A ray of sunshine in the dark clouds

I’m still plagued by car problems and now hubby also has to have a windshield replaced in his vehicle.  It had a pit in it from his trip to Oregon in October and a few days ago it split all the way across due to the cold weather. We had to scrape a quarter inch of ice off the windshield before we could get on the road.

I just got my car back out of the shop again, this time for an electrical problem that the mechanic thinks is in the front door panel.  This could be up to a $700 repair but he replaced a fuse and so far it’s working.  I’m crossing my fingers it continues to do so for the long term.  The tech told me he didn’t know how long it would last, a week, a month or a year or longer.  There was no way to know since everything showed up fine when he scoped the car on the machine they use.

The ray of sunshine in all this is that the guy came to my house to get my car and take it to the shop about ten miles away.  That evening he gave me a loaner car that he delivered to my house at 8:30 PM.  I would like to know what other mechanic does this?  He made sure the car was an automatic too and had gas so I could get to work and back while he had my car in the shop. 

 This is the loaner car, which reminded me of a demolition derby car

 

Now I have to say this loaner car was like driving a tank and not the prettiest thing in the world but it was wheels and got me where I needed to go.  Beggars can’t be choosy, right?  Also the car was definitely a smoker’s vehicle.  It about knocked me over to stick my head in there so I emptied half a bottle of Fabreeze in the car and let it sit overnight so I could breathe driving to work and back. But again, beggars can’t be choosy.  I was extremely grateful he loaned me the car because he didn’t have to do that.

 This thing had dings everywhere and you could view the trunk from inside the car

 

Be thankful for all your blessings, big or small.  There’s always something to be grateful for, even when a dark cloud hovers over your head.

She wants to join the family

We live in a place where we’re lucky to see a lot of wildlife coming by at various times.  The last few weeks this female roadrunner has made it clear, she wants in the house. 

 Not the greatest pic but I had to hurry

 

She jumps up on the top of the bench we have on the back patio and pecks at the window.  This sends the cats into a frenzy watching with wild eyes.  I’m not sure what this lady has in mind because I don’t think her or the cats would actually want to meet face-to-face. 

Female roadrunner trying her best to adopt us

She makes her rounds of the backyard near the house, hopping from chair-to-chair and perching on the table.  Last week she even tried her best to fly up and land on the ceiling fans out there.  Maybe she got into some loco weed, or ate some juniper berries.

 Here she is on the patio chair

 

Today, she jumped off the patio roof and took her place on the bench to peck at the window.  Her eyes scan the place from floor to ceiling.  I imagine she’s looking for food and expects me to provide it.  I don’t have any lizards or bugs lying around to give her.  Right now I’m not sure what else she’s trying to tell me, but she looks plump enough and not starving.

At this point, I’m not sure how long this activity will last.  The bird of prey that was taking a daily bath here has gone to other areas.  I haven’t seen him in a while.

Other than that, I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving and spent a relaxing day being grateful for all we have. 

Below are a few pics from our Thanksgiving drive along the back highway to Mesquite NV and back.  These are taken from the car window so aren't the best photos in the world.  This country passes through an Indian reservation and is mostly sagebrush and Joshua trees.  But the day was beautiful and about 50 degrees.

 
It’s onward toward Christmas now.  Some neighbors already have their lights up.  I’m only perturbed at the one who put his up a week before Thanksgiving.  That’s disgraceful!  These days everyone rushes things. 

We have a few leaves left on our trees, but they’re quickly littering the ground.  I watched some flutter down in a gust of wind this morning and wished I had the camera ready.  I did spend the next half hour trying to capture some but didn’t have much luck.  I guess things like that are better in person.

 Most of these fluttered to the ground today

 

I hate to see winter coming but that’s beyond my control.  All I can do is count the days until spring – and I shall be doing that – in the near future.  December and January are in the deep freeze here some years.

Now that those awful ulcers are about gone from my mouth, I have a raspy cough to take their place.  I attribute this to working near the coolers all day at work last week.  I was chilled to the bone from head-to-toe by the end of my shift, so I’m now stocked up on all sorts of cold products and extra vitamin C to get me through the winter months without becoming too ill.

Added to all this was another car problem, a dead battery this time, but I can’t say my mechanics didn’t warn me about that when they replaced the radiator.  So I spent part of yesterday getting that fixed.  

Now if I can just fix the garage door, which has gone on the blink lately, I may be able to sit back for a while.  I’ll be opening it manually for the time being because the openers and the opener have become enemies apparently.  They aren’t talking to each other now and the batteries are fine.  It’s back to my old friend, Google, to see if I can find a solution.  What did we do before the internet?  It’s too bad they didn’t teach courses like this in high school – something we could really benefit from as adults.

