Minor Win thread - Life is good!

Drain is blocked solid but the plumber is coming Monday with a much larger auger.

Managed to get the seized cleanout plug out today. Heat, cold chisel and hammer ftw.

I have seen the Molvo, and it is good.

I looked very closely and had to ask where the Volvo ends and the Miata begins. 

Win!

It was just tree roots and not a collapsed drain.

Also, we now know that it's a plastic line after the cast iron cleanout leaves the house so yay for that too!

Boo that the plastic line is cracked and roots are coming in but that's a problem I can budget for in the future. Right now I have flush toilets again.

ShawnG said:

Win!

It was just tree roots and not a collapsed drain.

Also, we now know that it's a plastic line after the cast iron cleanout leaves the house so yay for that too!

Boo that the plastic line is cracked and roots are coming in but that's a problem I can budget for in the future. Right now I have flush toilets again.

 

My house, December 23rd.   Now I really need to remember to phone the city to finish the job.

My little machine got the logs floating downriver again, anyway.

In reply to Streetwiseguy :

I've got a machine with a 3/8" cable but it wasn't making a dent.

Plumber had some professional grade thing with a 7/8" cable that made short work of it.

Money well spent.

If you need to see where the roots are coming in, call the city and start yelling at them about their drain being blocked and a lawsuit coming. They'll send a guy out with a camera to prove the clog is on your side, then you'll know exactly where to dig. 

I needed windshield deicer and cleaner for the work van today so I stopped at advance auto parts which is 3 blocks from work. They are closing the store. They were also out of both but they had 90% off of hard parts so I was able to get 2 front  rotors for the subaru retail 216 dollars for 14 dollars. I did some additional shopping while there and got about 300 dollars worth of stuff for 85 dollars.  Everything else was 30% to 60% off.

Not a meme or a win, but just funny. I have a number of clients who are Indian and Iranian. I've found most of them to be good people and very loyal customers. A few minutes ago I'm chatting with one of the Iranians and one of the Indians showed up. We are all lamenting the difficulty that we have finding quality employees (we're all in construction). I say that I've had pretty good luck with employees who were born overseas, since they often have a better work ethic than American born young people who have been relatively pampered in life. Their response was to complain about  "foreigners". I found it hilarious that a couple of  dark-skinned 1st generation Americans would be ragging on those damn foreigners (By which they mainly meant Hispanics and Chinese). How quickly things change.

After a less than great claim experience with my auto insurance company that I have been with for the last 22 years, I dropped them.

I shopped around and Flo had the best rates for the same coverage. My premium is literally half as much as I was paying and I even added another driver to the policy.

I survived my first day at the new gig after nearly 6 months on the sidelines.  Driving to work in the dark still sucks but otherwise a good first day.  

ShawnG said:

In reply to Streetwiseguy :

I've got a machine with a 3/8" cable but it wasn't making a dent.

Plumber had some professional grade thing with a 7/8" cable that made short work of it.

Money well spent.

If you need to see where the roots are coming in, call the city and start yelling at them about their drain being blocked and a lawsuit coming. They'll send a guy out with a camera to prove the clog is on your side, then you'll know exactly where to dig. 

They have been here many, many times.  Annually, until the elbow at the main plugged so solid they had to dig the street up to replace it.  Since then, every other fall.

I don't want to dig my front lawn all to hell.  Might try the sewer relining service.

In reply to stanger_mussle (Supported by GRM undergarments) :

State Farm? Cause that sounds like State Farm.  Because I used to have State farm. Used to.

stanger_mussle (Supported by GRM undergarments) said:

After a less than great claim experience with my auto insurance company that I have been with for the last 22 years, I dropped them.

I shopped around and Flo had the best rates for the same coverage. My premium is literally half as much as I was paying and I even added another driver to the policy.

Have I told you about my less-than-great claim experience with Flo?

It cost them my business. It damn near earned them a formal complaint with the state. Berkeley those crooks.

They are closing our site at work, i ranted about it in the other thread.

The minor win is several years ago a friend who was a long time contractor hired over to employee.  They were on the fence about filling out a form to claim vested service for prior years as a contractor, and i basically marched them to HR and stood there glowering with my arms crossed while they filled out the paperwork.

Found out at lunch there's a strong chance they get to leave as a retiree with benefits rather than a terminee without because of those extra years credited.  

Buddy's dad owns a few buildings and one of the tenants, a fly by night used car dealer, flew by night, and left some stuff behind.

