Furniture

Furniture began arriving late last week for the deck. We received two loungers and a table. Six chairs are being delivered tomorrow to go with the table. So now we essentially have all of the furniture, but no deck to put it on.

We're estimating the deck at about 50% completed right now. You may not think so from the pictures, but check out all the steel and joists that already had to go in. Most of the recent work has taken tons of time to do, but doesn't add much to the overall completion percentage.

My neighbors think I'm insane

So I'm pretty sure my neighbors all think I'm crazy. My AC went out on my golf back in March on a return trip to Charleston. The past couple of years, my AC got kinda weak during the summer months, so I would top it off with more freon; good as new! Well, that plan didn't work this year. It was getting pretty hot and since Kelly didn’t enjoy being all sweaty when she got to work, I got to drive it all the time.

I quickly discover that my cooling fan isn't working. The dealership wants $600 for it, a local import parts place wants $200. I spend the $200. After replacing that, I still have AC troubles. I give up and take it to Tune Up Clinic so they can see what's up. They tell me it's the compressor. Dealership wants $1000 for it, local parts place wants $400. I spend the $400. Now, I generally do all my own repairs, but I decided this time I would leave it to the pros to install. They install it, charge it back up with freon, and return to me.

Ah, happy days. (well for two days at least) AC stops working again. I take it back and they find a line that looks to be leaking. Dealership wants $150 for it, Internet parts place wants $100 for it. I spend $100. Again, I let TUC do the repairs so I don’t have to worry with it.

Ah, happy days. (for one day at least) I failed to get to TUC before they closed on Saturday, so they locked it up in their shop until Monday morning. By the time I got it, the AC worked for one day. Back to TUC. This time they tell me the evaporator is bad. No problem I think, let’s just replace the evaporator. "Well, the evaporator will cost about $200 but the labor will be another $800." Whoa. At this point I have spent $1000 getting the AC fixed with parts and labor and decide enough is enough. Famous last words?

Long story-short, I do the work myself (twice actually), and it takes about 10 hours and you basically take the entire inside of the car apart. My neighbors would walk by me in the garage and wonder what the hell I was doing. To quote one: "That's what mechanics are for." I think they are actually surprised now when they go to their cars and don't see me with my car apart. Another neighbor even asked me "This for fun, or is something broken?" Believe it or not, there are better things I would like to be doing instead taking my entire car apart.

Not my car, but this is basically what the interior looks like when you're halfway through:





Then this past weekend, I had to replace the cooling fan I already replaced because it was defective. Front of car off all over again.

Ah, happy days. AC is nice and cold now. Parts replaced?:
1. Cooling fan (x2)
2. Upper AC hose
3. AC Compressor
4. AC Evaporator
5. Heater Core
6. Misc AC specialty fuses

Well, I like to do as much as I can myself to gain knowledge and to save money. This is one of those times where I accomplished both, but never really want to do it again. Now on to my foglights, cruise control, rear brakes, center console light, side molding, blown subwoofer, coolant hose leak and seat adjusters. . .

Is it contagious?

So I went to the doctor today. I've been experiencing a sharp pain right below my left ribcage for a couple of days now. The first night I felt it was two nights ago. It hurt a bit while I was being lazy on the couch. I re-adjusted and it went away. Got up the next morning and couldn't hardly breathe without it hurting pretty bad. Was seriously considering going to the emergency room at this point. I consider breathing pretty fundamental to my survival.

Being the stubborn retard that I am, I took half a 'happy pill' left over from my knee surgery and went about my day. It didn't quite hurt to breathe anymore, but would if I really took a deep breath. Most of the day was uneventful except when I had to get up out of my chair to do anything.

Some of my co-workers convinced me that I should really have someone check it out. I started looking around on the Internet so that I could be my own doctor. Found lots of scary stuff about spleens rupturing and what-not and decided that my co-workers might be on to something.

I called a 24-7 help line provided by my health provider when I got home. They didn't think it was quite serious enough to go to the emergency room, but thought I should make an appointment as soon as possible to get it checked out. Now feeling like I wasn't going to die in my sleep, I took another pill and felt better. :)

Called this morning and got a 9:30 appointment. Had to quickly put my car back together (more on this in another post) so that I could make it there. The doc takes x-rays of my lungs, hooks me up to an EKG and takes blood samples. Turns out my lungs and heart look ok and the blood work will be done in a couple of days. She tells me she thinks it's costochondritis. "Costo-what?" It's basically a big word for saying something got pulled. I made her write it down so that I could repeat this later. Apparently Advil is the solution to this problem.

I must have hurt myself working on the deck or something. Maybe I'll come up with some cool story about how I was jumped by a gang and fought them all off. "No real injuries to report, except for a pulled muscle." Hopefully it will feel better by next deck-building day.

Here I am

Ok, now that everyone and their mother now have blogs, I decided to jump on the bandwagon. Whether I have anything to say that is worthy of reading is yet to be seen.

So step one was to come up with a witty blog name. Much like my gmail account, all of the names I wanted were already taken. "Craig.blogspot, taylor.blogspot, craigtaylor.blogspot, ctaylor.blogspot"; all taken. Even "giarc.blogspot" (craig backwards was taken) Hell, even my website name of "Craigtown.com" has already been claimed. I figured I would be writing about my deck pretty frequently as it is all-consuming right now but I didn't want to be limited by a name like "craigsdeck" or something stupid like that. "Blog of Craig" seemed to work ok.

I figure step two is figuring out how to use Blogger. I'd like to make my actual homepage at http://craigtown.com/ the blog. It's been an eon or two since I used it for anything, so it's about time to use it for something more than e-mail now. It was a flash site used to show off my web development awesomeness, but my awesomeness of old is now very old and not so awesome.

Step three is going to be writing content and actually keeping this thing updated. Blogger makes it pretty easy to post updates, so it should be easy to keep it updated.