The Life of Riley is a weekly post that details my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment. This edition was a lost episode that was written later and back-posted just to keep the dates straight.

Sunday (Day 553): Digging Out The Christmas Decorations

With nothing hanging over our heads for the first time in weeks, we decided to spend our Sunday morning kicked back with a movie. We checked out This Film Is Not Yet Rated, a documentary that turned out to be a whole lot of fuss over nothing. I like conspiracy stories as much as the next nut, but spending a couple of hours trying to uncover the people behind the movie ratings system because ratings affect a movie’s distribution seemed like less of a David and Goliath effort than a way to pinpoint where to send the gifts to ensure a favorable rating in the future.

If the real goal is a desire to distribute your art, there’s a distribution channel called the internet that has been around for quite a while now. It’s come a long way from the Prodigy/CompuServe days to become an extremely wide, low cost method of distribution that allows people all over the world to pick up what you’re laying down.

Lots of people have used it to get them more fame than they deserved, but then what do I know about worldwide distribution of something that might not be highly rated or expertly created? I’m just a blogger who regularly runs up a quarter of a million page views for the extremely complex art of beard growing.

Even though we enjoyed our first few hours of relaxation in the new house, it had to end some time. We got dressed by noon, and did some price checking because one of the kids asked for Rock Band for Christmas. I dusted of my deal seeking chops and found it $10 cheaper in a brick and mortar than anywhere online, so #1GF! and I headed out to pick it up. That was one Christmas gift down, but there were still a ton to go.

For the next couple of hours we ran around running errands like returning the midget Christmas wreaths that we bought last week and exchanging a chair mat for a smaller version that would actually fit in our office. I didn’t make a cape out of the chair mat or act like a monster with giant, green wreath arms, so it all went mundanely well.

Because #1GF! is now a homeowner, she recently lost the right to store large amounts of seasonal crap in other people’s attics. She has her own attic to stuff full of crap, now. We headed to #1GF!’s family’s house to pick up all of her stored Christmas decorations.

I thought it would be a five minute errand, but that’s probably because all of the Christmas decorations I own will fit into a single shopping bag. Ok, a lunch bag. Ok, maybe I only have a caganer, but when you have a quality decoration, you don’t need anything else.

At #1GF!’s family’s house, I was in a whole different world. The ladies went through the attic and I ran boxes up and down the stairs, shaking my head at each additional box. We ended up filling the car with seasonal stuff.

Before we left, #1GF! put together a decorative sled, and I found myself confused by the sheer volume and pointlessness of decorations. I knew better than to express my viewpoint, because it’s foolish to fight an uphill battle if you have no stake in the outcome. Decorate, don’t decorate, I’ll enjoy the season the same either way. But, I’m a male. I don’t notice much unless it contains a circuit board, needs fixin’, or has boobies.

We had been running around all day, so we figured we’d stop into The ‘Alehouse for some comfort food. We both had the usual. After a chicken pot pie and a black cup of coffee, I was thoroughly relaxed. I think it was early enough that even senior citizens would’ve scoffed at our need to eat so early.

We headed home and put up a fake Christmas tree that was bought at a chain store that has been out of business for about fifteen years. It had never been used, and had been stored in a box in one of #1GF!’s family’s attics ever since. There was no real explanation of why it had been stored unused for so long or why it had been purchased in the first place, but we were happy to have it. Fake Christmas trees aren’t cheap, and the real ones are a fat, sticky, flammable pain in the ass.

When we got the tree out of the box, we realized that it had the musty, damp cardboard smell of something that had been stored in an attic for fifteen years. This was not a sharp, fresh pine scent. We also noticed that the tree had one of those aluminum poles wrapped in fake pine bristles, making it appear that we would soon be looking at the artificial version of the Charlie Brown Christmas tree. Beggars can’t be choosers, so we sorted out the branches and started putting it all together.

