On an absolute last-second whim, I headed out this afternoon to take a hike around one of my favorite nearby attractions, the Tualatin Hills Nature Park. It’s just two stops away via MAX light rail, but between the pandemic and everything else I just haven’t made it over there in a couple of years.
At 2:38pm Pacific time, I emailed Honeywell’s support folks requesting any available tracking info for the replacement AC unit, since I hadn’t heard back from them since the previous Thursday when they agreed to the warranty replacement.
At 2:41pm Pacific time, a quick tap on the door to the apartment heralded the arrival of the replacement AC unit, thus rendering the email I’d just sent absolutely pointless.
Now imagine a lifetime full of this sort of thing and you begin to understand why I feel so emotionally tired all of the time.
August 15th, a Monday. We took possession of the AC unit I’d spent an untidy sum of money on to replace the previous AC that went kaput.
September 1st, a Thursday, a mere two and a half weeks later, I cut the power cord and emailed Honeywell Support a photo to prove I’d done so. This was the last step in getting them to ship me a replacement unit under warranty, since this one had developed a worrying and occasionally rather loud rattling noise within days of going into service.
So here we are, another 90F+ day ahead, and we’re short an AC unit.
Again.
For an unspecified amount of time.
Again.
I am so, so tired of everything.
Apparently this month is all about problems with cooling.
(more…)The good news is that the very (let’s not go into how) expensive new portable AC unit arrived on Monday, with just a couple days to go before the next (current) heatwave arrived. And it does good work! It’s designed for cooling about double the square footage of the old one, so one interesting effect of the upgrade is that sometimes this unit can get ahead of the heat enough to actually go into “fan” mode for a few minutes, periodically.
One amusing feature: It has a little flap on top where the air comes out, and it auto opens/closes when the unit’s powered on/off. There’s even an oscillation mode for that flap, if you want that sort of silliness.
The bad news, of course, is that we’re in another razzafraggin’ heatwave. It almost hit 100F again yesterday and today won’t be much better. Which means I’ve barely slept.
Sigh.
I love building things. Heck, I think I wrote about that here recently.
Sometimes, people even appreciate and/or make use of those things. That sure feels good, doesn’t it?
Usually, though, nobody really does. This goes back so, so far. Heck, my last really successful endeavor was when I took over the Anime Blog Muyo forum (well, kind of… I built my own and everyone migrated over when RadicalBender was done running his forum) and that lasted for… a couple of years? The Wayback Machine stopped indexing AEIOU’s content in mid-2008 and I genuinely don’t remember when we closed up shop there for good. We had some good times back then, the handful of us who remained…
(Side note: Nailing down some of the details in the previous paragraph involved reading through a lot of my own blog posts of the time and boy howdy was that a dark couple of years for me. Yikes.)
Then there’s stuff like the Mastodon server (I had two other users besides myself, and only one of them “tooted” more than a small handful of times). The home-theater computing rigs that only I would use in the household. Various purchased and/or assembled gadgets like that. Websites, forums, what-have-you. I ran a webcomic for four entire years with a readership of… half a dozen entire humans? Maybe?
Never mind this website that almost nobody reads. (Ha ha, how meta.)
It happens at work, too. A wiki almost nobody used. Fancy scripted automation stuff that only I ever actually use. Documentation nobody reads. (Well, I do: I don’t always remember how I did the fancy scripted automation thing the last time, after all.)
I can’t help myself, though. Not really. The challenge of getting something built has its rewards, and what else am I supposed to do? Just… not make stuff? Be serious. This is why I’m probably going to fire up another Mastodon instance (the one I’m on currently is shutting down, which may be ironic, I dunno). It’s why I’m still hoping to do more GoPro-footage YouTube videos that nobody will watch.
It’s fun to make stuff, dagnabbit. So… as much as some recognition would be (hugely) appreciated, I’m going to keep at it.
The alternative isn’t worth considering.
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