Current location:	Home
Current mood:	okay
Current music:	Peace and quiet
Entry tags:	household disasters, recording

A fine end to a not so fine week
I spent most of today working on a new song in the studio. I'd really like to have our new CD out by the beginning of next year, and quite honestly it has been a bit disjointed lately. I've got several songs pretty well along, and others that are either song fragments, or complete arrangements that need lyrics. The past week or so has been a series of disasters, so it was nice to be productive. If you dare, a lengthy description of

• About ten days ago, we had a backup in our kitchen sink. Many hours of plunging, running the disposal and general futzing around got us exactly nowhere. The same thing happened months ago, and after a day or so I managed to get it to clear, but no luck this time. Sooo, I broke down and called a plumber. Surprisingly, he was able to come by later that afternoon. When I got home from work, he was on the roof, trying to snake out the line from the air vent on the roof. Unfortunately, the snake was caught on something in the pipe. After about an hour of fighting it, he sent his brother, who had shown up right after I got home, under the house to cut the drain line to free the snake. They had decided that some other plumber had broken a snake in the drain line, and it was what was causing our clog, and grabbing their snake. They managed to free their snake from below by cutting the end off, and the sink was draining, so we hoped that they had pulled the snake snarl above the level of the water outlet and into the air vent, where it would do little harm. I wrote them a check for $200, and off they went. The next day, the sink clogged again. The upshot was they had to cut the outside wall of the house the get at the drain pipe. This revealed a chamber of horrors from a previous remodel. I ended up paying another $700.00 to correct the problems. They did pull an unbelievable snarl of old metal snake out of the pipes. I'm also looking at another $650 to repair ans re-stucco the outside wall.



• Another annoyance I've been dealing with is a problem with a guitar I bought last April. It's a Line 6 Variax 700 modeling guitar. It has electronics that allow it to simulate the sound of about 35 vintage electric guitars. It sounds amazing when it's working properly, but mine started exhibiting problems right after I bought it. After 10 minutes or so of plugging ot in, it would randomly cycle through sounds every second or so, which just sounds plain weird - not what you want your fancy-pants high tech instrument to do. I took it to the authorized service center in mid May. They were just about to leave for a month's vacation, but told me they'd look at it before they left. When I checked back, the tech said he couldn't reproduce the problem, but he reset the firmware, and thought that might take care of it. I took the guitar home, and sure enough, it immediately misbehaved again. By this time, the service center was closed for vacation, so I just had to wait. At the beginning of July, I took it back. I quite honestly forgot about it for a couple of weeks, but when I checked back, they again said they couldn't make it misbehave. I decided to leave work a bit early on Thursday to go there and show them what I was talking about. Just as I was pulling into the service center, my phone rang. It was Kristine calling to tell me that Maya's car had died, and they were stranded. They were at a book store, so I told them to go in, and I'd get there when I could. In the service center, I got the guitar to crap out in front of the tech, so he agreed to order a new main board for it, and I headed over to the book store to rescue the girls. Now, we just recently spent a fair amount of money repairing Maya's car. We did a major tune-up and replaced the computer. Kris seemed to think the transmission was dead, so I'm thinking we're going to be buying another car. With the last round of repairs we had come close to just getting another car, but we ultimately decided to invest a couple of thousand dollars into the old one. I'm seriously regretting that decision at this point. When I got to the book store, I realized the transmission was fine, but the car was exhibiting the same problems that had led us to replace the computer. When it gets too warm, it just stalls constantly. I couldn't put it into gear without killing the engine, which is pretty disturbing on an automatic. We went inside to have something to drink at the coffee shop while I waited for the car to cool down enough to drive. I managed to get it to the mechanic with only one stall. We're still waiting for the final verdict on that.



• Friday, I get home from work, planning to start dinner for Seanan and Chris' visit. I go into Maya's office, and she gives me a wry grin and says, "so you want to hear about the latest catastrophe?" The girls had been watching our fairly new plasma TV just about a half hour earlier, and there was a loud pop and the picture died. Note that I said "fairly new". I dug out the sales receipt, and we're 60 days out of warranty on it. I didn't buy the extended warranty, so we're on the hook for the repair. We dropped it off at the Toshiba repair center this morning. I have no idea how much it's going to run.