Archive for the 'Life' Category

Last week in Priesthood Meeting Brother Robinson explained that he had forgotten to ask anyone to prepare and give the lesson until Saturday night and that his wife had counseled him that it was not fair for him to assign the task to another on such short notice. He told us that he wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

This morning at the end of the Ward Easter Egg Hunt that I, as a member of the Activities Committee, participated in the planning and execution of Brother Robinson approached me and said that the person who had been assigned the lesson for tomorrow had bailed on him. He asked me if I might be willing to prepare and teach the lesson in his stead. I just smiled and reminded him of what had happened the previous week and joked with him that no matter how hard he tries, something always seems to go wrong in this matter.

Now you know how I’ve spent my Saturday night.

I pulled up into our parking lot and right in front of me were two lizards sunning themselves on the short wall in front of the car. One of them was really skiddish, medicine but the other one let me get about three feet away from it before it darted over the wall. These guys can run fast!

I usually pick up Krissy from work at about the same time every day. I try to get there a good fifteen minutes before she gets off work officially in case she gets out early. Today was no exception.

The sun was shining and it was even a little too warm in the car when the rain started to fall. There is a relatively new law in the State of California requiring all motorists to turn their lights on when driving in rain. This I did, as I usually do when it starts to sprinkle. When I got to Krissy’s workplace I turned off the engine and slid over into the passenger seat and laid back while listening to the radio. It was taking a little longer than usual for Krissy to leave the building and walk out to the car, so I reclined the chair. While I was thus reclined the radio went dead. I thought there might be an emergency alert that was preempting the program I was listening to, but it stayed dead for more than ten seconds. It was at this point that I realized exactly what had happened.

I scrambled to turn off any and all electricity sapping accouterments, including the headlights and then tried to start the car. The engine pretended for a moment that it was going to start, but the starter ran out of juice in the attempt. The sunshine had made me forget the lights were on, and I hadn’t opened the door when I arrived and never got the annoying whine telling me to switch the headlights off.

Dejected, I popped the trunk and removed the jumper cables. Another ten minutes passed in abject silence. When Krissy finally emerged I leaped from the car holding the cables over my head so she could see there was a problem. This turned out to be just another frustration in a long, difficult work day. We asked Marlon, one of her coworkers, to assist us in jump starting the car. Neither of us were really too experienced, but between the both of us we got the cars properly linked and started. Ready to congratulate ourselves on a job well done we started toward the cars to remove the cables from the batteries. That’s when Krissy saw it.

“What’s that!?” Krissy cried curiously. We both looked but saw nothing. She kept verbally nudging us until we both saw what she had seen. There was a little brown furry puffball in a little space wedged between the hinge of the hood and the body of the car. “I think I saw it move,” Krissy said, a little more cautiously than at first. As I looked more closely at this thing, I began to see what appeared to be little sprawling feet attatched to stumpy legs. I began to feel ill as I realized what I was looking at.

“Is it alive?” I questioned. “Are you sure that you saw it moving? I think it’s dead.” What’s worse than a dead rat, you ask? Krissy broke a branch off of a tree in the parking lot and tried to get Marlon to take it. Grasping for any reason not to go near the car again he came up with some lame excuse, and the branch was handed to me instead. I chose to approach from behind and to the side. I hit the side of the car, and the rat quvered, but maintained its supposed safe position. I wasn’t getting anywhere. I gave the branch to Krissy, and she came at it from the fron of the car.

When Krissy touched the little guy, he didn’t run out of the car as was hoped for, but rather, he burrowed in deeper and deeper until it was presumed that he was stuck. We could no longer see him and it appeared the he had dropped down behind the wheel well in front of the passenger door. Now I didn’t know what to do. Krissy was not happy about this development. All I could imagine was the rat getting stuck in there until it died and began to stink up the car. We wanted him out, so we called the best car expert we know, Randy. He didn’t sound too keen on dismantling the panels on the car, but he agreed to take a look.