#1GF! was used to having a real tree, so it took her a while to get the hang of feathering out the wire branches to make them look half normal. After I showed her that every twig didn’t have to look like the tree was bristling like an angry dog, it started to look better than either of us had expected. Once we had it all together and stepped back a few feet, it actually looked pretty good.

We decided that we had gotten enough done for the day, and called it quits. We went to bed listening to the wind howling off of the ocean like we lived next to a busy highway. Before we drifted off, I noticed that the house didn’t make loud cracking noises in the wind like the apartment used to, so I had that going for me, which was nice.

Monday (Day 554): The Hardest Working Blogger In Blog Business

I put out a double load of recycling out in the morning because the truck somehow missed our last scheduled pick up. It was 18 degrees and the wind was still howling, so I put the recycling up against our rusty old chain link fence to keep it from blowing away.

Do you know that you have to pay extra to recycle? Yea. You do. If you want to chuck everything in the garbage and let the next generation pick up the tab, it’ll cost you about $120 a quarter. You want to be Chucky Goodguy and keep the landfills from filling up, you’ll pay an extra $40 or so for the privilege. If it wasn’t for #1GF!’s big heart, I’d be destroying your world and saving the $40 for something more useful. Like food. Or board games.

Not that I’m dumping oil in the front yard or anything, but I’m starting to think that “green” and “recycle” are merely marketing terms to give rich people something to feel good about. “Going green” requires green. Until we reach the point where people can save money by going green, it is doomed to be a pet project of the wealthy.

I heard an awesome quote about that recently. It went something like, “That guy wearing the T-shirt that reads ‘Save the rainforest’ doesn’t want you to know that he’s saving the rainforest. He wants you to know that he’s better than you.” True or not, I liked the idea.

Once #1GF! headed out to work, I wandered around the house wondering what project I should start. I decided that I should try getting some of the last few weeks of LOR written, so I sat down to write at about 10 AM. This was to be the first test run of my new writing location. I sat at the desk and pushed the power button on my PC. I thought it was odd that there was a three second delay, but it booted normally, so I ignored it.

For the next eight hours, I roughed out two and a half weeks of LOR. That’s a no-edit laundry list post, folks. Editing it into a reasonable format takes almost as long. That’s a lot of hours just to have something for #1GF! to read to me when I’m drooling strained peas onto my shirt in my golden years.

#1GF! arrived home after work, and I shut down the PC to spend time with her. I made her dinner and then sat on in the TV room expecting her to want to flop on the couch. After freeing myself from the gluey fingers of the TV, I realized that an hour had gone by and #1GF! had still not come in. Fearing that she had be dragged off by another coyote visiting our kitchen, I went out to see what was up.

#1GF! was decorating the Christmas tree, which is a project that would never have crossed my mind thanks to the two testicles that I’ve been blessed with since birth. I went out to sit in the room with her, but she didn’t ask me to help out. I didn’t offer to help because decorating is not something I’m good at or ever really in the mood for.

“Don’t think you’re getting credit for doing the tree just because you’re in the room.”

“Well, then don’t think you’re getting credit for spending quality time with the hardest working blogger in blog business then,” I responded.

We had ourselves a standoff. I didn’t help trim the tree, but I wasn’t stupid enough to leave the room and do my own thing, either. I just stayed close and avoided eye contact. #1GF! may be little, but she’s feisty.

Tuesday (Day 555): Good Speaker Placement, Bad Power Supplies And Chai Cookies

I waited for the rush hour traffic to dissipate before heading out to the local home store to find some materials for makeshift speaker feet. I ended up settling on eight 6mm bolts, matching nuts, and a $2 package of rubber pads that stick to the bottom of furniture. Total cost? $7. I couldn’t get speaker feet shipped from an online site for that.

I was supposed to pick up something else, but I was so wrapped up in the speaker feet that I couldn’t remember what it was. (It ended up being pipe insulation, but even if I had remembered, I hadn’t measured to see what diameter or length I needed, anyway.) I stood looking at the painted white rafters of the home warehouse while tugging at my mustache for a few seconds in the hope that whatever I had forgotten would come to me. It didn’t. I was happy to at least have found some possible replacement feet for less than $10 and headed out.