More of life’s issues

My Caddy - I love this car and I'm going to have to love it a lot longer

As the old saying goes – when it rains it pours.  That seems to be the case right now with my car issues.  Of course, it is a sixteen-year-old car so I don’t expect things to be perfect.  I just hope this is the end of an expensive list of repairs for a while.

It all started out with the A/C, which had to be repaired this summer.  I could have let it go for a while if it wasn’t in the triple digits here.

Things went smoothly for a month and then the starter went out.  That happened when hubby was in Oregon taking care of his dad’s affairs, so I borrowed my neighbor’s car so I could get back and forth to work.  Thankfully, she has two vehicles and one sits in the garage most of the time.  After three days in the shop and about $500, I was able to get my car back. 

Now the car still had a shifter issue, which I’ve been nursing along for a year or more.  I wasn’t ready to shell out another couple hundred to have that looked into, so I’ve been putting up with it, although it’s getting to be a very sore spot having to fight to get the car out of park every time I get into it.  I think this is a brake switch and not a solenoid, which is a good thing because the brake switches are the cheaper of the repairs.

So back up a couple days ago when we were running around town and I had hubby drive my car so he could see how bad the shifter was.  He was getting pretty frustrated trying to get it into gear.  It smelled hot when we came home, but he couldn’t smell it, assuring me all was fine.

So the next day I went to work and noticed I left a trail of wet splashes and drops after I locked my car.  I touched it and it looked like water on my finger.  My car had the hot smell again, plus this time my heat gauge was slightly above the center spot, which it never is, so I knew there was another issue.  Things weren’t just fine.

Hubby brought a gallon of water and filled up my radiator.  The oil was fine.  I called the shop on my break and asked to bring it over after work.  The guys are so good over there and said they’d stay late so I wouldn’t be stranded and would take a look at it for me.  They even offered to give me a ride home, but hubby picked me up.

The verdict is it needs a new radiator and new radiator hose.  The tech pressurized the radiator for me, it was leaking in the front, and the main upper hose is almost worn to the point of having a hole in it.  So this problem is now being fixed, leaving me without a car again for a few days.  The shop ordered the new radiator right away, but they sent over a defective one and the mechanic can’t get another one until Monday.  That seems to be the story of my life, but things happen and it could always be worse.  Thank goodness, that’s my philosophy in life or things could get depressing in a hurry.

So I’m also having the shifter fixed as long as the car is in the shop again anyway.  Actually, hubby suggested it after his round with the car the other day.  I don’t have the estimate on that repair yet and am crossing my fingers because the radiator job is going to cost me $480.  Yikes!  You can see where my paycheck is going.

If things happen in threes, maybe this is it for a while.  I’m keeping a positive mind.

Sometimes endurance is important

That’s certainly been the case with me the last week.  The A/C went out in my car and I’ve been driving around in 109-degree heat.

The A/C seemed to be working fine and then all of a sudden it was blowing hot air, as if I had the heater on.  I had it recharged but three days later, it was back to the hot air again.  I had several stops to make, so I just rolled down the front windows.  It was hot outside but at least I had more air moving.  I probably should have taken a selfie to post here, but once I arrived home, believe me it wasn’t a pretty sight.  I think I could wring water out of my clothes and my face was beat red, hair all askew.  At one point, I thought I’d pass out, but I made it.

 My car

 

It occurred to me it might be time for a new car, but I’m having the A/C hose fixed.  It turns out it has a leak, an expensive leak, but fixable.  I realize I can’t drive my 1998 Cadillac Seville forever, but maybe a bit longer.  I love this car.

I may actually be getting a job after twenty-five years and my mission was to find black pants, which was a lot harder than it sounds.  But I accomplished my mission.  I guess the stubbornness I inherited from my daddy helped to keep me out roaming about town in those conditions.

I even got a compliment on my car and myself earlier in the day before I became a limp sweaty rag.  That feels good at my age.

Major computer issues at the moment

Yesterday my laptop decided to crash.  It was working perfect the night before when I shut it down.  You never know about electronics.  I spent part of the day trying to get it rebooted but to no avail, so I had to call a computer geek a friend referred me to.  He’s coming tomorrow to look the situation over and run a diagnostics test to see if he can repair it.  It may possibly be a sector on my hard drive, but not the entire hard drive.  Does a hard drive have sectors and how many of them?  I never knew that.

If it is the hard drive, I may as well buy a new computer because he told me that it’s an extensive and costly repair because of the way the laptop is made.  I’m crossing my fingers this isn’t the case because I can’t afford that right now.

