captainsblog | Fixing Things (Reply)

It seems to be the week for it. For one thing, it sounds like they’re fixing the airport main runway again, because every morning around 4:30, and every night well past midnight, the sound of DE PLANES! DE PLANES! is right over our house. This went on last summer for months, and I’m hoping it’s just a temporary thing this time. We’ve also spent time fixing a floor, two printers, four tires and some annoying bits of my client base.

I will start with those last bits. Two of my longest standing opposing annoyances finally left my life this past week. One finally paid virtually all of a judgment going back to 2018 that I’ve been chasing ever since, while the other, a tenant I’ve been trying to get kicked out since 2021, finally agreed to leave no later than November and probably sooner. Yesterday then promised to bring the end to a more recently acquired annoyance. (This is the one where I was representing a guy who wouldn’t take my advice, refused to sign things he promised to, and then essentially, but not officially fired me at the end of July. He confirmed that to the judge in a virtual appearance last week, but because he is now unrepresented, so we had to do it in person, with a court reporter at 11 o’clock yesterday. That only added one more thing to the five appointments I already had scheduled, but it will be worth it once it's finally finally finalized.

As for the other fixes, there’s the biggest one, and the one I’ve had the least to do with. Eleanor decided it was time to use power tools to get the accumulated crap off the kitchen floor, since sweeping and not-quite-swiffering it only gets us so far. When I came home from Wegmans the other day, I thought the difference between these two sections was a shadow from the kitchen table.

Nope, that’s the real difference in the color, bringing it much closer to how those tiles originally looked. (She had me bring up one of the leftovers from the cellar for comparison purposes.)

Then there is the endless saga of trying to keep all of my various printers under control.

I never did manage to fix the one that I apparently shocked the brains out of a few weekends ago by trying to clean it. The solution to that was spending just over 40 bucks on a much smaller Canon all in one machine that has turned out to be perfectly fine for the little bit we use it for at home. "Perfectly fine," that is, until the baby-size printer cartridges they sold with it run out of ink. That’s where these companies make their money now. The only problem we had with it is it came preset at the factory to turn off every 20 minutes, and like most things you buy these days, they don’t bother to give you a manual to tell you how to make changes like that. I finally found the setting and fixed it the other day.

Meanwhile, my printer at the office, still under service contract, decided I wasn’t paying enough attention to it, and sometime early last Tuesday it decided to stop printing. It took until late Wednesday for the service tech to get out and replace two things on it that now have it working better.

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Which brings us to the tires.

Two winters ago, one of the tires on Eleanor‘s car had a blowout on the way to Rochester. I managed to get it to the edge of town to a tire dealer I’d never used before, called Mavis. They confirmed it could not be repaired, and since the originals were getting close to 40,000 miles anyway, they did a very quick and reasonable job replacing all four for a little over 700 bucks. They also signed me up for one of their credit cards, which gave us a little more time to cushion the blow.

Meanwhile, the Smart car is on its second set of wheels covering the roughly 90,000 miles I’ve put on that one. It’s a rear wheel drive vehicle with slightly larger tires in the back, so they can’t be rotated. I do, however, have a set of snow tires for the rear that go on around the beginning of December and come off whenever I can remember to take them off. This past season they only had about 3,000 miles put on them in close to six months, but mechanic did tell me that the replacement summer tires, as well as the ones on the front, were getting near the end of their life and would have to be replaced before the next inspection this coming December.

The past week moved that up.

On the way downtown to one appointment or another last week, I was driving that car, it was raining pretty heavily, and I was driving a little slower than usual. That did not sit well with the idiot speed demons who regularly go 30 miles over the speed limit on the 33, and just about every time one of them went flying by me, I could feel my car starting to hydroplane. Fortunately, it has good traction control, and kept me in my lane, but I was determined not to take any more chances- so I dug out that credit card from a year earlier, and headed over to one of our nearby Mavis locations.

The guys over there have always been thorough and kind when I've come in with the occasional need to top off pressure when a sensor goes off, and they’ve never tried to sell me anything I didn’t need. They had the rear tires in stock, and those went on last Saturday. The other two should be in today, so I’ll be heading over there to finish the job. All-in, because it’s a smaller car, the damages this time are only coming to a little over $450, and that goofy little credit card is giving us six months to pay without interest. So I’d recommend them over the Goods and the Fires we viewed in the past.

That visit also brought the most recent episode of What Has Ray Lost THIS Time?

The only downside to things like while-u-wait car repairs is having to sit in a waiting room with a tv blaring, particularly if the blare is something like Fox News. So I brought earbuds to plug into either phone or laptop. Between the tv not being on and the job going remarkably quickly, I never even plugged them in- but when I got home to use them, they were gone. Of course they were black, in a black computer bag and a black car interior. I combed both multiple times. I then retraced steps. Fortunately, there were only two of them: the dealer itself, and the Arby's on the way home I stopped at for Eleanor's lunch. Neither had them. After one more thorough look in car and bag, even shaking the latter in case it fell into a crevice, I surrendered and pulled out my last set to use while mowing the lawn yesterday. This got me almost the entire show of local music on WBFO, including the sweetest song you'll ever hear titled "i hate ur guts":

Watch on YouTube

Only by giving up did the universe finally hear my plea. Because yesterday morning, near the beginning of an impossibly long day and after one of the worst cognitive moments of recent weeks, I went to put my workday files into that computer bag, and saw a sliver of white sticking out of a velcro-patched pouch:

Yup. In there all along. Lovingly packed into a velcro-protected pouch. You know, so I don't lose them:P

My followup neuro appointment can't come soon enough.