I have no brain cells left. First it was the downtime and DA12->DA2 move work which took the last 20+ hours (working holidays is really starting to get to me) and then just a while ago I primed and painted the target for the trip next weekend. Lots-o-fumes, and now I've got a headache. Looks good though. The woman is surprised I didn't paint it camo colors and although I did think about it I gave up on the idea after the fumes from the primer got to me. BBQ black it is...

Here is a shot of the power panel they were working on during our downtime. We actually had to power the whole room down in IL1 so they could replace some breakers and whatnot. That part of the whole operation went really well (the power up/down). First real cold start they've ever done. We did cheat a little though, I was worried that the old arrays would die when powered down so we actually left those spinning and relied on the UPS. Normally it's only got enough power for the room to run 5-10 minutes (since the generator kicks in by then) but with just 20 old arrays running it lasted the whole 90 minute outage. Glad we didn't have to do the room where all the filers are.

Last update before I get away from the computer for a full day, here is a pic of the new AC unit outside the house. That flip-up cap is doing it's job already, you can see the leaves and crap that would have gone inside had that thing not been there.

OK, one more. I picked up some of these on sale, should keep those pesky rabbits from running away after I hit 'em....

Looks like Dennis' journal is gone, his ISP seems to have been replaced with a domain squatter. Perhaps someone forgot to renew their info or perhaps just his journal is gone and the main site page has always been that fake squatter search page.

The HVAC guys came yesterday and did their thing. The woman was very pleased with their work, they were fast and efficient and didn't damage the house too much (couple of bangs against the walls when pulling the old furnace out of the attic). She took a few pictures of things which I'll download but for the most part the only way you can tell anything is different is that the thermostat is this quasi-fancy looking touch screen thing and you can feel a 'draft' without hearing the fan going. The old unit was loud enough even I could hear the fan, this one you just feel a warm or cool breeze coming from somewhere and you assume that the windows are open. Nope, it's just the $8700 hamster life support system doing it's thing. We had to shut it down last night, I was too lazy to figure out how to program it and it was in some test mode running the furnace full blast then the AC full blast alternating back and forth, back and forth. Amusing for a bit but then not so much.

I got my (late) 1-year anniversary card from the group. I was hoping it was going to be skipped like my birthday card, we get too damn many cards to sign around here anyway with 25 birthdays and 25 anniversaries per year. No one cares! Anyway, Van, our resident artist, has taken to decorating the envelopes a bit. Obviously we know what she thinks of me now:

Lots going on this weekend, no wonder I'm tired. Friday night I left work early and met the woman at the Salt House as planned. I left at 4:14 or there abouts and got to her office at 5:25, just enough time to change and get over to the restaurant. It wasn't crowded and we sat upstairs so it wasn't uncomfortably loud, quite a rarity in a SF restaurant where LOUD is the name of the game. She had the 'farm asparagus' salad and it was really tasty, the pork belly which is usually the star of any appetizer or salad was just sorta OK in this thing. The veggies were that good. I had the chilled asparagus soup which was also good, with the onions stealing the show on that one. For mains the woman had the chicken which is about as good as I've ever had chicken and I had the braised short ribs. They were rich enough that one portion of meat would have been sufficient but I ate both. :) The sweetbreads were nothing special, I don't see why people rave about them. Desserts were not inspiring enough for us to split one even, I think we were sufficiently full from the meal. The woman had a beer I didn't like so I didn't keep track of it and I passed on all alcohol since I was riding home.

Saturday was the quest to get the transmission fluid done. First stop was the woman's mechanic. Team Korea couldn't figure it out for the $45 they quoted me so they charged me nothing and told me to go to a muffler shop where they would weld a bolt on the plug and get it out.

