Township Easement

Came home Wednesday night to find the township had plowed around the opening of my driveway.

Well that's nice of them. Typically your driveway just gets plowed in.

A closer inspection revealed things weren't so nice. In plowing around the entrance of our driveway they completely plowed over our street number and a shrub that was planted near the road.

Well that sucks.

I took some pictures and headed over to the township office the next morning.

Turns out the township has an easement that runs sixteen and a half feet from the middle of the road out into everyone's property. This gives them the right to plow back huge piles of snow that might otherwise cause safety issues with "line of sight".

My driveway is such a case. There's a dip and a rise just before you get to it. If a car rolling down the road is in that dip, they can't see me coming out of my driveway when there's four feet of snow piled up around it.

In the end, all I could do was thank the township for making my driveway safer and easier to enter and exit.

The landscaping and street number were put there by the previous owner

I tried salvaging the shrub.

I'll deal with the street number later.

- b

Fios Battery

Did you know the battery in a Fios system would need replacing?

I should have known. It's not like batteries last forever.

Turns out the backup battery is only used to keep the phone working in the event of a power outage. The phone I don't care about. If the stupid thing didn't beep every so often to let me know the battery was dead, I would have just left it.

A little research on the interweb and I found I could get a replacement from Verizon for $100 or one from Radio Shack (that probably won't work) for $35.

I opted for the $35.

It fit. The beeping stopped and all the lights are green again.

We'll see how long it lasts.

- b

Water in the Basement

The tenant came home one night to find water in her basement.

The first thing you do whenever there's water in your basement is look for the source (duh). In this case it appeared to be coming from the furnace or the condensation pump.

I took the furnace inspection panels off and looked all inside. No water there, so we focused more on the pump. We poured more water into the pump to see if it was working and it was.

Hmmm.

The best guess was with the exhaust pipe.

Notice where the pipe exits the foundation? It appears to be only a couple of inches above the ground. There's a standard distance the pipe should be above the ground for clearance of things like snow. Not meeting that standard, they put in a 90°, ran a vertical piece the standard, then added another 90°.

The nights previous to the water in the basement had been really cold (single digit cold). Our theory was the steam passing through the vertical piece during the cold quickly condensed and froze. When the temps warmed up, all that ice melted and ran back down to the pump overwhelming it.

Ok, so how do you fix that?

It turns out the "ground" beneath where the pipe exits isn't really the ground. It's a raised flower bed that robs the pipe of the clearance it should have. In the spring the plan is to dig out that part of the flower bed so the pipe can horizontally run out of the foundation at the proper height. That should cure the condensation problem of the vertical pipe on really cold nights and remove two 90°s, thus increasing flow.

At least that's the theory.

- b

Playing Landlord

The new house needed a few things done before the new tenant moved in.

First we had Michelangelo throw some paint on the walls.

Then it was my turn to steam clean the carpets.

But there's a problem. Being new at this whole landlord deal, we missed the water contract. That means no water in the house till next week.

Without water, how do you steam clean?

You haul water over there.

Very carefully with everything else.

Yeah. My life has been exalted to precariously hauling water in cat litter boxes.

At the house I vacuumed while the water was at a low boil. Fired up the steam cleaner and had it all done in a couple of hours.

The carpets still need replacing.

Maybe next year.

- b

More Bike Maintenance

You'd think I was riding more or something.

The other day, while swapping the clown tire back to the normal one, I noticed my bottom bracket (bearings between the cranks and axle) was bad.

My cranks had a little swagger in them. The left side bearing felt like a loose bag of marbles opposed to the tight/smooth piece of machinery it's supposed to be.

Luckily I had a spare set of semi-used bearings just lying around, which is great considering my aversion to spending money on this thing right now.

I honestly wasn't sure what the condition of the spare bearings were, but was willing to try.

Hell. It's not like the bike wouldn't appreciate the handling anyway.

It's really a quick job. I think I spent more time cleaning off all the crud then actually removing and installing the new set of bearings.

The verdict?

The new ones are good. My cranks peddle straight again.

- b

Bike Maintenance Cont.

Clown tire isn't going to work in the rear. It rubbed.

The brake was rubbing too. I thought I'd try a different caliper position, but the pads had been worn to fit the rotor a certain way. With the caliper in a different position, the pads were rubbing differently and creating resistance. Climbing sucks more then usual when your rotors are dragging.

So I changed the tire and put the caliper back to its original position.

All in time for a snow ride.

- b

Some Bike Maintenance

Since my riding average had gone from three times a quarter to three times in a week, I decided it was time for a little maintenance.

My chain had dropped on two different rides. Considering my ride average, that's not a very good statistic for equipment failure.

So first thing to do was check the condition of my chain. Eyeballing it I knew there was some slack, but had no idea it was this bad.

