Fuck Today, Reboot Edition

Vet called and said Dyson’s bump was “the most benign thing ever”!!!

Yay!!!

Next up is suture removal. I asked if Dyson needed to be sedated for that. She said they’d try without it. Good luck, I say. At the vet, Dyson is not the most benign thing ever.

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I blew the fuck out of my left eardrum watching this video - CAREFUL (the Colorado man stopped by police for being black outdoors) which starts out with the man inside yelling right next to the camera. Whatever I listened to before must have been recorded at a lower level, because I had YouTube all the way up. Now my eardrum hurts and it feels swollen on the inside. I wish I’d avoided that … careful with those earbuds. Oww.

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Was driving home today, about 100km, an hour and a half drive.

I get most of the way home without incident.

Not even 1km from home, two minutes away, I spot a monster pot hole, too late to dodge it. THUMP! My left front tire hits it hard, and, within 100m, my steering wheel is shaking and my car is pulling left.

I’m that close to home, so I don’t pull over, I just slow down and finish the drive. I get out and look, and my left front is completely flat. Keep in mind, this is only a few minutes after impact.

I managed to put the donut on my car (had to swap the left front and left rear because you’re not supposed to put a donut on the drive wheels), but now, best case scenario, that tire needs to be re-mounted. If it’s anything other than the mounting that’s causing that fast a leak, the tire is garbage.

Not how I wanted my weekend to end.

Weird note: I’m generally not superstitious, but I got two phone calls on Friday which, together, gave me some worry about car trouble this weekend. The first was from a law firm in Washington DC, wanting to talk to me about an accident I was in where I wasn’t at fault. I told them I hadn’t been in such an accident, and that they probably have the wrong number.

Then I get a call from a dealership that I have repeatedly told to stop calling me (although they’ve left me alone for the last year or so), who told me that they have a note on my file that I’m ready to buy a new car.

Between the two, I’ve been a bit nervous that someone was going to ram into me and total my car all weekend. I’m almost feeling lucky to get off with just one tire out of commission.

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All I can say is Ow. Cars suck.

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Yeah. Unfortunately, for traveling that kind of distance where transit routes haven’t been established, there aren’t really any better options. It’s either drive, or have someone drive me.

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Agreed, but they don’t suck nearly as much as they used to. I have stories from the 1970’s and 80’s . . . .

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Mid-80s carburetors.

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Good news: after doing some internet research and going back to look at my tire to confirm, I now know exactly what is wrong with the wheel: the rim is bent. Which, in a way, means that it’s the mounting: the tire itself might be okay.

But yeah, I’m almost certainly going to need a whole new wheel.

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Something like this happened to me on New Year’s Day, 1990. I hit a patch of black ice on a slope and ran into the curb. Had to change the wheel out in -20 degree F wind chill.

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You’d be amazed at how much good a 8lb hammer can do for making a rim capable of holding air again.

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I’ve heard good things about heating it up and banging it back into shape. That said, I’ve heard that trick only works for steel hubs, so I’m going to have to dig up my receipt and check if that’s what I have (I think so, as they’re very plain, but don’t remember 100%).

If that is an option, though, I’m going to have it done professionally. The last thing I want is to have a tire go flat when I’m in the middle of nowhere.

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On a less serious and more whining “Fuck Today”…

  1. Got up early and still managed to leave the house 45 minutes later than I like to…
  2. Left the house, locked the front door, turned on the truck, started scraping the frost off when I realize I left my earbuds. Too much trouble to turn off truck to get the keys to unlock the door, so I’ll do without.
  3. Started driving to work, realized just past the last easy place to turn around that I forgot my phone too.
  4. While pondering where I would have left my phone, realized I left in the bathroom with my morning meds.
  5. Gave up and turned around.
  6. Still avoiding my email.
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I don’t know if you want to try a magnet, that may not be conclusive. I’m sure having it stated on the receipt would be better.

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Yeah, sometimes your brain is trying to tell you something by not telling you things.

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Dyson got his stitches out today! And he didn’t need to be sedated (though I think we all needed it afterwards).

The tech held Dyson with a towel wrapped around him. His front legs managed to get out of the towel, so I used the leather grilling gloves we’d brought (that we used to pill him) to hold his legs. The vet managed to get a muzzle over his face after about three tries. Since the stitches were on his cheek, I wondered how that would work. But it calmed him down, and the vet was able to poke the hemostat and scissors through the little breathing hole in the muzzle. She managed to take the stitches out, one, two, three. And he was done!

The vet’s face was literally bruised and black and blue afterward. Of course, she was that way before, too, because she’d had an accident with a horse. :racehorse::smirk:

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She needs the horsewoman’s word.

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The hot water tap in my shower broke last night. It used to be I could call the apartment manager, they would answer, and I could schedule a repair.

We have new management. The new system is to call a maintenance line Monday to Friday 9-4:30. Then go to the office and fill out a work order.

Except they aren’t in the office and won’t answer the fucking phone. This system is supposed to make things better. Better for who? I think we know the answer.

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Check your contract. At least in Chicago, renters have the right to pay someone to fix an issue like that and deduct it from their next month’s rent.

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Oh, at 10 he answered the phone. I told him I left an earlier message. “On what number?” “This one.” “Oh, I haven’t looked at it, yet.”

You were supposed to start at 9. You people set the time, not us. Now I am missing half a day because you didn’t answer the phone and therefore I did not know what was going on and didn’t want to drive an hour in to turn around and drive an hour home, because you couldn’t answer the phone to give me any idea what would be going on.

I get that a person can’t always be at the phone. But the office is a different person. And nobody is ever there, anymore.

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Update: they couldn’t fix the rim.

However, the tire is holding air when mounted to the new wheel, so I don’t need to buy a new tire (or worse, if they couldn’t find one matching the other three, I’d’ve needed to buy two).

Annoying, but this was the best scenario I’d envisioned once I saw what the damage actually was (“we bent it back into shape and it’s holding air” would have been very surprising, and pleasantly so).

So, no complaints, and I’ll try to improve my pothole slalom skills to avoid this next time.

(I’ve looked into getting the city to reimburse me, and it looks unlikely unless the pothole was there for weeks before I hit it, which I’m pretty sure isn’t the case. And forget about going through insurance for something this small.)

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