My weekend out East

I feel like I have been working for the last 2 weeks solid. After I made my trip to San Francisco, I had a few busy days at home, then I headed northeast for another set of meetings in Harrisburg, PA. I don't have any good pictures to post from Harrisburg... there wasn't really anything to take pictures of. I did get a shot of how poorly my toilet paper triangles were folded.

I don't really frequent hotels, but I have been traveling more in the past year and I've noticed this new fad. I guess it adds that little bit extra to make you feel like you are in a super classy joint when the toilet paper is folded. I just imagine the over-achiever that first came up with the idea. When he told his manager about it the entire staff was forced to start touching the toilet paper to make it all fancy. Nobody wants to go room to room folding the single ply sandpaper they are passing off as bathroom tissue. I'd be careful about touching the buttons on the remote. Who knows what the staff did with that thing as a silent protest. And don't even think about using that tiny coffee maker in the room.

Every time I enter a hotel room I have a minor panic attack. I've pretty much stopped watching the tv. If I do turn it on I walk up and hit the power button with my sleeve pulled over my hands. I am not above packing rubber gloves, and I may do it next time. I can't figure out how I am going to get a can of Lysol on the airplane to spray the seat before I sit down. In one of the airplane seats I had this trip I swear every fiber of polyester on that sucker was saturated with fart.

My trip went well aside from the "stink seat" and the hotel triangles. The worst part was that is was over the weekend. I got home on Sunday then had to go back into work Monday morning. I had an extremely busy week. I work in a very small group. There are basically 3 of us. This past week 2 of them were gone most of the time, so I was holding down the fort on my own. It definitely made the time go by quickly.

When I entered the working world I did quite a bit of programming. I've gotten away from it the last couple years, but this week I got to dig in and work on a couple new web tools. Being able to create something new that helps people is always rewarding. I'm thankful my job gives me the opportunity to do tons of different stuff. I get a good mix.

Well, that is all I've got for right now. I wanted to post something before I totally fell off the blogging wagon. Hopefully I'll have a little more free time to write this week, but that is tough to come by with a 1 year old running around the house.

My week out west

This was a crazy week for me. I got up bright and early Monday morning and flew to San Francisco for work. We got to hang out in San Fran a little bit on Monday, but most of the trip was spent traveling and going to meetings. We drove to Stockton on Tuesday and I gave a presentation. Then we were back in the air on Wednesday. I was back to work by Thursday. It is amazing how much work you can have pile up when you are out for just 3 days.

I did get to visit the Buena Vista and have a world-famous and original irish coffee. I also made a trip to In-N-Out while we were there. I'm sad to say that it wasn't as good as I had remembered it. One of the highlights of my trip happened at another burger joint in the Dallas airport on my way back. We had a few minutes to grab lunch so we went to Fudruckers right by our gate. There was a asian woman taking orders and calling out names when they were ready. When I ordered she asked for my name. I only said it once and didn't bother spelling it out because it didn't really matter. I paid with cash so she couldn't have got it off of a credit card.

This is the first time ever that anybody has spelled my name correctly without me telling them. Most of the time I spell it out and they still put a "k" on the end or throw in some extra vowels. It is almost creepy to think that she spelled it that way by default. I've definitely never come across it before. Maybe I have the asian spelling of Deric.

Dryer repair 101

This weekend I had big plans. I have been building up laundry for a while and I was going to buckle down and knock it all out. However, our drying wasn't up for it.  Our Frigidaire Affinity started making a light thumping noise that graduated to a full-on knocking as the morning went on.  It was operational, but I was afraid if we kept on using it, we would destroy it. I manually turned the dryer slowly and there was a definite point on each turn where it seemed to catch. I thought the belt might have been going pad, or something was loose in there and hitting against it.
I know nothing about large appliances. They have always intimidated me. In the past I wouldn't even think about fixing the dryer myself for fear of ruining it completely. I'm trying to get over that so I decided to start unscrewing things. I had to reference the Internet a couple times to make sure I was on the right track, but it wasn't long before I had everything disconnected and the font panel off. I took pictures along the way in case I needed to check how it all went back together.

The first thing I noticed is that the foam seal around the vent opening was completely destroyed. I thought the knocking was probably caused by this piece being so worn down allowing the drum to bump against something. The other thing I noticed was that the dryer was a total mess. There was lint everywhere. There were big clumps of it some places and everything was covered with a fine lint dust. A fire hazard for sure. There was a nickel in there, and a bunch of tiny beads that must have come off some fancy article of clothing not owned by me. As we cleaned it out my wife noticed a metal clasp from a shirt wedged near the top of the drum. I think that every time it rotated a small seem in the outside of the drum caught on that clasp and made the loud noise. We got it out and finished cleaning it. I was feeling pretty good about myself.
I headed to Home Depot to get a new piece of foam. This was seriously the most generic piece of foam. I thought for sure they would have it anywhere. Well, they didn't have it at Home Depot. They didn't have it at Lowe's. I called Sears and it had to be special ordered. I called around everywhere but every appliance parts store was closed. I looked up online and found the exact part I needed. I was a $15 piece of foam away from having a working dryer. I considered fashioning my own seal out of similar materials, but then I thought better of it.

I called the sears appliance parts department and ordered an oem foam circle alone with the proper adhesive to stick it back on there. We won't get it until Friday. I decided to go ahead and put everything back together without the new part, just to make sure I could do it.  It was fairly simple.  I was almost ready to call a repair man, but I am glad I resisted it. I'm looking forward to getting the new part in there and verifying everything works properly. If it does, this will be a win for me.