I threw my bag of bolts into the passenger side of ROCKET CAR! and I headed up the road to the grocery store. #1GF! and I had been living out of boxes for a while, so it was the first major food run at the new house. It turned out to be a lot more food than you’d expect for two people living in small house.

After going through the self-checkout, I started picking up bag after bag and looping them around a couple of fingers each. One of the baggers saw what I was doing and asked me if he could get me a cart. I thanked him, but waved him off. I wondered just how old he thought I was, and walked out with my fingers knotted through the mass of handles that came together in what looked like gigantic plastic cloves of garlic.

This is the way I carry groceries most of the time. It’s not like groceries are all that heavy, so why not work the hands a little on the way back to the car, you know? The easier you make it for yourself, the easier you’ll expect things to be all the time.

I headed home and put all the groceries away, and then looked up at the clock. I wondered how it could’ve be noon already. I went into the computer room to continue catching up on the growing pile of LOR posts.

I sat in my chair and reached under my desk to push the power button on my PC. Nothing happened. I pushed it again. Still nothing. I checked the power cable and then pushed the button a third time, but this time really hard in case I suddenly had lost massive amount of strength in the last few hours and hadn’t realized it. Nothing. Pushed it ten times really fast, as if the computer needed an electrostatic build up before it would fire up. Nothing. I gave up on the button and pulled the PC out from its hiding spot under the desk.

I opened the case, unhooked the front buttons, and booted directly from the motherboard to see if it was an issue with the switches. It booted up. I’ve never heard of a button going bad, but the PC was moved, so maybe something got messed up on the way. I disconnected the power, plugged it back in, and booted from the motherboard one more time just to make sure. We were back to no response. I gave the PC a Curly-style, “Oh, a woiseguy,” but the random boot pattern was pointing to a failing power supply.

I looked up the warranty on the case, and it was good for three years… which expired just two months ago. Sunufa. I trudged online to look up power supplies. In the old days, a PSU was a PSU. You grabbed a 300 watter, threw it in your PC, and bing bang boom: you were back to your regularly scheduled ascii porno. Now, it’s not so simple. Power supplies have branched out. Now, power supplies have options.

I had to get a PSU with enough 4V connectors for my older drives, but I also opted for 80 Plus certification (a power efficiency certification like Energy Star) and SLI and Crossfire compliance just in case I ever decided to throw an extra video card in. You know I won’t, I know I won’t, but if I didn’t get a power supply that had the capability, you know I’d be looking for the capability in three months time.

I checked prices at local stores on the off chance that they were only a couple of bucks more than online sites like Newegg and Mwave, but most local stores had few power supplies, all of which were out of my price range. In the end, I settled on a CoolerMaster Real Power Pro 650 and pulled the trigger on the order. I knew it was close to Christmas and I should’ve let someone give it to me as a gift, but it seemed so much simpler for me to just get it. Plus, who can wait for three weeks to get a PC up and running? Not me.

Once the order was out the door, I decided to make the dough for some Chai spice cookies. I used some odd-sized measuring cups (1 1/2 cups, 2/3 of a cup, 3/4 cup) that we got as a housewarming gift, which end up pretty handy when dealing with a lot of flour and an inherently messy cook.

I know, I know. Baking cookies isn’t the most manly pursuit in the world, but I don’t like all the absolute shit that they put in store bought cookies, so I bake them myself when I can. Halfway through this batch, the cheap, 800 year old hand mixer we have started smoking on the batter. The stink was pretty bad even after you got used to it.

Once the dough was made and the smoke had cleared, I cleaned up the absolute mess that I make when I bake. The recipe called for refrigerating the dough for three hours before baking, so I figured I’d tackle the speaker placement in my tiny TV room while I waited.

