overhead desk light in a desk with no overhead holes. (Here's how I did that.) Truth be told, I'm probably not as improvisational and self-reliant as I like to think I am sometimes, but I've still figured out enough to get me this far.

But what possessed me to try to replace my own bathroom sink? I mean, it looks fine...


But upon closer inspection...


Oh. Yeah, that's kind of an important piece that's just sitting out on the surface of the sink like that instead of being down in the drain where, well, where it's supposed to be. I'm not exactly sure how this happened. But it caused a problem that needs to be solved.

There's not a lot of room to wriggle around in the cabinets underneath the sink, but I was able to squeeze my way in there and get the underneath bolt supports loose enough to disconnect the assembly from the water line. Which left me with this:


Notice that the faucet is still attached to the flex piping. Easy enough to remove, right? Not if your wrench isn't big enough. I was going to need reinforcements.

BY THE POWER OF GREYSKULL!!!!

You could knock somebody out cold with that thing. Seriously.

So I put the BIG WRENCH to work and got the old faucet off the pipes, then switched it out for the new joint.

Some serious age down below

Now this was the hard part - installing the new plunger. First I had to remove a leaky section of pipe and get the old pop-up assembly out of its death grip to the underside of the sink. Then I had to put the new one in its own death grip (which is far more manageable) and figure out how to re-attach the pipe and test for the leak, then tape it up.

The new pop-up assembly. It's GREEN! The wooden bit on the left is the sliding drawer on the top level of the cabinet.

The last part was installing the actual plunger and connecting it to the assembly, which revealed the source of the problem that led to all of this in the first place: the previous plunger had somehow gotten stuck and broke off inside the drain, which not only caused the leak, but also caused the drain stopper to snap off. Who knows. But after several adjustments, I got the plunger to work to where it does what it's supposed to do... plunge.

See? That thing moves up and down now like it's supposed to.

SUCCESS! *flexes*

All told, the job took five to six hours, not including cleanup and disposal of water and undesirables:

The de-parted

The moral of the story is that the "easy installation" that was touted on the package is a half-truth at best.

The other moral of the story is that sometimes doing it yourself is worth the aggravation, even if it's not done perfectly, because you can go and adjust things later and actually know what you're trying to do (and saving at least $300 in the process).

Actually, the real moral of the story, when you take into account that I've replaced a toilet, a water heater, a refrigerator, and now the bathroom sink since I've been here is this:

The next place I live is going to be a lot newer.

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Listening to: Kanye West - Stronger
via FoxyTunes

The Summer of Electronic Armageddon

So I've been gone way too long. But I've got my reasons.

Let's go back to June 19th. I got home from work one night and I was watching TV when it shut off. On its own. I turned it back on and the volume started to max out. On its own. Then it started changing channels... you guessed it. ON ITS OWN. Efforts to exercise control with the remote were rebuffed with extreme prejudice. Finally I unplugged it and went to bed, baffled at what was going on.

The next day I plugged it back in. Same deal. So while it certainly wasn't in a vegetative state, it clearly wasn't capable of making rational decisions. I declare it dead and buy a new 26-inch flatscreen because it fits both my price range and my size range.

ONE WEEK LATER.

After getting a few too many blue screens of death over a period of three days, I started to panic and start my annual computer backup earlier than I normally would have. During the backup, I got another one.

And that one turned out to be the last one.

I don't remember how long I'd had that Dell desktop. Maybe since 2002? Did I move down here with it? Who knows. So I've just replaced my TV and now my computer's dead. (The wonderful irony here is that I had been considering for a while what kind of new computer I was going to get, maybe within the next year or so. We'll be coming back to this.)

So I went out the next day and bought a new laptop. Brought it home, went to work, came home and set it up. Couldn't connect to the Internet. Checked the cable, checked the modem, checked the connector cables. Nothing. After a combined hour or so on the phone with both the cable company and Dell support, it was decided that the laptop had a bad motherboard that wasn't recognizing anything that was trying to connect to the Internet.

Which meant that they'd have to replace it. And I'd have to stuff it in a box and ship it to Mississippi or Indonesia or wherever. (It might have been Arkansas, actually. Let me check. The label says Houston but I doubt it was the final destination.) I also have a metric assload of boxes piling up in my apartment because of all this, added by my purchase of a small bargain-basement laptop just so I could keep everyone updated on my progress quickly.

Got the Dell back a week from that Monday (we're in the middle of July now) and after fighting with it some more, I figured out the other aspect of what had happened: The cable modem the cable company game me was so old ("How old WAS it?") that they'd stopped updating USB drivers for it about two years ago. Thankfully, that problem was easily solved with the purchase of an Ethernet cable, which the comp happily recognized and chugged its way onto the Internet.

The speed of this thing is mind-blowing. Seriously. Why didn't I upgrade sooner? ("Because you're a broke idiot.") Easy there. I'm not broke.

ANYway, you'd think that'd be it. But last week - last Thursday, actually - my dad tried to call me with the news that my mom had been laid off from her nursing job that she'd had for about as long as we've lived in New Jersey. I say "tried" because my phone was busy. And my phone was busy because there was a problem with the line.

Of course, I didn't find out about any of this until Dad e-mailed me the next day. I figured - and hoped - that maybe it was just the phone that I've had for close to 20 years breathing its last breaths. So on my break from work that night, I went and bought a new phone, which, again, I'd been telling myself I was going to do for a year or so and never got around to it.

