7/25/08

Well, I am in a rather crappé mood. First off, I haven’t seen my cat since Wednesday evening. I'm a bit concerned but I'm not going to be a little Emo Girl blogging about her lost kitty. Sure, I'll be upset if she doesn’t return, and y'all will probably hear about it again, but I'm not going to go on and on right now. The second thing that has me in a state is the lawn sprinkler. I got in the shower this morning to damned little water pressure. When I was leaving the house to come to work I noticed that one of the zones which should have shut off at 0530 h or so was still going. “Well,” I thought, “that explains the low water pressure.” I went in and checked the control unit. It showed all valves closed except for zone 9 which was supposed to run for another twenty minutes. I shut the system down. Zone 9 shut off, the other didn’t. I grabbed a pair of slip joint pliers and headed for the water shutoff valve. When I opened the cover all I saw was dirt. Well, dirt and frogs. I dug around a bit and found the meter but no shutoff valve. I grabbed a piece of metal and dug some more. I finally got the valve exposed and shut it off. The sprinkler shut off too. Good thing because I'd have been in a world of hurt had it not. I waited around a bit and turned the water back on thinking that shutting the valve might reset it somehow. It didn’t. So now I'm all sweaty and dirty and late for work and the sprinkler is still running. I go in and take another shower. When I'm done, I call a neighbor and ask if he would come turn off my water for me. When he comes out I ‘splain to him that I've already dug out the valve and shut it down once but need to stay clean and get to work. I didn’t want him to think I was some little Emo Girl who can’t shut off her own water because she’s blogging about her lost kitty. Yeah, it’s probably going to be a theme today. We decide to ask another neighbor if we can borrow his meter shutoff tool. As we’re about to shut it down, I notice the green top to another box in the yard. “Wait!” I say. “There’s the sprinkler shutoff!” I'd totally forgotten about that. Had I found that first I probably would have made it to work… no, I still would have been late. Anyhoo, we shut off the sprinkler system and I thank both neighbors. I hop in Darth Versa and head for work. I'm sweaty again but the railroad is just going to have to deal with that. I get to the TOB and my “boss” and the tech for the meeting are already there and setting up. I tell them the story. Oh, I did include the part about the missing cat and they both got all Emo Girl on me talking about cats they had which disappeared for several days and/or weeks but returned. We’ll see. On the plus side, I suppose, I took some more stuff to the machine shop yesterday. Remember how I said the machinist wanted to flow the intake manifold and header with the head? Well, after work yesterday I went home to change clothes and see if the cat had returned. Ok, just because I mention her in passing while telling the story is not going Emo Girl on you. Suck it up. I changed and headed for the shop. When I got there I grabbed the intake and ceramic coated cast iron exhaust manifolds and set them in the back of Darth Versa. I then proceeded to remove the header from Shi-Chi. It was only three nuts so it wasn’t all that big of a deal. That is one POS header I must say. I plop it in the hatch of Darth Versa as well. Next I decide to cc the dish in the pistons. I search for the little syringe I have there for filling the Su carburetors but can’t find it. I decide that I can do it with math. I took the diameter of the bottom of the dish, subtracted that number from the diameter of the top of the dish, divided the difference by two, added that product to the diameter of the bottom of the dish, multiplied that sum by π (3.141592654 approximately), and then multiplied that product by the depth of the dish. Of course now that I see my formula I realize I did it wrong. Π times diameter is circumference, not area. I should have used π times the square of the radii. Damn. I need to call and tell the machinist I screwed up that calculation. Well, he wants a measurement of head gasket thickness so I'll redo the math when I go get that number for him. That’ll be one of tomorrow morning’s jobs I guess. As soon as I typed that last sentence, I realized I might have to wait for the sprinkler folks to come tomorrow. I just called and they will come on August 19^th. That’s three weeks without watering the lawn. I'll have to finger out a way to run the system semi-manually a few times between now and then I guess. What is going to be difficult is fingering out which zone is stuck. My thinking is I'll bypass that zone in the program, since it’ll be running the whole time anyway there’s no need for it to have a dedicated run time. It’ll lower the water pressure for the rest of the zones but there’s really no way around that. I suppose I could drag out the 100’ garden hose and the little helicopter/tractor sprinkler thingy a couple times a week until then. That sure sounds like a lot of work. I don’t know. We’ll see. Well, I'm on my own for lunch today as my desktop support and Lanier Copier guys are both out of town. I'm not terribly hungry anyway. What’s the point? My cat is gone. Ok, that’s as Emo Girl as I'll go today. We’ll talk again Monday.