What're we doing this weekend, Brain? Same thing we do every weekend, Pinky..
Trying to keep my house from falling apart. :)
Just before my big vacation trips last fall, I went into my garage an switched on the lights. "Ker-PLONK!".. One of the 8 foot strips made that sound and failed to light. Fuck! And no time to do anything about it because I was swamped with work going all batshit insane, and preparing for my trips.
I guess I'm a bit anal-retentive, but burned out lights drive me crazy. It just looks ghetto and slobby. So, I put up with it since then due to lack of time, but this weekend, I decided enough was enough. I figured from the sound it made and the fact that all four bulbs were out that it was the ballast. Sure enough, I tested all of them in another working fixture and they were fine. Yep.. the ballast. Well, it turns out it's pretty easy to fix. Just make damn sure the power is off if you don't want to become a real life Bob Clampett / Tex Avery gag.
Anyhow, after $20 in parts, including a new ballast and wire nuts from Home Depot, and less than an hour of ladder climbing, wire stripping, and fiddling around, I have fully working garage lights again. Yay!
So this weekend was productive, but it wasn't all work and chores. On Saturday I went over for a housewarming party with some good friends and we had tacos, beer, and other natural medicinal products, and played "You Don't know Jack" for several hours. I'm not normally much of a gamer these days, but that game is rather enternaining, especially when you have a nice buzz going on.
It's funny, these medicinal products, when they wear off tend to leave me a bit antsy, and for some reason I got a bug up my butt to fix my camp stove on the back porch. I have a nice steel griddle on it but for some reason when I turned on two burners both went down to about half output and the damn thing wouldn't get over 300F. I tried the old trick of turning off all the gas, disconnecting, reconnnecting and slowly turning the gas back on to reset the low flow safety setting, but that didn't help. Fortunately, I had mistakenly bought a regulator with the stove way back when I first got it and it was still sitting on the shelf, so I figured it could still be the regulator. Even though I hadn't used the stove that much, maybe some condensation had gotten in there and rusted/gummed things up and it wasn't opening up the gas flow properly. So I swapped the 'new' on in, and Presto! Suddenly I was getting good strong flames from both burners. So more flat top grilling is in my near future.
So it was a productive weekend.
On the work front, I've been a bit down. My boss, and friend of 20+ years, is having some heartbreaking issues personal/family issues I won't get into, but it has me pretty depressed lately. I really hope things will turn for the better.
Just before my big vacation trips last fall, I went into my garage an switched on the lights. "Ker-PLONK!".. One of the 8 foot strips made that sound and failed to light. Fuck! And no time to do anything about it because I was swamped with work going all batshit insane, and preparing for my trips.
I guess I'm a bit anal-retentive, but burned out lights drive me crazy. It just looks ghetto and slobby. So, I put up with it since then due to lack of time, but this weekend, I decided enough was enough. I figured from the sound it made and the fact that all four bulbs were out that it was the ballast. Sure enough, I tested all of them in another working fixture and they were fine. Yep.. the ballast. Well, it turns out it's pretty easy to fix. Just make damn sure the power is off if you don't want to become a real life Bob Clampett / Tex Avery gag.
Anyhow, after $20 in parts, including a new ballast and wire nuts from Home Depot, and less than an hour of ladder climbing, wire stripping, and fiddling around, I have fully working garage lights again. Yay!
So this weekend was productive, but it wasn't all work and chores. On Saturday I went over for a housewarming party with some good friends and we had tacos, beer, and other natural medicinal products, and played "You Don't know Jack" for several hours. I'm not normally much of a gamer these days, but that game is rather enternaining, especially when you have a nice buzz going on.
It's funny, these medicinal products, when they wear off tend to leave me a bit antsy, and for some reason I got a bug up my butt to fix my camp stove on the back porch. I have a nice steel griddle on it but for some reason when I turned on two burners both went down to about half output and the damn thing wouldn't get over 300F. I tried the old trick of turning off all the gas, disconnecting, reconnnecting and slowly turning the gas back on to reset the low flow safety setting, but that didn't help. Fortunately, I had mistakenly bought a regulator with the stove way back when I first got it and it was still sitting on the shelf, so I figured it could still be the regulator. Even though I hadn't used the stove that much, maybe some condensation had gotten in there and rusted/gummed things up and it wasn't opening up the gas flow properly. So I swapped the 'new' on in, and Presto! Suddenly I was getting good strong flames from both burners. So more flat top grilling is in my near future.
So it was a productive weekend.
On the work front, I've been a bit down. My boss, and friend of 20+ years, is having some heartbreaking issues personal/family issues I won't get into, but it has me pretty depressed lately. I really hope things will turn for the better.