I got a 54L jug of 5W30 full synthetic out of the deal

A couple minor wins for the daughter's car.  To re-cap, she bought a 1998 Civic EX with no rust and a rod knock for $1000.  She pulled the engine, rebuilt it, and we're getting it back in.  Win number one is that we got the motor back in the car and all bolted down. 

We had it up on the lift to get the rear mount and exhaust installed and figured that we'd go ahead and put the suspension back together.  When we went to pull the axles, we could not get the lower ball joint on the left side to come loose.  I even managed to break a ball joint tool trying.  Nothing we did would budge it and we wound up beating the everloving crap out of the thing.  So rather than risk damaging the ball joint on the other side, we just pulled the lower control arms to swing the knuckles to pull the axles. 

The second minor win is that we took the knuckle off the car and used another ball joint tool - one that we tried to use when it was on the car, mind you - and the control arm popped right off the ball joint, so we didn't have to break out grinders and drills.

Don't mind the mini-sledge.  I got that out in anticipation of needing to go medieval on it.

Replacing the ball joint was a whole different problem that I think was mostly that the rental tool's threads were all boogered up.  We took it back and grabbed a second one and things went way better.  And, by the way, berkeley you, Honda, for building that in such a way that I can't just slide the thing under my hydraulic press.

When it was time to re-install the control arm, the front lateral bolt didn't want to tighten up.  Further investigation led me to discover that the captive nut was missing.  This was a particular problem because the subframe has two tiny little holes - under 1/4" in diameter - but no other openings or access.  I was able to use a magnetic pickup tool through the bolt hole and a little pick through the drain hole to fish the captive nut out of the subframe, turn it around, place it over the bolt hole, hold it in place from behind with the pick through the little drain hole while we muscled the control arm into the bracket, and tightened the bolt.  I left us a little note so that we remember it next time.

Waters been out 2 days, luckily our 3 kids in diapers so flushing for them and mother inlaw been available to help watch. Back to enough pressure this morning to flush the can not using buckets!

The $35 Vevor office chair base that I got from Amazon fit on my reclining office chair.

I ran 3 miles in 33 minutes on the treadmill today. This was the first time I was able to run the entire distance without having to take any breaks to walk. I don't think I've ever run for thirty minutes straight before.

Considering that I could barely walk across my room in June I'm feeling fantastic.

a guy ran a redlight on my commute to work today, we're talking a good 2-3 seconds after the light turned. There just happened to be a cop going the turning right onto the road the redlight-runner was going on, and he put his lights on before the guy was even out of the intersection. Nice to see given how crazy people have been driving lately around here

My new 3d printer rapidly went downhill after the first week or so. I've been reading it as a Z-axis problem. At some point around the six or seventh restart of a job, there was a pop, and the print job was chugging along a couple millimeters right of where it started.

I found instructions on adjusting X belt tension, and dialed several turns of slack out of the belt. It's running just incredibly well now.

I'm a little grouchy about this being a fix in the troubleshooting section of the website instead of just being in a manual (that doesn't exist) as a maintenance item, so I might have addressed it before it got so sloppy as to allow the belt to hop a tooth, but a win is a win.

Facilities issue (water leak) in OR for my colonoscopy scheduled for tomorrow, so procedure postponed TBD.

The win is that they let me know before I pounded two bottles of miralax!

Karacticus said:

Facilities issue (water leak) in OR for my colonoscopy scheduled for tomorrow, so procedure postponed TBD.

The win is that they let me know before I pounded two bottles of miralax!

Haha, I was on the table and they were just about to push the sedative in when someone came into the room and said Dr just had to leave for a family emergency.  They asked me if I wanted to postpone and reschedule with the intended Dr or have a pinch hitter.  Literally 5 seconds before they put me out.  I'm here, I don't want to repeat this process.....

In reply to Karacticus :

That's a major win in my book.

Got my Indian Motorcycle certification done.

Signed up for Slingshot...

Appleseed said:

In reply to stanger_mussle (Supported by GRM undergarments) :

State Farm? Cause that sounds like State Farm.  Because I used to have State farm. Used to.

Amica. I started with them in 2002 after USAA jacked up my rates for no reason.

My parents have been with State Farm for almost 40 years. State Farm automatically added me to their policy the instant I got my driver's license at 16. Their rates were absurd. My folks refused to pay my insurance, and being a lazy 16 year old, I had no job. I surrendered my license. I did start a policy with their agent, a family friend, when I was 17. My premium was never the same amount month-to-month. It was stupid.

In reply to DarkMonohue:

I'll give Flo a shot. If they piss me off, well there are plenty more carriers to choose from. I don't give a crap about loyalty anymore.