Speaker placement is always a bitch for me because I seem to be one of the few people on Earth who doesn’t like bass overpowering their music. I like balanced, but minimal bass from my speakers, so for those three hours of my life (that I’ll never get back), I measured and moved to get the speakers positioned to minimize bass. In the end, the speakers were in the middle of the room. They were so close that you could move them with your feet while you were sitting on the couch if you really wanted to.

Now, #1GF! will tolerate quite a bit of my nonsense, but having speakers in the middle of a ten foot room didn’t seem like something that she was going to understand, no matter how much math and method I backed it up with. I stared at the speakers, trying to think of a way to disguise their odd placement with plants or throw pillows, when an engineer friend of mine called.

I figured he would sympathize and know some sort of mathematical bass triangulation algorithm that I could use, so I laid out my problem. He paused for a second before answering. “Sounds like you need to get an equalizer,” he said.

I paused for a moment to choose my words carefully. All that came out was a slow, drawn out “You sunufa bitch.”

When he stopped laughing, I explained that the two of us needed to get into the high priced speaker feet business to make money off of audiophiles. We’d sell the feet at a ridiculous price like 200 bucks a set, and those that bought them would extol their audio enhancing virtues based on the absurdly high price they paid for them. The market, by my thinking, would create itself. It would be the emperor’s new clothes of speaker feet and it would eventually buy me a bigger room to put my speakers in. This did nothing to prove my own sanity, and we have yet to enter into a speaker foot production partnership at this time.

I got off the phone and went back to the speaker placement. By the time #1GF! came home, the door to the TV room was blocked with boxes and furniture that were impeding the creation of an acceptable listening area. Her eyebrows wordlessly expressed her need for explanation.

“It was all in the way,” I said. Rather than suffer the explanation, she chose to simply accept the answer.

“What’s for dinner?” she asked.

With my hair going in all directions and standing in the middle of the room looking a little on the nutty side, I sidestepped and parried.

“I dunno. What’s for dinner?”

Sanity was facing off against speaker placement. We had ourselves another standoff. We stared at each other for half a minute, which was just enough time for me to realize that food was as important as audio fidelity. We made dinner together.

“Have any plans now?” #1GF! asked, fully expecting me to dive back into the audio insanity.

“Hell, yea! It’s cookie time!” I whipped out the bowl of dough and went to work making the chai cookies I had prepped earlier. The dough was like a rock, and I made a mental note that whoever wrote the recipe probably needed a kick in the jimmy or a new fridge.

Once I kneaded the brick back into dough, I turned on the oven for the first time. The thing stunk worse than our dying mixer, but according to the oven booklet, oven stink is normal for the first few times it’s turned on. I threw the drinking glass cut cookies into the oven.

When the cookies came out, I found that the stink didn’t affect the taste, but the recipe might make more sense as a muffin. I made a mental note to try to convert it later. I cut a corner off of a sandwich bag and iced the cookies with vanilla icing, even though the recipe had so little liquid that it had to be thinned by double before it remotely resembled icing. #1GF! was impressed. Men everywhere scratched “macho” off the list of adjectives used to describe me.

As I cooked up a few batches, #1GF! told me a story that one of her coworkers had come over to her desk because he noticed that the contractor troubles that she was having seemed to coincide with the contractor troubles on this blog. Another coworker brought the guy into the loop that #1GF! and I lived together, and he wanted to let her know that he knew about it.

The guy wasn’t obtuse. #1GF! and I never made a make a public affair of our being together. We both kept our private and business lives separate, and worked hard not to let our personal connection interfere with working together. We did it so well that most people we worked with didn’t have a clue that we were together.

We’re still private people (says the guy who has trouble telling a story without getting cut off with, “Yea, I read about that on your blob, dood.”), so even though we don’t work together anymore, #1GF! doesn’t broadcast our personal life together. She won’t deny it, but she doesn’t make it a point of discussion. It’s still sort of funny to know that some people are just piecing it together seven years later.