Most the muffler shops I could find were closed, but down by my parents place I found 13th street muffler and radiator. (nice screen shot of google street view since I forgot to take an exterior pic). Inside no one was home, but eventually some Mexican dudes came in from the taco truck outside and saw they had a customer. I explained what I wanted done and that I had replacement plugs and oil and they set about working on it. Three guys using a zillion different pullers and other odd tools I didn't recognize and they failed to get it out. After 45 minutes or so they busted out the welder and bam, it was out in a jiffy. They changed the oil out for me while I enjoyed a Mexican coke from the taco truck and cleaned it all back up. Also while under there they found the source of the strange banging noise I thought I was hearing: one of the muffler mounts was off. Two guys fixed that real quick like and the total bill was $35 for the whole hour. Since they were cheap, and let me stand right under the lift with them the whole time watching, I went to 7-11 and picked up a six pack of Pacifico and brought it back to them as a thank-you. They were stunned. I think I helped seal some of the rift between whitey and the illegals. :)

After all that the transmission fluid looked just fine, although the fancy stuff does make it shift a bit easier when cold. All told a good adventure and worth the time. They do all sorts of stuff in that shop, so I'm sure if I need something simple done without all the crap a real mechanic would want to charge/do I can head back down there. The manager/English speaking guy gave me his card and welcomed me back for anything. Ah, the power of beer.

After the car was squared away I went by the archery shop to get stronger arrows. They had already heard of the mystery cracking arrows from their friends and bumped me up to the next level of arrow with the 'bull dog' collars on the back. Since I had been having trouble they gave me 50% off on the dozen. That's way more than I was expecting, I was just going to buy them and chalk my bad arrows up to experience.

Saturday afternoon after all this we then went up to my parents for grandma's early birthday. She likes the iPad and was doing surprisingly well with it reading books and playing wheel of fortune, poker, slots, etc. She even managed some email. The whole iPhone/iPad this is really amazing when you think about it. Movies, music, internet, games, books, etc, etc. To us it's nothing but to someone who couldn't email or do anything until yesterday it's quite an amazing amount of stuff in a tiny package.

Today we had breakfast and then I fixed my parents XP box again. Some sort of search indexing thing was running and basically making the HDD thrash 24x7 for the last few weeks so I turned that off, no idea how it got turned on but I don't think they need it. With that off the box was running normally again. Maybe it's a new default in some patch that got pushed out or whatever.

The most amazing thing about the trip was that the Suzuki got 38.4 mpg up and back. That's pretty damn good I think. Over 2.4x what the Jeep gets anyway, so I'll take it. It's also a lot quieter than the woman's car, even dad was amazed at how quiet it was cruising down the road. Sure, it handles like a wet bag of concrete but it' a great road trip machine.

Horrible couple of days, but the week is almost over. This afternoon I'm taking off to ride up to SF to go to dinner with the woman at the Salt House. (menu). She goes there commonly when she's hanging out with friends so I figured I should give it a try so I at least know what I'm missing. Google says to take 280 up to the city which I'll probably do, it's going to be less nerve wracking than trying to cut up 101 at rush hour on a Friday.

Last night the 2nd HVAC sales guy came by the house to give us estimates on fixing/replacing the AC. The first guy the other night got us to sign up to replace everything with all super efficient stuff to the tune of $9k. The guy last night (who is a friend of a guy I met in the archery league) said since we don't use the heat much and it still works just fine to skip replacing that and just repair/replace the AC to the tune of like $3k. That sounds a lot better, we'll see what his actual quotes are today and then pick.

Dad dropped off the simplified target setup last night as well. My design was really spiffy but hard to manufacture and heavy as all get out. This isn't as spiffy and is very susceptible to damage from misses (which is very possible at 600+ yards) but it's free so we'll give it a try. Removing the two bolts drops the plate out of the carrier for easy replacement. I just need to paint it up, and he gave me a can of their fancy primer stuff so I can blast it with that then hit it with the BBQ black and call it good. I'll either leave the target itself primer gray, or might spray it with that 'chrome' paint left over from working on the woman's tack trunk. Might be too shiny though. What is nice about this target is that if you pull the end bolts out the legs come off and it falls into 4 easy to carry pieces.