I can usually work my way out of most of this stuff that comes along, but I’m not that familiar with this, so we’ll see what happens.  Meanwhile, I had to drag out my desktop and dust it off and get it going again so I could get on the internet.  That took part of last night and today.  I hate electronics issues.

I also have issues with my desktop now because I took out Windows XP back in March or April and loaded on Windows 7 and then I started using the laptop because I wasn’t ready to spend the time to load all the programs, etc.  So today I loaded Word (so I can work on my book) and my program for the internet.  When I tried to punch in my key for Windows 7, it told me it had expired because I didn’t do it within thirty days.  What?  No one told me I only had a certain amount of time to do it.  Why isn’t there a message that comes on the screen to warn you about this?  So now I’m still able to get on the net by telling it to remind me later, so this is another issue for the computer guy to take care of.

I’m just can’t tell you how thankful I am that I back up all my files daily.  I got in the habit of doing that a few months ago instead of doing a once a week thing.  Please get in the habit of doing this because you never know when your hard drive may crash.  I back up my books, documents and photos to three places because I’m a bit paranoid and I figure all three won’t crash at once.  It’s better to be safe than sorry when it comes to things that you can’t replace.

Life keeps me busy

My neighbor’s back from her hiking trip so I’m relieved of my cat and garden duty for now.  Raven is happy to have me home, but runs to the door if I’m stepping outside a minute.  He doesn’t want me to leave him home.  He really enjoyed his visits across the street.

Raven

We held an open house for agents last week because we were inundated by calls from them wanting to preview the house for possible clients.  My husband is nicer than I am, I guess, because he wanted to do it.  I have no warm fuzzy feeling when it comes to real estate people.  I guess time will tell if they really have a client or not.  I’m always skeptical.

I’ve been back in the garage and doing house repairs.  The laundry faucet sprung a leak and flooded the cabinet below and under the washer and dryer, so we had quite a mess to clean up.  Why does all this kind of stuff happen around midnight?  My husband wasn’t a happy camper because the last thing he wants to do at that time of night is pull out the washer and dryer and take stuff out from under the sink to clean up the mess.  Plus, we were both upset at having to replace the faucet.

Yesterday, on the way back from lunch with some friends, we stopped at Home Depot and bought a new faucet, so we put it in today.  Naturally, with the two of us doing the repair, it took half the day.

I’m not sure where the weekend went, but here we are almost facing Monday again.  Have a great week everyone.

An unusual lizard sighting

Wall Maintenance

Last weekend we were having a crack repaired in our block wall.  The mortar between a few blocks had cracked over the last ten years.  This is probably wear and tear due to weather extremes here, but my husband is a perfectionist and this bothered him so he was out there in the hundred-degree heat helping the guy with the repairs.

 Zebra-tailed albino lizard

During the course of this, he spotted this albino lizard in the desert seeking shade under a bush on the other side of the wall.  We’ve never seen one of these in the ten years we’ve lived here, but it sounds like they’re common.

 Zebra-tailed albino lizard

Naturally, I ran for the camera so we could get some pics.  We take pictures of everything around here.  My camera gets well used.

Later I came in and looked this lizard up on Google.  For more info on the zebra-tailed lizard, check out Wikipedia.

Innovation

We all have to get creative at times when it comes to fixing things because - face it - sometimes you have to do it yourself.  If you don't you may wait a very long time to get something done, if it ever happens.

This is the repainted door we were working on

Recently, this was true of the garage door. (the fire door between the garage and the house).  We needed to get the springs replaced in the door so it automatically shuts itself since it's a fire door.  It has to pass house inspection and that's something on the list.  We had the door taken off in October to be repainted.  We've waited for someone to come and put the hinge springs back in place since then.  We finally decided to tackle that job ourselves since it wasn't happening any other way.

What an ordeal.  What would take some expert five minutes took us half the day.  This is no easy job when you don't know what you're doing and have never done it before.  But we persevered and finally could cross it off the "to do" list.

This is the spring mechanism we had to insert the pin into.  There is one at the top and one at the bottom of the door.

 Of course, over the months one of the springs was lost.  Nobody would sell us just a spring.  We had to buy the whole mechanism.  So we put on the thinking cap and made our own.  These pins don’t exactly look like a spring, but are more like a finish nail.  They are designed to hold the spring in place, putting tension on it, so the door will close automatically. 

Naturally, we didn’t have any nails the right size, so we cut a finish nail off and with great effort got it in the hole.  And guess what?  It works!
  
Unless you've been through it, there's more to consider when selling a house than you'd think about on an ordinary day.

Aw Hell !

Clipart

Well the technicians came and the fridge is toast.  The compressor went out and it’ll be $600 to repair it.  We can’t put this amount into a ten-year-old fridge.  So now, we have to find a new one.  This is very bad timing as we will be moving and intended to sell the fridge with the house.  We have a small used fridge in the garage that we’re using in the meantime while we look for something on sale.

