Bob and Honey – Movie Stars

Our Chiropractor’s office is normally closed on Tuesday mornings, but we got a call from them Monday asking us to come in.

Dr. Rob Rosenbaum is making a new series of instructional videos for his Website and wanted each of us to be in a segment.  Of course, we said yes.

Each of us recorded a video that had to do with something other than the traditional spinal adjustment normally associated with a visit to the chiropractor. 

Honey’s is about treating Temporomandibular Joint  pain.  The TMJ is the joint connecting your jawbone to your skull, and Dr. Rob has new equipment and procedures that gave her immediate relief.

In my case, when I broke my ankle and crushed my talus (heel bone) in an accident 13 years ago, doctors told me I would experience some pain from the area for the rest of my life.  I believed them, and their predictions had proved true until about two months ago.  I was having a particularly bad day and mentioned to Dr. Rosenbaum that it was a shame that my ankle pain was something chiropractic couldn’t fix.

He took the challenge.

After just a few minutes using a combination of new equipment and manual manipulation, he had my foot and ankle pain-free for the first time in 13 years. 

I’m not sure when the videos will be on line, but I’m looking forward to seeing them.

Tornado Advice

Ever been in a tornado, or seen the path of destruction after one touched down? 

If not, let me assure you that an F-3 tornado, with winds in the 200 mph range, can wipe out anything standing and leave a path that looks like fresh-plowed earth!

When a tornado hit Mayflower RV on I-40 north of Little Rock yesterday, not all of the RVs on the lot fared as well as the ones in the picture.  Many were picked up and carried hundreds of yards down the road.  Some have not been found at all.

Of course, that’s not the worst of it.  As of this writing, 14 are confirmed dead in Arkansas twisters that touched down yesterday.

A lady from California, obviously unfamiliar with the power of tornadoes, posted on RV.net that they were in an area of northern Alabama with tornado watches in effect.  She asked if they should bring in their slide-outs if they had to ride out a tornado in their motor home.

It might be considered cruel – maybe a bit condescending – but the best answer she got was that if she was determined to ride out a tornado in her RV, she should leave the slides out because she “Might as well be as comfortable as possible during your last few minutes on earth.”

Another Spell Check

Way back in June 2010, I had a blog post titled Spell Check. 

Twice in the past week, I have received comments on that post.  Both were from somebody trying to sell their spell check program.  I do not allow comments like that to be published on the Boggy Thicket, but, even if I did, I could not recommend this one.

A quick look at their website will show you why. I added the red highlights – Giving the benefit of the doubt, I assume the lack of spaces between words in the title and the name of the product is on purpose…

SpellChecking Modes of KetticSpellChecker in C#.NET

KetticSpellChecker provides two spelling check modes for the developers to define how this control checks the spelling in there Windows applications. This spelling check control is capable of checking spell both word by word and all words at once.

The website goes on to explain that Kettic is capable of checking spelling in multiple languages.  I wonder if one of them is English.

Adventures of a Shade-Tree Mechanic

There is an old saying - “If it ain’t broke, Don’t fix it.” – that carries a whole lot of wisdom in just seven words.  That is not to say that normal maintenance is not a good thing, but sometimes it is better to leave well enough alone.

I had a good example of that this past week.  My new-to-me Ford 2000 tractor, a three cylinder diesel, had bad battery cables that occasionally lost connection.   I knew they needed replacing when I bought it, and Friday, I bought new cables and swapped them out.

That seemed like a simple enough operation, a straightforward replacement of bad parts with good.  Nothing to go wrong there – Right?

Wrong!

After replacing the cables, the engine fired right up, but it only ran about 30 seconds and quit.  It wouldn’t even try to start again.

Here’s what happened -

In order to reach the battery cable connection on the starter solenoid, I had to remove one of the fuel filters.  When I put the filter back on, I failed to fill it with fuel.  Once the air from the filter reached the fuel pump, it lost its prime.  Much like a bolus of air in a human vein causing a heart attack, it killed that old Ford deader than a doorknob.