Also yesterday my car parts came in, now I have a fuse box cover, rear hatch bulb cover and a new dipstick with an intact handle. Combining that with the un-stripped drain plugs I picked up from the dealer in the morning I'm all set to deal with the last annoyances on the new ride.

The woman just pointed out that today is my 1 year anniversary at Apple. Vest stock, vest!

Photos of the infamous sit-stand workstation:

It's really making my knees hurt I think, I end up standing almost the whole day because it's easier on me than sitting in this crappy chair. Next up I need one of those kitchen mats chefs use, or maybe just a cheap fluffy rug. Anything to keep me from standing on concrete all day. I know, I'm never quite happy.

Another random photo in the phone, the broken turn signal (which is now back together again):

I used one of the anti-poison oak wipes, some surgical gloves, alcohol wipes and a ton of paper towels and cleaned up my bow, arrows, arm guard, release, boots and hat today. I either cleaned up any traces of poison oak that were there or just made it worse by spreading it around. I'll know tonight after the league shoot... or I guess 24-48 hours from tonight.

I've got a small but really nasty patch of poison oak on my left arm and one spot on my left leg where I must have touched it sometime during the night. I can only think that I got it from the field range last Sunday. Odd that it took it a few days to show up but that's what it says, it can take up to 72 hours o show.

Since the oak rash is in such a bad spot on my arm (and would get all over everything) I've been covering it with gauze and tape. We used up the supply of stuff I had left over from the bike crash and when I went to get more I about choked at the prices of medical stuff at the drug store. $10 for tape and $8 for gauze? The woman suggested an alternative though, some 'vet wrap' that they use on horses to hold the bandages on. It's the same 3M product, just in larger rolls and available in lots of random colors at 1/6 or less than the human oriented price. Seems to work exactly the same, I just have to live with green and black dressings now instead of white and flesh tones. I resisted getting the neon pink or orange colors. There are lots of medical supplies available at the pet store that seem like they would be good to have in our emergency kits. Way better stuff than you can get (legally) for humans without being in a hospital.

Saturday we went to brunch up in SF with a couple of the woman's (gay) friends. They've got a really nice little house in a really crappy area, but with the garden in the back yard you can go out and enjoy life without having to think about what's outside your front door. Zillow shows it at $850k, not bad for 1100sq ft in SF.

DAMMIT! I dropped the bike this morning. I was turning into a spot and some asshole comes flying up on me in the garage and I catch him in the mirror and try to 'dodge' but of course I'm going like 2 mph and all I successfully do it hit those 'bots dots' they've scattered everywhere around the building entrances and fall over. Asshole drives around me and takes off around the corner of the garage. Damage is a bent light mount (for those lower PIAA lights), broken turn signal, bent hand guard mount and some scratches on the crash bars. I've got most the plastic for the signal, but dunno if it's salvageable. bent guard can be bent back and scratches will vanish under some BBQ black paint (handy having crash bars in matte black). My right hand and shoulder are sore and I can't tell from what.

Rain. Bah. Still managed to make it to the field range today, even with the woman in tow. She was supposed to be running the rangefinder but mostly she just looked for animals and tried to tell the targets to run away from me. She's crazy.

Talk about something on the to-do list for a long time. Some cool kids on the net have wrapped the front of their M6 rifles with para cord to both provide a front grip and to let you carry some cord into the field in case you need it. I've wanted to do it for a long time, finally found the time and the cord last night. Looks pretty good for my first attempt.

OK first off, although it says it's a 'food grinder', attempting to use the grinder to make shredded cheese didn't work out as planned. I ended up with cheese noodles. Doh. They melted in the quesadillas just fine, just looked a little weird.