Turned out the phone wasn't the problem.

Two aborted attempts to contact the phone company later and I had an appointment because their remote test couldn't determine if the problem was inside or outside the apartment and somebody would have to come look. In the meantime, I actually had to turn my cell phone on for a week straight. I drained the battery on it. That's happened maybe one other time since I've had it.

This was finally resolved today. The guy showed up at about 8:30 this morning (!) and pokes around inside and outside for a while before finding the problem: a short in the wiring. It's possible that something related to last week's thunderstorms had caused the wiring to short out, but the outside connector box was pretty old anyway (Aside: The next building I move into will be much, much newer than this one. I've had a toilet and water heater go down on my watch and now this.) and probably just conked out on its own. It was a surprisingly easy fix - of course, they're trained professionals - and he was on his way before 10 and I set up my new phone, alerted everyone, and went back to bed.

(Though, to be honest, the telemarketers? The static? Didn't miss any of that.)

Anyway, I'm back, and it's almost football season to boot, so TJD business will definitely be picking up. (Among other things, the JackSux 6 draft is Saturday unless it isn't anymore.)

P.S. - This has been my ringtone for the last week.

What's In A Name

So yeah, this is really weird and Twitterish in-my-own-head stuff but I'm putting it here anyway.

You know the the blonde bartender in the Budweiser commercials who's always extolling the virtues of Bud? (And what does she actually care which beer her patrons drink? She getting a kickback?) The ones that end with Jet's "Are You Gonna Be My Girl?" playing in the background? Yeah. Well, I always called her "Christine" in my head just becuase I felt like she should have a name. I didn't think anything of it; I mean, she doesn't look more like a Christine than anything else or anything like that.

It turns out I was right.







Yeah, I'll just let that sit there, a nice bit of obscure knowledge you can take and pass on to others.

Year-End Freeze Out

So the last day of 2008 was an... interesting one.

The last couple days I'd been noticing that my freezer was starting to warm up and the stuff in it was starting to thaw out. After turning it all the way up to compensate and try to hold it off for a couple days, I called my landlord and asked if he knew anyone who did good work and could come look at it.

Turns out he did. So the guy shows up, and it's actually the same guy who repaired my washing machine when this happened. We pull the refrigerator (it's one of those top/bottom deals) out of its space and he gets down to open up the back of it. After pulling the back compartment off, it doesn't take him much time to figure out the problem.

Freon leak.

Now this refrigerator came with the apartment, and I've been here since 2002, so who knows how long it's actually been here. The refrigerator seems to be working fine. I should have known something was up when he asked me exactly that. Then he told me what had happened.

"That sounds bad," I said.

"Yeah, you need a new refrigerator." Ths was followed by about two hours of back-and-forth phone calls among the repairman, me, and my landlord, who kept calling back to ask me to check the dimensions of the place, because it has to fit in the space and give you room to open the doors and what not.

After finally getting that handled, I went out to spend some of the cash my parents game me for Christmas. (Besides my few specifics, I should just say "Amazon gift cards" next year and be done with it.) Got some pants, Madden 09, and a new alarm clock to replace the one which had suddenly gone 10 minutes ahead of the rest of the world.

I got home at about 6:30 and pulled into a completely dark apartment complex. Thank God for this flashlight, even though I had to change the batteries by candlelight after getting them all lit. The power stayed out for about another 45 minutes.

No more than five minutes after the power came back on, my dad called. "I guess you were one of the 5,000 people who were without power," he said, obviously quoting the news report that had said as much.

Frequent Reader Note: The usual year-end festivities are almost complete. The Top 15 won't be in February like last year. :)

Sign (or Tag) of the Times

We'll ignore the fact that I'm on a relative shoe shopping spree (Two pairs in two weeks for the first time in two years! I'm out of CONTROL!) to point out something both odd and disconcerting I saw tagged to my new pair of dress shoes:

"AIRPORT FRIENDLY
No steel shank"

And on the back:

"This shoe affords all the comfort and support of a normal steel shank, without the anticipated travel delays. So pick up a pair. And proceed directly to your gate at the airport."

Hmmm.

Digging Up Sludge

- So I'm beginning to think that Butch not only rigged our Fafarazzi league, but is somehow pulling strings on the outside. He grabs Britney in the first round and not three days later she goes plummeting off the deep end. (Who ever imagined the day would come where Kevin Federline would look like the stable, dependable one?) Meanwhile, I finally dumped Simon Cowell after three weeks or so because he somehow only got me two points in three weeks while American Idol is on the air. Thanks for nothing, you hack.

- There's a slight outcry here because the Eagles aren't bringing Jeff Garcia back. But looked at another way, Garcia > Feeley, but Heather > Carmella, so it's pretty much a wash.

(By the way, I'm so going to catch hell for that from the usual suspects.)

Also, if this is the most off-the-field drama this team has this year, I'll be doing a jig.

- Clint Malarchuk. Tim Krumrie. Dave Dravecky. Napoleon McCallum. Tom Browning. Shaun Livingston. Did I leave anyone out?

- Randomly heard the other day: "Counting Blue Cars."

- This may also be a good time for me to try to rally the Jersey girls of the world to execute a full-scale beatdown on Antonella. She's not helping your cause, ladies.

- And finally:



Because sometimes, Spam is just too highbrow.

Bandwagon's closed. Please catch another.