All the “test” cookies I had to eat ended up giving me one hell of a migraine, and may have caused a couple of weird dreams despite their completely legal ingredients. The first dream was that the roof had to be torn off of the house and the instructions for the contractor were written on the walls in Farsi. And the bathroom walls were filled with wigs. I couldn’t understand why the contractor needed to tear the roof off, I couldn’t communicate with him because I couldn’t write in Farsi, and I was pissed that someone wrote all over the walls and filled them with wigs.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the second dream had to do with a poor guy who lived near a swamp killing someone for the insurance money. I kept swapping into the heads of each character in the story and none of them were making good choices. It would’ve been a good ninety minutes of TV, but it was not a great night of sleep.

Wednesday (Day 556): The Great Boiler Fake Out

I went down to measure the pipes for insulation (because most of the house was still cold), and checked the model number of the boiler so that I could claim a fat $500 gas company rebate for having a high efficiency boiler installed. When I checked (and double checked) the boiler, I realized that we didn’t have a high efficiency boiler at all. In a big yellow sticker on the front of the boiler, it listed it as a 80% efficiency boiler instead of the 87% we paid for.

Fuckin’ A.

I left a message for the plumber to tell him that we had the wrong boiler. I always try to give people the benefit of the doubt so I don’t freak out, but how the fuck do you install the wrong boiler? This wasn’t like a one model letter difference where you pay for the 205A and accidentally get the 205B. This was the cheapest, lowest efficiency boiler you can install these days. I wondered why not only why it happened, but why it continues to happen to me.

I had a quick sandwich and my only plan for the day was to bring my migraine inducing cookies to my parents because I couldn’t eat them myself. Before I left, I picked up a message from a friend of mine who had the day off and wanted to come by to see the house. I gave him a call back.

“Hey what are you doing today?” he asked.

“Nothing important. I never do anything important. I don’t have a job, man,” I said.

“You’re writing, aren’t you?”

“I am doing that.”

“Well, there you go.”

See, that’s what friends do. They try to drag you up a little even when you don’t think you need it.

While I waited for my friend to show up, I tried to match up a ball of skeleton keys to the doors in my house. It was mundane, but I figured that it wasn’t a very involved project for an indeterminate wait. I had them all figured out pretty quickly, but then thought that having keys sticking out of all the locks made the long hallway seem like it belonged more in an asylum than a beach house. I pulled the keys out and put them back in the cellar, making sure to separate the working ones from the ball of useless ones.

When my friend showed up, we spent some time trying to place the speakers. He likes bass, and suggested that I may want to skip proper placement and equalize out the bass. I called him a sunufa bitch. I think it has become my knee jerk reaction to equalization suggestions from people who should know better.

I eventually put the speaker placement issue aside in favor of testing out Guitar Hero II in the new house. You know, just to see how it sounded. I dug the PS2 out of its box, wiped a good layer of dust off of it, and set it up.

You could hear the grinding of PS2 gears, and the game refused to load. Rather than give up, I dug up a PS2 grinding fix that I found a couple of years ago, and located a tube of lithium grease that I knew I had seen in the basement recently.

In ten minutes, the PS2 was running just well enough to allow us to get through a couple of rounds of Guitar Hero. The game didn’t seem nearly as fun as it used to be, and it not only screwed with my equilibrium, but made me a little edgy. I put everything away just as #1GF! got home from work. We all decided to go down to our local hangout for dinner so that they both could make fun of me for baking cookies.

I no longer liked Guitar Hero, the house was still tormenting me, and cookies were giving me headaches. The world was not cooperating with my vision of the way things should go. It was nighttime in December, and it was 66 degrees and raining, so even the weather refused to make sense. Some say, “Welcome to New England.” I say, “Welcome to the Life of Riley.”