When we got to Randy’s he came out and I lifted the hood. Randy poked his head around a whole lot closer that I ever would have, but didn’t see anything. He was convinced we should just wait it out and that the rat would leave our car after he ralized that there was nothing there for him. Just then, Randy spotted the rat behind the engine touching something called the firewall. The rat was obviously not trapped, and had proven that he could get out of the car any time he wanted to.

When we went back inside, Randy’s wife, Joanna, decided she would give the rat a name. After trying a bunch of different ones the name Firewall seemed to stick. As far as we know Firewall the rat is still perched happily in the engine cavity of the car enjoying its warmth and dryness.

Incidentally, while we were outside it began to rain a little bit, and there was an amazing rainbow over Randy’s apartment building. I didn’t have my camera for any of this, which upset me almost as much as foolishly letting the battery die. I asked Randy if he had a digital camera in the apartment. I ran back outside and quickly snapped a few shots in the rain.

The day began too early for me. I was still exhausted from the previous day when I woke up. We left at around 9:30 to go to Salt Lake from Las Vegas. On the way we stopped for breakfast at McDonalds. We ordered One Sausage McMuffin without egg and two Egg McMuffin meals. As we drove out and I began handing out the food I found in the bag two Sausage McMuffins, two Egg McMuffins, and three hash browns. They had given us an extra Sausage McMuffin and an extra Hash Brown! I guess that makes up for all the times I didn’t get all the stuff I ordered but still had to pay for at other fast food places.

Driving through Provo was interesting as usual. The billboards there seem to be the most Mormon-centric of anywhere in Utah. There are many businesses looking to woo missionaries with their special discounts even on seemingly unrelated items. If you have a missionary on your billboard you can’t go wrong because everyone will look at it.

We arrived with little hassle. There was some horrible traffic for a while, but all’s well that ends well. General Conference is tomorrow and it looks like rain… as usual.

My brother, Christopher, just turned twelve and was ordained a Deacon in the Aaronic Priesthood. He lives within 10 minutes of the Conference Center in Salt Lake City, so we, his family, felt it appropriate that he actually attend the first Priesthood Session of conference that he will hear. As it turns out, my Grandfather has never attended General Conference in person. We, his family, have decided that he should attend General Conference in person at least once in his lifetime. To both of these ends I took a flight from Palomar Airport in Carlsbad to LAX and then another flight from LAX to Las Vegas. Tomorrow we will drive up to Salt Lake City.

The terminal at Palomar is incredibly tiny. It made for a somewhat different experience than what I am used to in pre-flight passenger screening and boarding. There was only one metal detector, and it was at the end of a narrow hallway. It all seemed somewhat strange in that everything felt less formal than at larger airports, but some of the proceedures felt oddly out of place. My favorite instruction was not to go near the outer fence surrounding the runway or else you’d have to go through the metal detector again.

Each flight was very short. The first was only in the air twenty-five minutes, and the second was around forty. They served drinks on the flight from LAX to Las Vegas, but the stewardesses were still cleaning up when the Captain anounced that we were beginning out descent and he instructed the crew to be seated.

After I arrived in Las Vegas my Grandfather took me directly to the Bishop’s Storehouse where he and Grandmother volunteer twice a week helping people fill food orders and restocking as necessary. It really is a lot of work, but it was fun to work with my Grandfather again. I stayed there for three or four hours until Grandmother arrived and drove me back to their house. I’ve only had about two and a half hours of sleep, and I feel as though I may fall out of my chair, I’m so tired.

I took Grandfather geocaching in the afternoon. Then after Grandmother got back from getting her hair done we ate at In-N-Out Burger for dinner. Finally, we came home and I collapsed from exhaustion went to bed.

When our piano was tuned Krissy asked about what we could do to restore the finish and beautify it. Ever since then Krissy has wanted to fix it up. Tonight we finally bought the product and Krissy was so excited that, even though it was ten o’clock at night she started in on her project.

It didn’t take very long until we were seeing results. This stuff is amazing. Krissy was able to make the exposed portions of the piano look almost exactly like the unexposed portions under the lid.

