There was this kayak trip, on Lake Superior where there was a lot of rain and not so much in the heat department. But the relevance of that to this is tangential at best: when we loaded my kayak onto my car in Oshawa, I snagged the car's antenna in the decklines and broke it. Last time I did this (with a canoe), VW wanted $50 for a stupid little piece of metal to screw into the remaining nub. Kevin advised Canadian Tire. I forgot all about it, since no longer car commuting means that a busted antenna does not equal bad mood on account of missing Metro Morning and The Voice.
One of the reasons my car didn't make the trek north was that it had developed a rather violent shaking at speeds from 60 to 80km/hr. Now, a year ago, there was some talk about how my brakes have a "shudder" and I should have that checked out but la-la-la I no longer commute, you can tell me this and I will ignore it! The on-again off-again ABS light is just pretty, too!
I ignored no more, and last week, I paid - among other things - $60 for the mechanic to tell me that the ABS light was currently off. Indeed, I did. I suppose I also paid to be told that there was no error code in memory. I guess I imagined that brake light. Except for the part where it flickered back on on the way home, but hey, no more seized caliper, no more worn brake pad, brand new rotors, no-longer-neglected credit card. Yeah.
So, car that has spiffy braking ability, sitting in driveway. Except today, when I took it to big box hell to buy roller blinds. I don't know if they changed something about the streetlights or not, but of late it seems as if an orange searchlight is trained on my window at night. And while my wooden slatted blinds are very pretty and all, they bleed light along the edges. The way my bed is positioned, if I turn onto my left side, a bright bright beam hits my eyelids, and that wakes me up, and then I grumpily turn over and the cycle begins anew. Time to fix.
So, roller blinds. Unattractive as the vinyl things are, they block light quite effectively. My window, including frame, is 35" wide. The frame sticks out 1.5" from my plaster and lath wall. The roller blinds come in 37.5" widths. Hmmm. So I mounted the brackets on 0.75"X1.5" pine, cut to 40" length, and I screwed that onto the wooden frame. Great, that, except that now the blind starts out 0.75" and change from the brackets beyond the window frame, and we have lots of light bleed. So down that goes, up goes more of the 0.75x1.5" pine, this time screwed carefully above the window frame, and then the pine with the brackets on that gets screwed to that, and I am smug and this is perfect.
Well, except for the part where I have to "tension" the stupid roller blinds. The first one, I have more luck than skill, and it works. The second one, not so much. First too floppy, then too tight, and then the ratchet seizes up altogether. This is the part where a reasonable person would have taken a break and figured out how the ratchet can be made to let go (thank you internet, I wish I'd asked you earlier) and a quick tempered person with less than average mechanical ability might take the screwdriver to the thing to "explore". So I'll be going back to big box hell tomorrow.
Big box hell also includes Canadian Tire, by the way. And they, in their infinite wisdom, sell precisely one replacement antenna mast, with about seven "adapter" configurations. Sure, I got the threads to fit my mount using one of the adapters. The thing is three times as long as what it replaces, since the one universal antenna fits all vehicles (ergo, none, properly), but at $14, I so don't care. It's not like I won't put some boat or bicycle up there and break it again anyway. The way my day went, I'm glad I didn't strip the threads trying to figure out the adapters.
Today also included putting some window film on the cutouts in my front door. See, uh, my front door is direct line of sight to the bathroom. I live in an older neighbourhood, where the postie comes up to the door and shoves the mail through a slot. I figured it was only a matter of time. So I got the fancy window film (not as fancy as the Emma Jeffs stuff, but I will buy an ill-fitting $14 replacement antenna instead of the $50 make-specific one, do you really think I'll buy the designer window film?) I carefully pushed the sheet into the first hole, marked where I needed to cut, and cut.
And realized I'd cut a mirror image of what I needed. Sigh. So next I used paper to trace those holes, and get them to fit properly, and flipped them over and cut the film with a mat, ruler and exacto knife. That worked great, well, for two of the three cutouts, I still managed to do the mirror image on the third.
I wonder what other projects I can tackle today?