Ready for the disconnect

My pump should start to yell at me in about an hour and then at about 1:15 or so I imagine it will be empty. So I'm going to head out later and get disconnected! I'm going to treat myself to a turkey sandwich. I can't decide whether I want Quizno's or Harris Teeter. Quizno's is good because it's hot and I like the sauce they use on the Paremesan Turkey or whatever it is that I always order. But Harris Teeter has better bread and meat, I think. I wonder if they can shove the sub in a sandwhich press or something? Hah.

Anyway, regarding ODB-II readers: if you take your car to Auto-Zone I've heard that they will read the code from your car for free and provide you a printout of what it means and what you might need to fix it. The ODB-II readers are really only useful for a select number of things. Emily's car was having all sorts of poor performance issues, and it even totally stalled out once or twice. Finally, whatever it was caused the ECM to record a fault that I could read. It was an Idle Air Control Valve failure. A new IACV was like $160, but I researched some and figured out I could just remove it and clean it out with some throttle body cleaner and it would probably be fine, which it was. So that right there paid for the reader in and of itself. If I can fix this O2 thing, even better. But I guess you have to want to fiddle with repairs yourself. If I had a new car I wouldn't bother, but anything more than 5 years old, I bet it's probably worth it (like your Nissan SUV, John!).

Also, on Sunday we finally put together and stained this thing we bought from Ikea to use as a shoe chest. We had (have) this cheap metal thing that we had a million shoes piled on, and they were always falling off and stuff. We bought this thing from Ikea like 3 months ago and it's just been sitting there. So I said I was going to put it together and use it unstained if we didn't stain it this weekend, which we did. Turns out putting it together was far worse than I thought. We've bought lots of Ikea furniture, but this one was the worst. The instructions were absolutely awful, and the provided hardware for keeping it together wasn't cutting it. I ended up using about 8 wood screws to keep it together. I almost destroyed it, I got so angry trying to get it and keep it together. Finally I did though and the staining began. I have never stained anything before. It was pretty fun, though I didn't realize I should use a rag to clean up the excess stain, so it doesn't look as good as it might otherwise. But not too bad. The stain we picked fit in very well with the other stuff in our living room.



Also, Square D QO series breakers are really expensive. They have that market cornered. A 15A combination AFCI is like $40. I saw a 20A GFCI breaker that was like $55. I can buy an outlet for $15. Why is the breaker so much more? Either way I'm going to be getting some because it's more convenient.