For those that don't know, this is a chain checker and it says the chain is bad - really bad.

Great! So it's bad, time to replace it. Not quite.

It's so bad, technically I should replace the cog and the chain ring. Simply throwing a new chain on the old gears could make things worse or just wear out a new chain faster.

So I checked the cog. Unfortunately there's no cool technical gizmo for checking cogs. It's all eyeball.

And my eyeballs have an astigmatism, but what's supposed to be little half circles between the teeth now look like little half ovals.

At this point it's not even worth looking at the chain ring.

So what's a guy do with some messed up bike parts, a kid due the end of the month and a house closing next week?

Flip the cog around (so the ovals stretch the other way) and tighten the chain via the sliding axle adjustments.

Voila! Single speed bike is fixed. Riding three times in one week isn't worth new stuff. If I start to average that per week, maybe I'll reconsider.

Since I was playing bike mechanic, I decided some different (notice I didn't say new?) tires could make things interesting.

I should just call them clown tires. They're huge. The bike is more rubber then it is steel.

There so big, I had to be careful how true the rear wheel was when fitting in the frame.

Considering my aversion to bike maintenance cost, I had better got the wheel true or I'm buying a new frame.

- b

Headlight Hell

The passenger side headlight went out in Jen's car.

That's easy enough. The way headlights are today you just pop a clip, pull out the bulb, put the new one in and reset the clip.

It took me nearly two hours to do that in Jen's car. If it had been the drivers side, it would have gone much faster.

In her Prius, to change the passenger side bulb, you need to first remove an engine cowl then an air intake. Once that's done, you have a tiny little space you can't see to work in upside down.

The next step is removing the waterproof cover. The instructions say "turn counter-clockwise (but it's backwards) and pull. If it sticks wiggle it a little". I pulled, wiggled, pulled, wiggled, cursed, threw some tools, etc before the damn thing popped off.

The next step is the clip (locks the bulb in place) - like any headlight clip, just unclip it - but it's backwards and upside down. Fumbling for the clip I managed to dislodge the bulb from under the clip, but not enough to remove the bulb - only enough to prevent the clip from being unclipped.

Did I mention it was freezing outside even in the garage? My fingers felt like wooden pegs. I couldn't feel it when they cut on some sharp edge. I'd pull my greasy fingers out bleeding and not realize it till I saw it.

Finally I asked Jen for some kind of mirror. She had an old compact I was able to use and see what happened.

Using the mirror I could see the bulb, see the clip and see where it all got messed up. Unfortunately I couldn't hold the mirror and work on the bulb at the same time. I had to commit to memory what I saw, reverse it, then translate it to what I felt with my wooden peg fingers.

It took a while. It took a long while and some tool throwing before I got the old bulb back in the right spot so I could finally unclip it. The bulb came out. The new one went in. I snapped the clip back in place, then reassembled the rest.

I really hate this crap. That was two freaking hours of frustration and freezing. For two pleasant hours of my life, I would have easily paid $50 to have my mechanic do that.

- b

Almost Got it All

We started the holiday break with a lengthy list of things to do. Most of it had to do with the preparation of our new family member, which really meant - make more room.

Since Jen and I moved in four years ago, we've primarily lived on the top floor of our house (we have a bi-level), and either put or left everything else in storage downstairs. With a kid coming, with new furniture and a whole bunch of other crap on their own, we had to some reorganizing.

The main culprit is what we call the blue room. It's a room downstairs with blue carpet. It's served a couple of purposes over the four years and has been documented in this here blog. Lately it's just been a huge catch-all for stuff. It's caught so much stuff, you could hardly open the door.

What's amazed us most is that the majority of the stuff is now simply gone. We threw out a lot. We've made one trip to Goodwill - soon to make another. We Freecycled a bunch of stuff. One women called me the most generous person on Freecycle (meanwhile I'm cursing all the lousy-bastard no-shows). And we also moved things around.

We had storage in our garage attic that was hardly used. When we found something we needed to keep, but not use often, it got boxed and moved out to the attic.

The Picture is meant to be dark. That's how I saw it in all my trips into the garage yesterday. Kind of creepy. Reminded me of Samara's (The Ring) hideaway in the horse barn. No wonder all the horses killed themselves.

Items that needed to be handy, we moved into our newly organized "workroom" or the newly added shelves I put in our furnace room.

By 9pm last night our blue room had become simply another room.

Unfortunately that lasted all of five minutes. There are other rooms whose use take priority in the coming weeks, so the goal was only to get this one completely clear so we could clear out the other higher priority rooms.

Like I said - almost got it all.

At least now we're way closer to having it all clean and clutter free. More like a house we live in and not just a space we store stuff.

At least that's the effect I was going for when I hung some pictures in my gear room.

- b

Picture Says it All

- b