It’s June 21, the longest day of this year, the day of summer solstice for 2014 here in the northern hemisphere (winter solstice down under). Summer solstice is considered the first day of summer, although we’ve already seen plenty of hot days in central Virginia.
My last blog post was written May 21: one month ago. I won’t say nothing has happened in the past 31 days. It’s just that nothing worth telling the world about has happened. On the other hand, that’s never stopped me from writing before.
First, the faucet on my kitchen sink developed a drip. It’s a modern faucet so it doesn’t have an easy-to-replace faucet washer. You see, if it had a washer, fixing it would be a breeze, and we can’t have that. It has some kind of valve for which no one carries parts, so I may have to replace the entire faucet assembly: hot water, cold water, and sprayer. It’s ten years old and that seems to be par for a faucet lifetime these days. But fixing the faucet – plunking down $200 for a new one, turning off the water, crawling under the sink with a basin wrench in one hand and a flashlight in the other – is on hold until the drip becomes just a little more annoying.
Then there was the approach of hot weather and my Jeep needed a dose of a/c refrigerant. Although it’s a simple operation and I’ve done it a number of times, this year something went wrong. I had a brain fart. Or a senior moment. Whatever. I won’t bore you with details. Suffice to say that when you try to recharge an automobile air conditioner and said air conditioner is not running, bad things can happen. In my particular case, the bad thing was an entire 12 ounce can of R134a with Stop Leak venting inside my garage. I can vouch that atomized Stop Leak does not have a pretty smell. But lesson learned; I bought another can of refrigerant and was able to get the a/c system to emit cold air once more.
Then my Jeep developed an issue with its idle speed. When I took my foot off the gas, the engine would slow too much, to the point it sometimes stalled. If it didn’t stall, it would bounce back to a normal idle speed. I decided the likely cause was a dirty Idle Air Control (IAC) motor. The IAC is attached to the throttle body by two screws; removing it was straightforward. It was indeed dirty. The pintle (the part that regulates engine air flow at idle) was sooted up. I cleaned it using throttle body cleaner and a toothbrush until the pintle was shiny. Then I reattached the IAC to the engine. I started the engine, and found it had a different problem: the engine wouldn’t idle at all. The only way to keep it running was to keep the gas pedal partly depressed.
In for a penny, in for a pound. I decided that the IAC was probably bad, and if the parts store had a replacement for less than 50 bucks I would buy it. Maybe it would fix the problem, and maybe it wouldn’t. But if it did, it would save me the hassle of taking the Jeep to a dealership and waiting hours to have it repaired. So I walked to the parts store. And as I walked beside busy Boulevard, I reflected on how unpleasant it is to not have transportation available in the form of a personal vehicle. I passed by a turtle on the roadside that had been squashed flat. “Yeah, pardner,” I said to the flattened turtle, “that’s what happens when you move too slowly in a world of automobiles. It’s no place to be on foot.”
The parts store had a replacement IAC in stock and it was about 30 bucks. I bought it and trudged back home and installed it on the Jeep’s engine. It worked. The idle problem is history. Woo-hoo.
Then came the next problem: my computer died. I turned it on one morning, and the fans ran, but nothing else happened: no splash screen appeared on the monitor, and there was no attempt to boot up. I thought possibly the power supply was bad, so I checked all the voltages. All were nominal. I checked the internal drives by cabling them to another computer. I concluded that repairing the computer would cost nearly as much as buying a new machine, and I’d end up with a six-year-old Windows Vista computer. So I decided to bite the bullet and buy a new machine. I placed the order and it’s on the way (says FedEx). It departed Nashville, Tennessee, at 3:07 this morning. I hope those FedEx boys are careful with it, and don’t drop it, nor toss it around too much. I hope the shipping container is marked “This End Up” and “Handle With Care” and “Consignee Will Kick Your Ass If You Break This Computer.”
And sometime along the way during the last 31 days (and maybe a few more) I gathered all of my dad’s letters that he wrote from the South Pacific to his new bride back in Virginia during the Second World War, and I typed them up, and I put them on the Internet where they will live forever. They’re mostly “mushy” love letters, but there is the letter in which he wrote of seeing American fighter planes (P-38 Lightnings) shoot down a Japanese Zero which then crashed near him. There’s the letter he wrote right after recovering from malaria (just a postscript, really, that read, “P.S. I was in the hospital for a while but now I’m out.”) There is the letter he wrote after seeing his buddies killed by friendly fire. (All the letters were read by army censors, and if the censors didn’t like something, they cut it from the letter.) One day I may read the letters again and try to decide if there are any that might be of interest to the general public, and maybe I’ll post links to those letters.
This post is long enough. I have to save something for July. ;-)
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