Thursday (Day 557): The Birth Of a Super Villain

It had been a couple of days and my power supply still hadn’t showed up, so I decided to check the status of my order. I found out that the PSU wouldn’t be showing up at all because I had typed something wrong and the order couldn’t be processed. Newegg had been waiting for my corrected info for a couple of days, which is about how long it takes them to have an order on your doorstep. I corrected and resubmitted the order.

I called the plumber again and got dumped to voice mail on the second ring, which is a pretty firm indication that you’re getting intentionally dumped. I left a message and nicely asked him to call me back.

The plumber called me back a little while later to tell me that he installed the boiler that he should’ve and that installing a high efficiency boiler would’ve required him to run a direct vent from the boiler out through the back wall of the house. I read him the invoice listing the exact boiler that we didn’t get, and reminded him that we discussed direct venting and that he said it would be no problem to run the vent up an existing chimney flue. I made sure to tell him that I didn’t think that he did this to pull one over on me, and made sure to keep my tone even and positive, but that I paid for a high efficiency boiler that I didn’t get.

That’s when he turned on me and told me that he didn’t know what I wanted him to do. He said that he thought all boilers were high efficiency, and then told me that I was “moaning and groaning” about the boiler and asked if I just wanted the rebate money. I refused it because if I got the right boiler, I would get the rebate anyway. He then went on to tell me that the piping up the chimney would cost nearly a thousand dollars to install and that wasn’t going to be his problem. If I wanted the correct boiler, the vent was going out my back wall between two windows. That wasn’t what we agreed on, and it certainly didn’t sound safe.

I wasn’t being hard on the guy, so I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t just apologizing for the mistake and telling me when he’d fix it. I was almost acting apologetic that he had to fix his mistake, but if you’re going to be a fucking dick about a mistake that went against your own invoice, why should I bother trying to help you? I told him to get us the boiler we asked for and call me back once he had figured out how to get the piping up the chimney and hung up. FUCK.

The guy wanted to actually charge me more for a job that I already paid for? All I could think was, “Hey dickhead. I already paid for the fucking piping. You have that money and it’s mine. Or maybe you can take the piping money out of the thousand plus that you pocked from delivering a bottom of the barrel boiler? I wandered around the house talking to myself and dreaming up ineffective, but extremely satisfying, ways of dealing with the problem.

In my aggravation, I walked from a room full of boxes to one with less, and then back again. I needed something mundane and involved to take my mind off of the anger, so I looked up how to debrand my phone. After a little while, I realized that debranding could leave me with a dead phone, so I decided to finish placing my speakers.

I spent a fair amount of time inching the speakers around the floor, and when I finally got them in a decent spot, I attached small rubber pads to the heads of metric bolts that were being used as replacement speaker feet. After a couple of final measurements, I felt that my speakers were in as good a spot as they were going to get. Unfortunately, I was still pissed, and I still needed something in depth and mundane to slow me down.

I Googled how to get into the service menu for my TV and ended up doing a full 54 point convergence to correct the geometry. If that doesn’t sound insane enough, I did it using string and masking tape and worked on it until long after dark. I may have been quickly losing my mind.

Halfway through lining up the blue grid with the strings, I heard something like a waterfall outside. I went out in the rain to investigate. I shined a flashlight up at the corner of my house. One side of the gutters were overflowing and creating a puddle in the corner of the house. This did not seem good.

It was cold, dark, and rainy, so I figured the issue could wait until it was light. I shook off the water and returned to my convergence project. #1GF! had a haircut and a work party, so by the time she got home, I must’ve looked insane sitting in the dark in front of a TV covered with a grid of string. I’m almost positive that this is how super villains are born.

Friday (Day 558): Springs, Waterfalls, And Stupid Robots

I woke up at 5:30 to the sound of gently rushing waterfalls. As I don’t live near any waterfalls, I realized that all the gutters were overflowing because the wind and rain that hadn’t let up since the day before. The gutters had been overflowing all night long, so the water had dug out foot deep pools under the downspouts.

