Intersection Logs

They mended the fence again.

The maintenance guy finally showed up to look at my dishwasher -- at 9 this morning, before I was dressed. I asked him to come back in an hour, but he didn't. So I still have two inches of dirty water in the bottom of the non-working dishwasher, where it's been for nearly two weeks.

Every time I plug the work laptop into the living-room power strip, the plug comes loose from the wall outlet, knocking me off the internet.

Right now, I'm not sure why -- apart from inertia -- I put up with this apartment at all. It wasn't new or fancy when I moved in in 1997, and the place hasn't exactly gone up in the world since then.

I think the a/c is fading out again. It's 98 degrees outdoors, 85 degrees indoors, and it's been running flat out all afternoon. I had to have it seen to twice last summer; really, I wish they'd just replace the compressor. (The apartment was a long way from new when I moved in in 1997; I've had a new furnace and water heater in the last two or three years, and it amazes me that the dishwasher still runs.)

ETA; OK, that was quick. I put in an e-request for service at 4.50, and about 5.05 a guy showed up. He went up on the roof and banged about a bit, and now I'm at 80 and falling. I'd be interested to know what it is that goes wrong and can be fixed so fast, but I'm not very au fait with the workings of air conditioners. Maybe there's a belt that falls off, or something? I do notice that I still use the term "pulling down" to describe artificially falling temperatures, which I picked up as a grad student working with heavy-duty scientific refrigeration equipment.

I'm supposed to be doing housework today. Really. It's long overdue, and the local environment is getting grungy enough to bother me.

Unfortunately, I keep wandering by the bead table and getting distracted again. I think I have the design for necklace number three nailed down now, but there are lots more little bead kebabs to make.

This is the main strand; there will eventually be two shorter ones with three and one of the big faceted beads, respectively. (Hmmm. Maybe I'll need to adjust the numbers of small red beads on the ends to account for the fact that the stations are more than an inch long.)


( Detail shot under the cut )

I think last night was the first time this winter that Tucson has had below-freezing temperatures, and today topped out in the mid-40s. That may not sound like much to most of you, but for Tucson it's the sort of cold day that happens only a handful of times a year.

I did three rounds of grocery shopping (Safeway for basic foodstuffs, Trader Joe's for fun foodstuffs, and Safeway again for cleaning supplies) and made a batch of lentil stew. I also walked around the bookshelves looking for potential culls. There's a box from last year's cull still waiting to go, and that might be as much as I can carry on one trip, but that doesn't absolve me from the need to thin out the shelves a bit more. I think I could part with the remaining Babylon 5 books now, and probably the Robin Paige turn-of-the-century "Death at ..." mysteries, the Jane Lindskold "Wolf" books, and maybe the Fionavar Tapestry at long last. (My Kay trajectory is backwards to most people's; I liked Fionavar and was lukewarm about Tigana, which is no longer on my shelves; A Song for Arbonne I abandoned half-way through, with a resolution never to buy anything more by that author. It was beautifully written, but I couldn't stand the subject matter.)

My dishwasher appears to have died; at least, it did half a job of washing the last load and failed to drain completely. So that's yet another request I have to make of Maintenance ... and in the meantime I have three days' worth of dishes to hand-wash in a tiny kitchen with effectively no counter space and a double sink of which neither half is quite big enough for a dishpan.

Our mailing room informs us that the Post Office may return mail with addresses longer than five lines. Given that my sister's has six in conventional British format (Name, number/street, village, city, postcode, country) I found it hard to believe that this should apply to international addresses, but apparently it does, and one is supposed to put postcode and city on the same line. I just hope that the Royal Mail wouldn't then send it back for being improperly addressed, as they have fairly firm views on the Postcode getting its own line. (I also hadn't realized I'm supposed, nay, required, to put my full first name, not just the initial, in the return address field. I even have several sheets of labels lying around with the initial.)

The dewpoint dropped below 50F for several hours this afternoon, signaling that we're moving into the post-monsoon phase of summer. It's also hotter than it's been for a while, but dry heat tends to be somewhat more bearable.

I need a better DVD storage solution. I think the best use of the available space would be a long, low cabinet with drawers, to go in place of the apology for a coffee table that stands beside the recliner and from under which I just belatedly removed two crates of yarn oddments and abandoned crochet projects. Failing that, boxes or crates to go under the table would work, I suppose.

Yesterday my toilet started running, and not in the way that can be fixed by fishing the chain out from under the flapper valve and reattaching it to the lever. Today Maintenance fixed it -- and now the shutoff valve is leaking. This was fairly predictable; the similar valves on the kitchen and bathroom sinks failed a couple of years ago when I had the faucets replaced, so they seem to be effectively single-use devices. Fortunately, so far it's a fairly slow leak; it's too close to the floor to put more than a shallow receptacle underneath. So tomorrow morning I'll be calling the office ....

Also, some unidentified neighbor has left two messy bags of trash, too overfilled to carry, outside my door, and Mr. Maintenance no doubt thinks that was me.

I'm off tomorrow morning, really early. (No, really, really early. Earlier than that, even.)

I have a blinding headache, and I'm wandering in ever-diminishing circles around an apartment that is still messier than I'd like to leave it. In about thirty hours, I should be home in Sheffield; I have low expectations for the amount of sleep I'm likely to get between now and then.

On-line time will be short and low-bandwidth for the next couple of weeks -- it's about the closest I ever get to going off the net altogether.

It did cool down a lot with the rain, though -- 0.75 inches, and a drop of about 25 degrees in half an hour.

I have spent much of the day doing battle with the study closet, which as I seem to remember mentioning recently is a bit of a glory hole. Among the things I found back there -- along with floppy disks and packaging for software that ran on long-gone computers and mysterious redundant cables -- was my small collection of commercial PAL VHS tapes. It's small because in the days when I had a use for such things I had much less space and less disposable income than I have now, and it's here at all -- along with the couple of hundred lovingly-labeled home-taped cassettes -- because when I moved here I thought it would be easier to find a multiformat VCR than it turned out to be. (I did once see one in a store, but I couldn't quite see my way to paying $1000 for it.)

So, most of these I recognize; the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Stargate movies, of course, Hitchcock's Spellbound, which is my all-time favorite classic movie, four random Star Trek movies, and a copy of the BBC The Tenant of Wildfell Hall that was a freebie from the Radio Times. The one that puzzles me, though, is the solitary volume 6 of Babylon 5. I liked B5, but not enough to spend a month's salary and six feet of shelving on collecting the whole series on tape, so the existence of this orphaned volume is somewhat baffling.

Incidentally, it occurred to me when I found a small stash of unused CD-RW disks that I haven't used one of those in years. I used to use them for scratch purposes, back around the of turn the century but before I started carrying a laptop to and fro; these days flash drives have pretty much usurped that function, being much more convenient though still somewhat more expensive on a dollar/megabyte basis.

My air conditioning doesn't appear to be working properly, as of yesterday when I turned it on for the first time this year. The fan works, and the compressor makes about the usual amount of noise, but no cooling occurs -- the air coming out of the vents is not noticeably cooler than if I just run the fan. In previous years it would usually cool down to 80 degrees within less than an hour.

Also, the endless running water noises are still audible. If this is a normal condition, please could you let me know so that I can stop bugging you about it?

So far I have managed not to pass my malaise on to the characters, though everyone's tired and cranky after being up most of the night.

Also accomplished, though with slightly more klutziness than usual; three loads of laundry and a pot of vegetable-bean stew, rather less spicy than the last one. Maybe it was the pale yellow chilli pepper that made the difference last time; the jalapenos seem to have been pretty mild. I did not attempt baking.