For this next section you might want to download this theme music to play while reading so you know what was going through my head at the time. :)

I pulled the brakes off the Suzuki and unlike on the bikes I didn't have the right tools to compress the calipers. I tried a few failed attempts with hand tools but it was clear nothing I had was going to work. I could see what I needed, really just a piece of flat meal with a hole in it, then I could weld a nut into the hole and thread a bolt through. The metal would sit inside the caliper and I would turn the bolt and have it push on the old pad opening the piston. I had the welder, and the metal and the bolts, I just didn't have the time (I was trying to do this before work). Queue the theme music. What could I use instead? Looking around I saw my weights sitting there and noticed that the screw on ends were basically a piece of metal with a threaded hole in it.... and the screw-on part fit the hole on the caliper perfectly. With only slight hand pressure turning the handle the piston retracted just like you would expect. Ha! I even remembered to clean off the piston before pushing it back so the grit on it didn't tear the internal seal (see first KLR brake job for an example of screwing up the seals). Now I have new front brakes.

Another bit of luck today while out cruising around. I didn't like that the Suzuki had 2 new tires and 2 random used tires so I went to a few used tire places looking for replacements. I didn't want to spend the big bucks for new stuff, so I was hoping for a bit of luck on used. Nothing, at first. I got turned around and lost trying to find a shop over by NVDA I had seen a few times and by pure chance I found it, didn't even have to break out the iphone. They didn't have any used tires in my size (damn Japanese weird sized tires!) but the guy was like "hmm.... let me check the back something tells me we have something". Sure enough they found 2 brand new tires of the exact same Chinese knock-off brand that match the new ones on the car. They were even the same model. Freaky. The guy at the desk said that they ordered them for some woman who never came back for them so I could buy them. Perfect! Now I have 4 matching brand new tires. I'm now $5200 into the car with the AC, brakes and tires. Still not bad.

One of the spark plugs I picked up for the Suzuki was broken, the ceramic was totally split into 3 big chunks; must have taken a hard hit at some point in it's journey. No grief from the auto parts store at least about swapping it out. Now I've fresh plugs in the car and learned that it doesn't have a distributor, it's got little coils directly tied to each plug. Kinda cool. The old plugs were not horrid, but I mostly wanted to see if they had any oil or other nasty residue on them. Looked clean, if a bit white. Shouldn't have to touch them for a long time at this point, but I put some anti-seize on them anyway. I've got it, might as well use it.

In between running around I made up a batch of pizza dough so we could do grilled pizzas tonight. Mixed in some of my good semolina flour in the dough, seemed to make a bit of a difference. Mine was sauce, mushrooms, bacon and mozzarella and ricotta cheeses. The woman had the same cheese but no sauce and added pine nuts, onions and truffle oil.

Sometimes it's the little things that count. For example, the flaky AC in the Suzuki was caused by this little relay. I never would have found it or figured it out I'm guessing without that crazy wiring diagram the mechanic got off alldata. At least I figured it out wasn't the compressor or dryer or anything major.

While it was a the shop I had the mechanic give it a quick once over. The only thing of note was that the front brakes were at 5%. Yowza! He wanted $250 to do the job, claimed the cheapest pads were $90 and the rotors could be turned. I went to Autozone and got a set of pads for $26, and if I wanted to replace the rotors (which I don't, they're good enough for now) they're $36/each brand new. I don't think you could get them turned that cheap. Now I have a project for Saturday.

Hey, I learned how to pull the .jpgs out of that pdf I made of the CL ad. This will suffice until I get to take some real pics. Spent 2 hours last night clay baring the new ride, and still have at least half of it or more to go. Lots of strange little surfaces on it that need to be cleaned up.

Also, I got my new office layout approved. The ergo up/down desk is getting closer! They had a guy come out and actually measure up my office and do some before and after drawings. Seems like a lot of work when all they're really doing is removing the legs from my desk and putting new legs on. Still, they probably get paid by the drawing.