I felt partly to blame because I had it on my list to clean out the gutters, but I kept pushing it down the list because it didn’t seem like a priority. I also saw the start of the issue the night before and didn’t do anything to fix it. I went to the basement, and not only was the window well overflowing in the back of the house again, but there was an inch of water in the front of the basement as well.

Climbing a ladder to clean the gutters in the pouring rain didn’t seem like the most safe thing in the world to do, so I waited until dawn so that if I did fall and kill myself, #1GF! would be able to find the body a little bit faster. I went around the entire house cleaning out the gutters while #1GF! vacuumed up the water inside. I had to stop about every ten minutes to carry the full shop vac outside because it was a too heavy for #1GF! to carry herself.

Normally, being regularly interrupted from a job I’m struggling through and didn’t plan for could be aggravating, but we were both working hard to get through it. I could bitch and moan or I could smile and make jokes. I smiled, made jokes, and tried to make the best of it.

Things like this make me think about being a man. Being a man isn’t about breaking bricks with your head (which is still pretty awesome) or about staying out of the kitchen. I see my job as a man as being not only to get through the rough spots, but to make the rough spots seem like they’re not all that rough. Smile, whistle, and get through things the best that I can without wasting time cursing chance. And it makes life a little more pleasant when things aren’t going our way.

I had the gutters cleaned out by 9:00 AM, and noticed that it was twenty to thirty degrees warmer out than when I started. It must’ve been some sort of tropical storm blowing through, and I wasn’t complaining. I’ll take warm rain to an ice cold New England Winter rain any day, even if it is coming down in sheets. If this is a result of global warming, I may just switch over to a Flock of Seagulls hair do, so that people don’t question why I’m constantly spraying AquaNet into the air.

#1GF! and I vacuumed until 9:45 and then realized that we had two springs in the corner of the basement that were bubbling in water faster than we could vacuum it out. It looked like someone had turned on a hose and stuck it under our basement just for fun.

I stuffed the holes full of cardboard to slow their flow and kept vacuuming. When the lake got down to a puddle, I went upstairs drenched and muddy. I showered and put on some dry clothes to keep that cold wet feeling from getting into my bones. I grabbed a cup of coffee and checked to see if the plumber had called me back. He hadn’t.

I headed out to the local home store to pick up some water stop cement, and #1GF! headed off to work. It was only 10:40 in the morning, and I felt like we had put in a full day. Once I was out of the emergency and into my car, I found myself constantly conversing with the plumber in my head. It was not the way I wanted to spend my first little bit of down time for the day.

When I got home, I spent the day plugging holes and cracks in the basement to prevent future springs. Midway through, I heard a knock at the door. Thinking it could be the plumber coming to make things right, I bolted out of my bulkhead and walked around to the front of the house.

It was better than a plumber. My power supply had arrived from Newegg. They delivered it in a day for free. Even if life is determined to keep me from having a minute of peace, I will always have Newegg. Damn, they’re good. I beamed at the box, patted it twice, and put it on the basement stairs.

When I finished up plugging the holes, I grabbed the shop vac to clean up the remaining water. As I pushed the water back toward defeat, the vac got stuck on a support pole and refused to roll around it. It did this all the time. I’m glad no one was around because I turned to it and said in a pretty disparaging tone, “Seriously. You are the worst robot ever.”

I still don’t know what’s worse: the fact that I was calling my shop vac a robot, that I was addressing it directly, or that this isn’t the first time that this conversation has taken place between me and my shop vac. I thought about it for a minute while the robot looked dumbly on.

“If I ever do transform into some form of super villain, this type of thing is going to ruin your chances of being my sidekick.”

The robot knew better than to respond. I walked over and rolled it around the support pole.

I finished up around 3:30, and threw all my work clothes in the wash. Now, I grew up doing my own laundry, but #1GF! has barred me from the laundry machines after a couple of minor incidents where I treated girl clothes like boy clothes and ended up turning them into doll clothes. That said, I haven’t done laundry in years.

