I was out riding the Felt today, and on my way home as I was approaching the overpass over the 35 bypass, a tractor-trailer was turning left onto Bellbrook Avenue ahead of me. I stood up, sprinted and tucked into his slipstream. I was very pleased with myself riding along in that pocket of dead air until I made a sad realization:
Once we start down the hill there’s absolutely no way I can spin fast enough to stay with him. Damn.
I don’t recall ever wishing so sincerely that I was riding my geared bike during the nearly 3 years that I’ve been exclusively on fixed gear bikes.
As I sat up and watched the truck pull away down the other side of the hill I decided that I have to get the geared bike out on the road.
If you missed the first installment, you can bring yourself up to speed here.
So Tuesday he’d said he be here around noon. Sometime after 2 he showed up. He gets everything apart, loads up the parts that need to be replaced (the defrost timer and the thermostat) and tells me “I’ll be back to finish up either today or tomorrow. If I have to go to Dayton to get parts, it’ll be tomorrow. I’ll give you a call and let you know.”
I didn’t hear from him again Tuesday, so I tried to call Wednesday morning. I left a message and I waited. Finally at 5:30 he calls. “Well, I’ve got some good news and some bad news,” he says, “the good news is I got the timer, the bad news is I won’t be able to get the thermostat until the truck comes tomorrow around noon. So, I’ll be by tomorrow afternoon to get it all put back together for you, are you going to be around tomorrow?” Dude, that’s not ‘good news and bad news’. That’s just bad news. When the bad news negates the “good” news, you don’t get to invoke that phrase… seriously!!
Not even attempting to disguise the disgust in my voice I tell him, “Well, I don’t guess I have much choice… yeah, I’ll be here.”
He finally comes Thursday (remember this all started Monday) around 2:45 and starts putting my refrigerator back together.
So, after spending 4 solid days waiting; waiting for him to call, waiting for him to show up, waiting for him to finish working on it, and now, waiting for it to cool off, I finally have a working refrigerator again!
Here, all I can say is: “Damnit!”
Naturally, I stuck a can of Welches Grape Soda in the freezer and went for a bike ride. You really can’t beat a nice cold grape soda after a ride, I always say.
Are they all rather, shall we say, flaky? It’s been my experience that people that go into this line of work are somewhat peculiar. Interesting folks, fun to chat with, but exceedingly frustrating to deal with on a professional level.
Here’s my situation. My refrigerator quit working. The freezer still works, but the fridge? Not cold at all. I’ve been keeping a supply of drinks and a few perishables in a cooler with Blue Ice
packs which I rotate in and out of the (thankfully) still working freezer. I’ve been doing this for longer than I am willing to admit to because, well, I’m a bit of a flake myself. I abhor anything that interferes with my routine, or lack thereof. When my work week is done, I value coming and going as I please above all else. If it’s a nice day and I want to spend it on my bike out in the countryside, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. That’s my reward for working those 14 hour shifts.
Anyway, back to the fridge. I’m on vacation this week so I bit the bullet and decided to take care of the situation. I call my landlord and she says she’ll have her handyman call me. He calls Monday around 12:30 and asks if I’m going to be around for awhile. He’s got a couple of stops to make and will come by later in the afternoon. “Yeah, yeah, that’s fine” I tell him.
5 o’clock comes and goes, no handyman… finally around 5:30 he shows up. He chips at the thick frost in the back of the freezer (which I didn’t even realize was there) for awhile, then says he needs to let it thaw for a bit; he’ll go take a look at a leaky faucet nearby and be back in a bit.
He never comes back, or calls. Tuesday morning, I call him and try to pin him down as to what time I might expect him. He asks when is good for me and I tell him that I’m on vacation and that the soonest he can be here would be great. When I mentioned being on vacation he commented that it “Must be nice.” Oh yeah, it’s great; sitting here waiting on your ass all day. Sheesh!
So, he’s coming around noon (we’ll see about that). Hopefully he can get it fixed in time for me to get a ride in this evening. I sure as Hell hope so.
First some back story. My maternal grandfather died in 1982, when I was 16. He hadn’t made any attempt to contact my mother or myself since roughly 1970. Anyway, after he died, the son (TS from here on, for the sake of brevity, clarity, and anonymity) of the woman (TW) he’d been living with (but never married) contacted my mother, seeking permission for TW to stay in the house they’d shared. My mother said yes and basically didn’t think of it again. That is, until recently.
Come to find out, TW died a few years ago, but no one bothered to tell my mother. Since then the house has been sitting vacant and now the state is looking for someone to pay the back taxes. Here’s where this portion of the story gets weird.
My mother has an older half-brother, Hank (same father), who was raised by their fraternal grandparents. Mom was always told growing up that they had taken him in when my grandparents married rather than burden my grandmother. What she’s only now discovering is that they actually adopted him. So my mother’s brother is also her uncle, and his father is actually his brother (on paper)!
What all of this means is that the state of Texas is coming after my mother for the back taxes, since she is, as we all just learned, the only next of kin. As my mother was finding all of this out, and trying to decide upon a course of action, she talked to Hank for the first time in ~15 years and he tells her that he’s sending a box of their father’s things that he got from TS.
The box comes and it’s apparent that it’s basically just the things that no one else wanted, which is fine, she really didn’t want the stuff anyway. So, she brings the stuff to see if I want it. “Sure”, I say, “I’ll take it.”
Ok, so that’s the back story. Which leads us to the real story.
The Cigarette Case.
One of the items is a silver (in color) “ejector cigarette case” which I discovered didn’t really work.
The foot that does the cigarette ejecting was only moving about 1/8″ when the button was pressed but the slot that it travels in is nearly 1 inch long.
Closer inspection revealed that it appeared as though the whole thing was held together without any fasteners and could be opened up and disassembled.
I got it apart and found that a piece that’s supposed to serve as a pivot point for the mechanism had slipped out of place.
I won’t bore you with the fiddly details of reassembly, but I was thrilled to get it back together and working as it was intended.
The funny thing is this: At the instant I realized I had fixed it, my memory flashed to the person who taught me, when I was about 9 years old, that sometimes you can fix things just by taking them apart and putting them back together. Admittedly there was more to this than just that, but anyway…
That person? my uncle Hank, as I was “helping” him fix my grandmother’s Mr. Coffee coffee maker.
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