What's up?

How kind of you to ask, well let's see ...

The battle over the couch continues. I remembered one of the cat sites I read mentioned a change of material can make a piece of furniture more or less inviting. I've noticed Mindy liked the feel of the sheet I had put over the couch, often running her paws over it. I took the sheet off and the peeing seems to have stopped. I say seems, since the couch still stinks, so it hard to tell. Even after a couple hits with the cat enzyme spray. Becoming more concerned about this I did the sensible thing and lifted up the cushions. Oh boy!! She had found the gap between the cushions and peed in there. Now I've got the cushions leaning up against the wall so I can give them the enzyme treatment top and bottom and have also thoroughly sprayed the innards of the couch. We'll see how it goes. This enzyme stuff getting expensive.

I've gotten decoders installed inside all my loco's now. The latest addition to the fleet, the Kato's, are like a watch. Just like everyone said, very smooth runners. I've taken a break from building stuff around the club and have focused on getting my loco's tuned up and helping rewire our main yard. It's coming along nicely and I'm looking forward to Thursday nights again. I've also taken time to read up on the details of how our club's DCC system works. Fascinating stuff. Now when people have questions I can help them out. I'm aiming to make up some posters to put up on the wall to answer the most common questions about how the particulars of the system work. My chance to get familiar with PowerPoint.

I mentioned in my last post about my yearly battle with the change of season. I'm happy to report I'm starting to feel better and am waking up a bit sooner again. We've had a bit more sun lately which has helped as well.

Things at work a bit strange the past few weeks. Usually we look at a piece of equipment, get some parts, fix it up and move on. Lately this process really dragged out so we've got lots of half finished projects hanging. We've also had more electronic problems. I can do some board level repairs, but am not a pro. One -80 deg. C freezer had a little control board go bad, company wants $660 for it! We decided to take the brute force approach and replace every IC chip on the board. All 10 of them. Total cost, about $8. With everything going on, I kept putting off placing the order for the chips. The professor getting impatient so I finally sat down and spent 1/2 hour typing in all the part numbers. Two days later the parts came. Hurray. What's this, they sent the wrong ones. Oh. Replacements coming this Monday. I've installed sockets for all the chips on the board, once they come, we'll plug'em in and see what happens. Hopefully we will have saved the professor $652. This project got me jumpstarted to finish up some other projects that had fallen off the radar screen. Will feel good to have them out of the way.

A couple at my church puts on a meal every Wed. night. Everyone welcome to come eat and stay as long or as little as they like. We usually have anywhere from 20 - 40 people in their modest sized house. It's a fun time. A couple weeks ago Dannie went to turn off the ceiling fan and wound up with the chain dangling in her hand. Jim went and got a new switch, but it didn't fit, so he asked if I'd take a look. What seemed like a simple thing, well ... not so simple. The switches look alike on the outside, but work totally different on the inside. It turns out easily 10 different styles available. Found a wonderful place on the web that sells just ceiling fan switches. Now Jim and Dannie's fan whole again.

Now for the story within a story. One of guys who's a regular on Wed. night lives near me. The switch didn't come on Tuesday like I had hoped, so all day Wed. at work I debated whether to drive home and see if it had arrived. Meaning I'd have to drive all the way across town twice, with no guarantee the switch had even come. I finally decided to make the drive and on the way over it occurred to me to give Derek a call and see if he'd want to ride over together. The sound of death answered the phone, Derek feeling really sick. He hadn't planned to come, since he rides a motorcycle normally, but thought he'd make it in the van OK. Cool, Derek's a great guy, everyone misses him when he can't make it. Turned out the switch did come, so I got to help Jim, Dannie and Derek out with one simple decision. You think maybe the Holy Spirit talking to me at work that day?