The Vstrom is really sensitive to chain slack when compared to the KLR. The bike was getting all cranky and feeling like it had a ton of lash and it turns out the chain was .25" out of spec. Damn. The KLR would run 1.5" out before you could feel it. Also unlike the KLR it was a snap to adjust, just pull the pin, unbolt the axle, 1/4 turn on the adjusters on each side, bolt the axle back up to spec, reinsert pin. No fumbling with two nuts per side or vague adjustments. The only thing I don't like is the spec for the chain is with it on the side stand, I haven't found a center-stand wheel off the ground spec. Google should tell me it's just that I only have to mess with the chain every few thousand so I forget (vs. every few hundred on the KLR).

Couple pictures for the day. First off, the sprouts we planted over the weekend:

Next up is a pic of the bow in the trunk. The woman was worried it wouldn't fit under the cover but I knew it would. See, it's not a car, it's a self propelled hard case for the bow...

Last is a pic of the car that we had to call the cops on. The woman went to work the other day and next to her car was this car with some guy sleeping in it. She got freaked out and made me call the cops. They chased him off, but now she's afraid he'll come back for her since she 'found' him and she figures he figures it was her that called the cops. The guy shouldn't have parked in a complex with such restricted parking and where all the vehicles are known, and parking backwards like that just draws attention to yourself. Better to sleep in a motel parking lot, or an apartment complex, or perhaps in the Walmart parking lot across the way where they encourage people to camp.

Car deal is done, and the woman doesn't have a new ride (she thought about the idea of payments and/or dropping lots of cash and the idea got less appealing to her all of a sudden). I still wasn't feeling right about the Focus deal with all that's going on so I found an alternative, a 2003 Suzuki Aerio. $4800 out the door, so I figure with the leftover $1200 from not getting the Focus I can get anything wrong on the Suzuki fixed. The woman likes it a lot better than the Focus, and I like that it's totally stock, right down to the radio (a 6-disk in dash changer even). It's not as fast as the Focus, but it rides nicely and handles OK for what it is. I've got it sitting in the lot at work, I'll take the Jeep in at some point and bring it back so I can clean it up. They did an OK job detailing it but I want to razor blade the FastTrack velcro off the window and run a clay bar over the paint. Yea, it's a beater in theory but no reason I can't try to keep it looking good and white should be easy to take care of. Now I have two Suzukis (Suzukis?) and I just have to decide how much insurance to carry on this one.

We also got the planter boxes filled today. I've given up on growing corn in a box, or pumpkins or squash or soybeans, but I did fine some snap pea bushes. They supposedly don't need support like the climbing snap pea plants. We'll give them a try and see how they do in such a small area. We also got two types of peppers and some tomatoes for both salsa and for the woman to snack on. She really likes the cherry tomatoes with cheese.

I had my ergo eval on Wednesday and the guy said that my arms are too short for my height, specifically my humerus is about 1.5" shorter than spec. That explains why I want to put bar risers on every bike and why I feel better with shorter rifle stocks. It also is probably contributing to me being able to bench press more, guys with shorter arms usually lift more. Anyway, they're going to get me one of the variable height tables so I can stand some of the time I'm at work. I think sitting too much is contributing to my digestive health, or lack thereof.

Nothing from the dealer about the car, replacing the clutch or whatever it's turned out to be must be taking him longer than planned. Now however there may be another snag, the woman's brother got a Kia Soul as a rental when he arrived in Ohio and she really loved it. She's not had any interest in replacing her Sentra at all and dreading when it finally dies because she doesn't like the new Sentras, but today she said maybe she should get a Soul and then I can take her car. I don't want an automatic, but if she really is going to get something I'll take hers since from a value prospective hers would be the best. Full history, all services done and I know it's not be abused... well much anyway.

Busy week last week, tons of interviews but I have 2 people in in-person interview in Austin (which I won't be flying out for, the locals can do it) and one for Cupertino showing up on Tuesday. We're going to give him an offer for sure, it's just a question of which position he's going to fill.

The woman flew standby and got an earlier flight, she made it home by 7:30pm. Since dad was in town still we went to dinner while the woman went home (she wanted to clean up and rest after 8+ hours of travel... why does it take so long to get places inside the US?).