April 22 – Earth Day

We did nothing special for Earth day—just our normal Earth-destroying existence. Bad humans!

I haven’t done anything too interesting for the past couple days but I thought I’d record what I’ve been up to since my day of the gas engines.

When we got back from Jacksonville last time the fluorescent light in the laundry room had quit. It’s been one of those tricky lights that wouldn’t always turn on when you flipped the switch. Playing with the switch and good timing would finally turn it on. I just left it on all the time. It burned 40 watts and kept the bugs that like darkness away. Rather than have to put up with a finicky light we decided to replace it. So we have a new fixture there now that only uses 17 watts/ The circuit also controls a fixture in the center of the garage that I haven’t used in 30 years. I had a flush mount ceiling light that we got at Lowe’s ages ago and never used so as part of this task I put that in and put a 7 watt fluorescent bulb in it (we got the bulb for $1 on a Lowe’s visit probably 3 years ago).

My gas engine saga continues. I sealed the leak in the outboard motor fuel tank, put the motor together, gassed it up and tried starting it. The good news is it fires up. The bad, it quits running after a short run. That actually is good news , too. I know the engine is OK and will run. I either have a plugged jet or some crud in the fuel line. I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to get it running good with a little more work.

I’m getting into the phase in retirement where I’m looking at all the things I’ve stored away to get to sometime and either doing them or getting rid of the thing altogether. The outboard was #1 because it will provide a decent range for tooling around the bayous—fishing or just relaxing. Next on the list is trying to fix the old Panasonic DVR. I found a couple of people on-line that had the same problem and were able to fix it by replacing 2 capacitors. One guy even had pictures with a description of the job to fix it. Apparently the capacitors were defective in a bunch of the units. They all failed about the same calendar time. If this is our units problem it will be easy to tell. The capacitors actually swell and split and ooze yellow stuff.

The cold still has a hold on me. I did some yard work this morning and after about 45 minutes I had to quit. I got winded and woozy. I changed to plan B—light duty stuff for the rest of the day.

The garden seems to be growing properly this year. Last year I got all plant and no vegetable. This year the plants are beginning to blossom. Hopefully produce will form.

I’m still not getting any walking in. My experience with the yard work shows that my not feeling up to it is not just mental. Karen’s cold turned into a sinus infection. Christy is still battling her weeks old cold. This is one nasty bug. I actually felt better yesterday than I do today. What will tomorrow bring?