Labor Day Weekend 2005

My mom and dad came up on Friday afternoon to spend the weekend with us. Elise was catering a party and I got home around 6 p.m. Too tired to cook I ran over to Double Daves and picked up a pizza for dinner.

Elise came home in time for pizza and chatted with my parents. Since it was the beginning of the month, I spent a couple hours in the office paying bills. Since selling the trusty Shadow last week, I decided to take that cash plus some and pay off one of the other vehicles. When I get in “mad pay off loan mode” I tend to strap us for cash. So, it’s Ramen and ketchup for the next couple weeks.

Saturday was guard the TV and watch college football day. I got off the couch a couple times to eat. Later that afternoon mom, dad and I headed out to Lakeway for Clay’s 19th birthday party. Just as we reached Bee Caves we got a flat in my parents’ car. Dad and I, with nowhere near Indy pit stop crew speed, changed the flat and went on to the party.

We got home from the party shortly after Elise got home from working all day. We were all exhausted and went to bed.

Elise left early on Sunday morning to head out with the girls for Kim’s bachelorette party. I figured that this would be a good opportunity for me to move the house’s thermostat from one wall to another. See, our thermostat was originally and strategically installed in the dead center of an 8′ wall. This entire wall was dedicated to the display of a little thermostat. We would much rather hang a nice framed photograph or painting on this wall. So I decided to move the thermostat.

After disconnecting the thermostat I went into the attic where I worked quickly and immediately found the five conductor wire that leads from the attic and down through the wall to the thermostat. I pulled on said wire. The wire wouldn’t budge. I pulled harder. It became a fight. I pulled on the wire so hard that I heard the AC compressor turn on and then off. I didn’t think anything of it.

I eventually pulled the mangled wire from the wall through the attic. I learned that I didn’t have quite enough wire to drop down into the new wall. Off to the HoPot.

An hour after splicing the new wire, dropping it down the wall and hooking up the thermostat, I had no AC. The fan didn’t turn on. I tried the heater. Nothing.

I scratched my head and eventually consulted my dad. He had no suggestions. It was getting close to 1 p.m. and the house was going to start getting hot.

The week prior I found an electrician on craigslist.com. At the time I was wanting someone to come out and run electricity to the deck. Now I needed someone for my thermostat wiring. I called the guy I found on craigslist and asked if he knew anything about thermostat wiring. He assured me that he did and he was at the house an hour later.

Five hours later I had a working thermostat but still no air conditioning.

So I did what most people would do in this situation. I cranked up all of the ceiling fans and dad and I went to the HoPot for more lumber for the deck rafters.

By the time we got home it was too late to work on the deck so I cooked a couple t-bones and ribs for dinner. The outside temperature was cooler than that of the house so dad and I stayed outside most of the night. Mom stayed in the house and was miserable.

We all went to bed around 11 and the temperature inside wasn’t that bad. I think my bedroom was in the upper 70s with two fans blowing.

On Labor Day my dad and I labored. We woke up at 7 a.m. and started fixing the rafters on the deck. Dad rigged a makeshift tool used to straighten the 2×6 rafters as I nailed down 1×4 cross beams to keep the rafters in place. Ten hours later we had all of the cross beams in place and nailed down.

Elise came home from her camping bachelorette party early in the afternoon and mom and dad left later in the day.

We sat semi-miserably in the warm living room and watched TV until 10 o’clock and went to bed. Despite being totally exhausted from working on the deck in the hot sun all day, I didn’t sleep well at all.

I woke up this morning and called ARS Service Express and have an AC technician coming over to the house this morning. Hopefully I’ll come home tonight to a nice, cool home.

Back in my day…

I have a Visioneer Paperport 3000 parallel flatbed scanner that I received as a generous present from my parents almost ten years ago. It used to connect to my Windows PC via a parallel cable that was daisy-chained with the printer.

Since my Windows box crapped out on me again I moved it to the guest bedroom. Now I don’t have a scanner because the iBook doesn’t have a parallel port. This old scanner doesn’t have a USB port so it’s basically useless to me right now.

I ran over to CompUSA after TKD tonight to shop scanners. Seeing how I don’t do much scanning these days, I decided against paying for a new USB scanner. I do, however, have a very important image that I wanted to scan tonight.

So I drove home sans a USB scanner. On the way home, I found myself saying aloud, in my best Grumpy Old Man as played by Dana Carvey, “Back in myyyy day… we didn’t have fancy things like You Essss Beeee!”