My husband went to run errands after the repair guys left, so I decided to haul some big boxes out to the garage and get them out of the house.  He said he’d haul them out in due time, which means they’ll b there a while.  Naturally, I couldn’t see what I was doing, one big box caught the door lock, and I ended up locking myself out of the house.  Now what?  Today I didn’t have the house key in my pocket, wouldn’t you know, so I had to break in through the front window.  I’m so glad it’s nice today and I left it open about three inches.

As if all this isn’t enough today, I ended up cutting the bottom of my foot on my floor mat because it’s all cracked up.  I go barefoot around here in the summer and I didn’t want to get a new mat until after we move.  I guess that will teach me to wear shoes.

I’m told later today that we will need a permit to haul away the old fridge because it contains Freon, a hazardous substance.  But if we buy a new one, the people who deliver it will hail the old one away and dispose of it.  This may be easier, but you do wonder if everyone is in cahoots to sell new appliances.  My husband decided to check and see if the power company had any rebates on new fridges.  It turns out they have a small one and will give you another rebate if they haul away your fridge, but only if it qualifies.  In other words, I guess it has to be a certain brand.  We’re calling them tomorrow because we don’t want to be stuck with a fridge we have to dispose of.

The only good thing so far about today is that the weather is perfect.  The gusty winds are gone.  It’s sunny and we have a nice breeze.  It’s in the mid-80’s.  I love it.

 Mama with her birthday cake

I called my mom for her BD and got to talk a few minutes.  I think she had a terrific time at the restaurant and actually enjoyed her whole day today.  That’s great!  Maybe next year I can be there.

Don’t tell me it’s another repair bill?

Free clipart

Daily life brings a lot of joy, but it also hands you crap occasionally.  Today was one of those days.  This morning we discovered the fridge had quit.  Lucky for us, we have another fridge in the garage.  We called a repairman and then moved everything to the other fridge and freezer.

The technician called us back and said he couldn’t come until Monday because he was too busy.  What?  Monday!  This will never do and was quickly becoming a frustrating situation.  He gave us the name of another repairman he knew, so we called him.

As it turned out the second guy never showed up, claiming he tried to call us, but our phone never rang.  We were here all day waiting for him too, so Tootie missed her vet appointment to get her eye checked today.  This is a whole other story about what has been going on here for the last month or so.  I’ll fill you in on the next post.

We are giving the repairman the benefit of a doubt, thinking maybe he wrote down the wrong number, but this is quite typical behavior for where I live.  We’ve had to wait on people all day only to have them not show up or bother to call us.  I won’t miss this when we move.

Now Tootie won’t make her vet appointment tomorrow either because we’ll be waiting for this man again.  We have no time as to when he’ll be here.  I probably won’t take her in now until next week.  I think her eye is on the mend anyway.  It would just be nice to have the vet confirm it.

I hope that this will be a simple fix and we won’t need a new fridge.

May Pole

On another note, today is my mother’s birthday, Mayday.  Everyone’s going out for Mexican food.  That’s no surprise.  Mexican is the one thing they can all agree on to eat.  I wish I were there too, but maybe next year.  I hope one of my sisters will take pictures to send to me, and to my little sister in New York.

 My mother

Raven’s now six months old and getting to be quite a handsome boy.  We had company today, our Aussie friends, and he was all over them, purring and playing and being a social butterfly.  This is my handsome little man.

 Raven - six-months-old

The resident lizard is still making herself at home in the fireplace.  She must have been out on the town last night because she wasn’t in there.  Hee-hee.  I don’t know if she had a hot date or not.  I determined this was a female lizard because she doesn’t have the colorful underbelly the males do.  The cats enjoy watching her through the screen.

 Lizard in the fireplace

 Lizard in the fireplace

It’s windy here in the desert again today.  This makes day number three of wind gusts up to 40 mph.  Big earth movers are stirring up the dust preparing the ground for the new house going in two lots down from us.  I kept the windows closed, which I hate to do, being there are so few days in the year we can open them.  The building crew is keeping long hours over there having run into the underground stream we told them was there.  They’ve had to change their plans so the house doesn’t start to sink and crack later.  A guy has owned that lot for twenty years and finally decided to move down here and build a house on it.  I guess we’ll hear the noise from all the construction soon.  The cats love all the action that’s taking place.

 A to Z survivor's badge

Congrats to all who entered and finished the A to Z challenge this year.  It was fun.  I enjoyed hopping over to read others blogs.  Thank you to the ones who read my posts and to my new followers.

Until next time...