The Fix is On


Today saw a little bit of everything. We kayaked. I did some yard and shed work a little bit of shoulder exercise (trying to keep the old rotator cuffs strong) and I began fixing stuff.


The week before Sophie was born saw my laptop and shop vac break. The laptop was fixed on Sophie’s birthday. Today I looked at the shop vac and found that the problem was only the power switch – an easy fix. It is now working again and will be useful in cleaning up all the sawdust in the shop.


Next came the cat feeder. I found that whatever critter attacked the thing had bent the axle that the feeder wheel turns on. It was only a long skinny bolt so it wasn’t hard to bend. I’m going to replace it with a macho thick bolt. The basic feeder design is sound – it’s been working for 10 months with only periodic maintenance to fix wear and tear. So I’m going to beef up the axle and look at giving the drive train (electric drill and bicycle wheel) better wear and critter resistance.


Penny and I are also getting ready for our fantasy football league draft this weekend, boning up on this year’s rankings and planning a draft “strategy”. This basically consists of getting player rankings off the internet and making sure our computers can communicate properly for the draft and then crossing our fingers and trying to build a reasonable team on draft day.


I also finished some light reading today – Dave Barry Takes on the Beltway. He provides probably the most accurate description of our political process I’ve heard. If you want to feel more hopeless about our politicians and political process you should read this book. He did have some good ideas. One was for a government agency to insure candidates always told the truth. This would be accomplished by keeping them juiced up with sodium pentathol . Can you imagine how strange it would be for politicians to actually say what they really think about issues?

After reading the book I’m thinking of applying for a subsidy to help us feed our pride of cats in the back yard. It is more worthy of funding than a lot of projects our tax dollars go to.