Gustav is about to make landfall, and even though it has nothing in the world to do with me, I'm keeping a tab open to watch for it because, in a very morbid way, it fascinates me. We almost lost New Orleans last time, and I'm curious to see if it's finally going to get blown away.
I'd never thought much about New Orleans before Katrina hit, and when it did, my thoughts were shaped by reading the endless on-line arguments over whether the city had a right to exist in the face of natural environmental changes. It seemed pointless (and even offensive) to keep repairing the dikes when it was obviously stupid to build a coastal city below sea-level.
I like to pretend that I'm a logical thinker, intelligent enough to make the correct conclusions given sufficient evidence. But there is also a deep well of reactionary cynicism buried in my soul that boils over when bad decisions are repeated ad nauseum. This is most evident at the office, where the current state of affairs is best summarized by the phrase, "Waiting for the next crisis to occur." It has been a long, stressful road from one disaster to the next, not unlike the situation in Louisiana, with the walls being patched every few weeks to survive the current storm and then a period of frantic effort to prepare for the next. Meanwhile the storm waters are rising ever higher.
At some point, someone has to put down their foot and say, "Enough!" If the evidence points to the fact that the city is built on the wrong site, it's time to abandon the city and go elsewhere. That's just common sense. No amount of lingering historical significance is warrant enough to waste the time and money to attempt a rescue, not in the face of seasonal storms that make kindling of our best efforts to forestall the inevitable.
But cynicism says that these people will never make the intelligent decision, not when their emotions are involved. People are remarkable in their ability to disregard the obvious in their search for the sublime. Our whole political history is evidence of this. People will continue to place their faith in hearsay and gossip and anecdote and wishful-thinking and miracle cures and political pandering so long as it coincides with their dreams and wishes and prejudices.
I wait for the leaders at the office to make the intelligent decisions, and am unsurprised when they do not. When logic dictates that they spend the time and money and resources on one project to get it done, they farm out all the engineers to other projects and outsource all the real work to offshore temps who have neither the training nor the experience for the task. When we are over our heads with too much work and not enough people to do it, they trim the workforce to "cut costs". When we are behind schedule and understaffed, their solution is to harangue the employees to work longer hours rather than admitting that the deadlines can't be met, and make appropriate adjustments.
It's wearying to the bones, and numbing to the mind, making cynics of us all. In this we are made useless for the next (inevitable) project because we have grown so callous through mismanagement and mistreatment that we enter into the unspoiled land with an eye toward finding fault, and thus poison the waters before we have even taken a drink.
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My back is aching and my sinuses are on fire.
A few weeks ago, the door of Cheryl's closet fell apart. It is a mirrored pocket door - with mirrors on both sides - which means that not only is it difficult to gain access to it in order to perform repairs, there is also the added thrill of dealing with the possibility of broken glass regardless of which side the door is gripped. This promised to be one of the more fun home projects (in the "thrill of victory, agony of defeat" vein).
Complicating the joy of working on the home project was the presence of billions upon billions of microscopic elements commonly known as "ragweed" which are currently jabbing my mucusoidal tissues and causing various violent reactions throughout my body, including sneezing, wheezing, dripping, itching, aching, swelling, and the inevitable closing off of the airways. This is, of course, merely icing on the cake, a spice of life, an extra element of fun to add to the mix.
Being unfamiliar with the door mechanism, I did the obvious thing and took the trim apart so I could access the stops and other items which required removal (according to the on-line references). Then it was a simple matter of pressing the appropriate plastic locking mechanism in the proper sequence to disconnect the door from the rollers, thus allowing it to drop to the floor (but not on my foot!) so that it could be swung inward and removed from the slot proper.
The next step was to remove one side of the door (which was entirely mirrored glass, mind you) very, very carefully with a putty knife so that the inner mechanism could be revealed. And what it revealed was quite interesting. The aluminum frame was not joined, as one might think, by screwing the four pieces (top, bottom, left, right) to one another, metal to metal. No, this was a clever design! The corners were all joined together with plastic! That is, behind each corner was a square of plastic, and the screws were inserted through the holes in the aluminum into the plastic. And we all know how well metal screws in plastic work!
As if to buck the trend, though, the immediate cause of failure was determined to be an inability on the part of one of the screws to maintain its hold on the beveled edge of the aluminum. Evidently the plastic hole didn't line up well with the hole in the aluminum so that the screw was inserted at an angle; consequently, over time the head of the screw was able to circumvent the edge of the hole and fall through, thus invalidating any support it was providing. The sudden release of this support, coupled with the weight of the door, broke the plastic, and the door sagged on one side.
It might be possible to replace the plastic piece and thus repair the door, but I'm not thrilled with the idea of searching for the plastic piece on-line and having it shipped from wherever it is manufactured (they don't stock those kind of parts at Home Depot or Lowes) and then trying to put the frame back together and re-glue the glass to the frame, when I can just purchase a new pocket door (with glass on one side only) and re-hang it in an hour or so. I'm basically lazy. Plus I don't have much faith in the design.
So we went to Home Depot and ordered a new door. Can't wait til it gets here. In the meantime, I'm going to pull the other glass panel off the aluminum door frame and hang one of the mirrors in the girls' room, then play around with the door frame to determine the optimum method for securing the pieces to one another.
In my copious spare time.
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Meanwhile, the Toyota was driving me crazy. Those guys that installed the used engine in evidently didn't bother to check out the thermostat; the car is running way too cool. Being too cool is not necessarily a good thing in a car engine because it is designed to run at a specific optimum temperature, and unless this temperature is maintained, the combustion is not as efficient as it is supposed to be. I don't have any specific mileage numbers, but it was obvious from anecdotal evidence that it wasn't getting the 35 - 40 mpg I was expecting.
The needle on the temperature gauge barely hovered above the minimum. My guess was that either they hadn't bothered to install the thermostat, or it was defective. Either way, the engine was never warming up.
So I rigged up a drill-powered pump with some 1/4-inch tubing to speedily drain the radiator into waiting (clean) gallon milk jugs (so I could recycle it easier), pulled apart the casing and removed the old thermostat. Couldn't see anything obviously wrong with it (I'd have to test it at precise temperatures to determine if it was really broken), but I'd already bought a new one, so put the new one in and sealed it up again. Then put the fluid back in and sealed up the system and ...
The gauge now reads nearly normal, just a tad lower than I'd hoped. Took it around the neighborhood for a test spin (no leaks!) and it drove OK. Then drove to the store and back to let it warm up properly. Felt a bit smoother.
Carburetor still needs some adjustment, though. It still races momentarily when letting off the accelerator. I did some on-line searches for that symptom but didn't find anything, so I might just take it down to the Toyota dealer and see if anyone around here remembers how to tune up carburetors.
These days they all seem to rely on the computers to do the work for them.
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By the way, I put some more photos up on Flickr.
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