Comparative Reality

Rekiwi said:

Now all he has to do is avoid the Curse of Jimmy Carter and being assassinated.

Which, if you think about it, is an interesting curse: Bad presidency, great after-presidency career as a respected dignitary, peacemaker, builder of houses, and generally pretty damn decent human being.

Hell, what's George Bush the First up to these days?

I was thinking about the assassination thing, and...well, remember when Reagan was shot? And, a little over a dozen years later, we got the Brady Bill?

I think we can assume that if someone is insane enough to make the attempt, the person is deathly afraid that Obama is a socialist, or a terrorist, and/or is going to take his guns away. And if some whacknut does take a shot at Obama, I don't think it would take 13 years to push a much stricter interpretation of the Second Amendment.

Now I get to be annoyed and/or pissed off by the various state and local political crap.

I feel like I've been holding my breath for months.

Or, you know, eight years.

The one about the garage door? Yeah, er...forget all of that.

What I should do is oil the tracks every six months. That's reasonable. Tightening the chain, though? That's not something I should have to deal with.

I know this because that's what the repairman told me. He did say that by tightening the chain, I gained another two or three days of life out of the thing. But it stopped working yesterday morning. The machine made a whirring noise, which I initially thought was the gear spinning, after having popped the chain. It was actually the sound of the motor turning, but since the nylon (?) gear attached to the shaft had been chewed away, said shaft wasn't turning at all.

Fortunately, this was a quick fix. Unfortunately, it wasn't exactly cheap. The real problem, though, was that the shaft itself had been worn away, and was wobbling around. That's what caused the initial problems. I didn't do anything to make it worse, which is some consolation.

He actually blamed the last guy who worked on it (different company, and I don't really remember how long ago it was), who didn't tighten the chain properly. And then he said that the spring will probably be the next thing to go, because that's just how it works with automatic garage doors.

I told him that, in fact, the spring broke a couple of years ago. He smiled and nodded.

"Most people use this as their front door," he said. "You get a lot of cycles out of it, but not a lot of years."

Of course, the battery in my wife's car also crapped out yesterday.

Houses require a decent amount of routine maintenance. Meaning, the many, many components of a house need to be oiled, tightened, inspected, replaced, or otherwise tweaked every so often. "Every so often" being months, or, more pleasingly, years. Of course, the longer the interval, the more involved and expensive the maintenance is going to be.

Air filter for the AC/heater: Every three months. I was pretty good about that. But too many times this year I'd look up at it and think, in passing, "It's probably time to change that." I'm conscientious enough to write the installation date on the filter. I finally got around to replacing it. The date was "12/07." It was a bit dusty.

Our garage door has been acting up. Almost literally, since it's been balky about actually closing. Noticing that the thing was shaking a bit (which, of course, was the clue that I ignored), I broke out the ladder and re-connected the various wires on the back. That seemed to work. At least for the few times that I tested it. Then it went back to not working, and then started to get a bit picky about opening at all.

So I broke out the ladder again this morning, climbed up, redid the wires again, and then noticed that the chain looked a bit droopy.

At that point, I slapped myself on the head, got a wrench, and tightened the chain. The same thing happened a few years ago, but...well, it was a few years ago. I've wired, fixed, drilled, dug, and basically done too many other things since then to remember that, yes, I need to tighten the chain every so often. Preferably more often than once every few years when the garage door stops working.

Obviously, writing it down on my blog is a foolproof solution, and, from this point forward, I will never forget these basic tasks again.

Of course, I know there are another half dozen or so routine maintenance tasks that I'm forgetting even now...