Once I figured out what I had done wrong,  I had to detach the fuel lines at the injectors and cycle the engine until I had fuel flowing again.  

That solved the problem with the tractor, except that by the time I got the fuel lines reconnected,  the battery was getting too low to start the tractor on its own. At that point, I used jumper cables and my riding lawnmower to give the tractor a boost.  It was working, too– I had just seen the first puff of smoke from the old Ford’s exhaust when the lawnmower abruptly quit. 

It just stopped like I had turned off the key.

After breaking out my voltmeter and tracing the circuit, I discovered that the mower has a 20 amp fuse that had picked that precise moment to fail.  It never had gone out before – after owning the mower for almost ten years, I didn’t even know it was there.  Luckily I had a replacement fuse in my tool box, and once that was fixed, the tractor started up on the first try.

All in all, a half hour job had grown to almost three hours over two days, but at least now it’s done.

Fishing In The Corvette Hole

Remember hearing about the huge sinkhole that opened up inside the National Corvette Museum back in February?  Well, all eight of the priceless Vettes have now been retrieved, but museum officials haven’t decided what to do with them yet.

Currently, the damaged cars and the big hole are on display at the Bowling Green, KY facility.  That’s not a permanent solution, but it seems to be working – attendance at the museum is actually up by about 50%. 

The disaster has even inspired art.  The painting above, titled Resurrection, was done by board member Dana Forrester.

Damage to the Vettes ranged from only minor cosmetic damage on two vehicles to one – a custom made 2001  Mallett Hammer Z06 race car -which which one museum official described as “just a tire.”

    

It may just be coincidence, but the fiberglass bodies of the older cars seem to have fared better than the high-end composites of the newer Vettes.

Unfiltered Frustration

After filling in our pool this spring, I put the pool pump and filter on sale on Craigslist.  In the past, I’ve had the usual obvious scam replies, but I’ve always had good luck selling whatever I posted in a timely manner.

Not this time.

This time has been three weeks of total frustration!

• I had one immediate query, then no reply to my response. 
• Then I had two separate callers who went so far as to arrange a time to come out - even get directions to the house - and never show up.  Neither had the decency to call back and say they had changed their mind.
• I even had a shirt-tail relative message me on Facebook asking if they were still available.  She never answered my response either.
• Finally had a potential buyer show up yesterday only to change his mind. 

Although he had asked about the model and size of the filter (It’s a CCP420, which indicates 420 feet of filter material in the cartridges) he drove all the way out from the Galleria only to tell me that he already has that size filter and needs something larger.  The guy was an African immigrant, and there was a but of a language barrier, but DAMN!

I’ve taken Honey’s suggestion and deleted the Craigslist ad – at least for a while. 

If you’re interested, they are still for sale -  I’m just not actively selling them.  I’ve got to get my frustration level down to a more manageable level – somewhere below the boiling point.

Eeeuuuuuw

Up in Oregon, there is a plant that seems to offer solutions to at least two of the problems concerning the environmentally conscious citizens – waste disposal and energy generation. 

Since 1987, a company known as Covanta, in cooperation with Marion County, has been turning municipal waste into electricity.  According to its website, Covanta Marion processes 550 tons per day of municipal solid waste, generating up to 13 megawatts of energy which is then sold to Portland General Electric.  The facility also processes about 700 tons of in-county medical waste each year and about 1,200 tons from elsewhere, making it a small percentage of the total waste burned. Out-of-town medical waste is charged a higher fee.

It is an elegant solution that has worked well for over a quarter of a century, but it is now in jeopardy – all because the B. C. Catholic, a Vancouver based newspaper, reported that the plant was burning Canadian medical waste that included aborted fetuses!

The Marion County Board of Commissioners is moving to ban the practice immediately. 

Apparently, even in super-liberal Oregon, burning unwanted babies to light your house is just too creepy.