#1GF! wasn’t around to stop me, so I threw the clothes into the new washer and added the soap. I pushed the start button and waited. The washer sat staring at me in silence. Just when I started to wonder if my laundry skills were as rusty as my nunchuck skills, there was a loud KACHUNK! and I was positive that I broke something. “Oh shit. That can’t be good,” I said to no one in particular.

The washer went silent again. Like a monkey looking at the monolith, I swayed my head back and forth, as if two inches to either side would give me a better view on what was going on. Just when I was comfortable that it wasn’t going to do anything, the water started rushing into the machine, startling me. “Shit. You are one crazy washer. You should team up with my robot,” I said to the machine before leaving it to do it’s business.

The plumber still hadn’t called, so I left him a message to call me. Even though I was aggravated at having to chase yet another professional down, I kept my tone positive and even told him to have a nice weekend. Because I was still harboring a massive amount of anger about the whole issue that I was working hard not to release, I needed to attack another involved, but mundane task. I thought about hanging the rear speakers in my TV room, but decided to leave that can of worms unopened. Instead, I went back to working on the TV convergence.

At some point, my engineer friend called and asked how things were. I explained the morning to him and said, “Oh, we’ve got ocean views, waterfalls, and natural springs here, man. It’s like a fucking spa.” I didn’t tell him about the robot because, well, engineers love robots, and I didn’t want the one applicant for the sidekick position to be recruited away if I ever reached the required anger level to make the jump to super villain.

#1GF! brought home pizza and the two of us sat watching sitcoms and hoping to laugh. Once it was time for bed, I started installing new video drivers on the DVR because taped shows didn’t look quite right. I finished the project in fifteen or twenty minutes, but there is no reasoning that explains the times that I start some of my projects. I checked off the “irrationality” box on my super villain application form.

As soon as I hopped into bed, I realized that it might have been the convergence that was affecting the TV and not the video drivers on the DVR. I was not really psyched about trying to tackle the convergence again. That meant a whole new batch of string and a whole bunch of lost time, but at least I wouldn’t be thinking about the plumber.

Saturday (Day 559): Trapped In The Malls

In the morning, I sat #1GF! down to listen to how well the front speakers were placed considering the room size. They were only a foot and a half off of the rear wall, so the front to back imaging wouldn’t be that deep, but I asked her to close her eyes and listen. I stood in the doorway to the room, smirking and sure that she’d be impressed.

While she could tell that the music sounded like it came from a center point and humored me as best she could, she didn’t see the big deal. She wanted to know if the speakers could be pushed back against the wall as far as they could go. I managed to sputter something like “Gik. Boop. Dak.”

I shook my head and explained bass reinforcement and how I had to walk around the room clapping and talking to find the bass reinforcement points. She said that she was happy not to have witnessed that bit of insanity. If she tried to explain the importance of interpersonal communication or the intricacies of home decoration, I would have had the same reaction. It just wasn’t her thing.

We headed to Target, then the mall, then to a flag store, and then to a home store, which allowed #1GF! to get some Christmas shopping done. I hadn’t really gotten a list together yet, so I mostly wandered around like those old men you see trapped in the mall. We ended up eating dinner out and headed home around 6:30 because #1GF! was tired of shopping. Once we got home, she inexplicably looked up more stuff online (isn’t that shopping?), and I watched Cops. I guess we both have our priorities.

What I Learned

• #1GF! does not care about audio like I care about audio.
• #1GF! has a LOT of Christmas decorations.
• You can make speaker feet for under $7 with metric bolts, nuts, and rubber pads that can be found at any local hardware store. You can even find a list of common speaker thread sizes if you need them.
• Chai cookies give me a migraine and and an overactive night of dreaming.
• There are a lot of new options on power supplies these days.
• Odd sized measuring cups are a lot handier than you’d expect.
• I know how to get into the service menu on my TV and do a 54 point convergence. I don’t wish to use this knowledge ever again.
• Some people will turn on you when things stop going their way.
• I don’t really like Guitar Hero anymore.

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