Here is a side by side comparison of what part of the piano looked like. On the left, the upper two inches had already been done. On the right the whole side is finished. It’s not perfect, but for the price and the amount of effort involved the results speak for themselves.

After conquering the Double Peak Mountain overlooking San Marcos, Randy and I came back to the apartment for a bit. While he was here he looked at the light switch in the bathroom for me. He was quickly able to determine what needed to be done to swap the switches in the closet and the bathroom. After hooking the sensor switch up in the closet, though, we ran into some problems. The light came on, but the switch didn’t seem to be functioning. The LED on the switch itself never illuminated and the button didn’t do anything. Worst of all, the light would come on, then, after ten seconds, turn off again. It would only stay off for one or two seconds, then turn back on again. This behaviour made no sense.

I went on the internet to find out if there were others that might have had similar difficulties and I found the company’s website. I never found the information I was looking for, but I was able to find a product catalogue with switches that were similar to mine. On one of the pages was a layer by layer photographic diagram of what was inside the black box. Nothing too useful about that, although it was interesting. Also of note was that the diagram showed the switch with its faceplate removed exposing the sensitivity and duration controls.

Sensativity and duration controls!? This was just what we needed! Randy put the switches back the way they had been and turned the sensativity and duration controls to maximum. I started a timer to see how long the light would stay on if no movement were detected in the bathroom. The light stayed on almost exactly thirty minutes! This is a much better solution because now I don’t have to worry everytime maintenance people popped in to check on things.

Thanks to Randy, the light switch formerly known as evil has redeemed itself.

Update: the light switch is not at bad as originally though. Click here to see why.

A few months ago there was some maintainance performed in all of the apartments in our complex. Our normal, up is on, down is off, human-style light switch was “upgraded” to the monstrosity pictured at the right. Now, I’m a technical kind of guy, and I was intrigued at this new hi-tech switch. There is a motion sensor on the top and a button on the bottom. When you click the button it always returns back to the same position. The green LED flashes intermittently, and sometimes seems to flash when it detects movement. All of this is fine, so far. But there is one really annoying “feature” of this light switch: it shuts off after 5 minutes of no motion detected.

I am assuming this was installed to save electricity. The first time I took a shower with this thing, the light turned off while I was rinsing soap off of my face. My eyes were closed at the time, and when I opened them, it was pitch black. I got to finish the shower in the dark. Thank you crappy light switch.

Every time I take a shower now, I’m always paranoid that this thing is going to shut off on me, so I wave a towel over the top of the shower curtain every one to two minutes. Sometimes I am really relaxed and forget about waving the towel, and just when you least expect it: “Click!”

I came up with what I thought would be a solution. There should be a mechanism to detect if the shower is on, and if it is on then the light won’t shut off unless the light switch is manually turned off. The problem with this comes when someone wants to take a long relaxing bath. The water won’t be running, and the light will still turn off!

I could see where this type of switch might be useful. If it had been me, I would have installed this thing in my closet. That’s the light I tend to forget is on when I walk out of the bedroom. I can’t recall forgetting to turn off the bathroom light. Anyway, I had some ideas for fixing the problem. I unscrewed this switch to see if it might have an adjustable timer. Unfortunately it was just a black box and I didn’t want to risk breaking it because I don’t own it. My next idea was to actually switch it with the normal light switch in the closet, but I didn’t know what the maintenance people would say to the landlord if they came in and noticed it.

Finally, there are the paranoid theories I keep thinking about. How do I know that this thing doesn’t have a hidden camera in it instead of just a motion sensor? This thing reminds me of HAL, a little bit too much. It’s just a switch with a light in it, but it still creeps me out sometimes.

I hate this stupid, evil light switch.

Tonight we had dinner with family. My neice was given mint and chip flavored ice cream for dessert and, capsule well… you can imagine what happened.

This afternoon we had a beutiful hail storm that ended up sticking to the ground. It was pretty slushy and took on a snow-like texture. People got all excited and I saw at least 5 families out playing in it and taking pictures. It’s been three hours and there is still some on the ground, but most of it has already melted.

I can see the ocean from my balcony, so this is a really low elevation for something like this to happen at.