November 17, 2009

I am still here.  It is that in-between season.  This isn’t the first time I have fallen way behind on my web postings in October and November.  I think the weather, darkness, and lack of physical activity leave me with very little energy in the evenings.

This weekend was spent in the garage.  I spent most of my time working on the van.  I installed a backup camera with an extra blind spot camera.  I installed a brake controller.  I installed a power inverter.  I installed an RV trailer plug.  I still have a little wiring to finish, but the hard part, figuring out where things go, is complete.  It was fun to work on a vehicle again, even if it was just electrical work.  It was nice to work in a huge expanse of emptiness like a cargo van.  Finding routings for wiring is much easier in a vehicle like this.

I also spent some time working on the garage door.  We had a spring pop in September and I replaced the torsion spring with an extension spring, but the spring wasn’t quite strong enough for the extra heavy two car wooden door.  The original 25 year old garage door opener didn’t care.  It just dragged the heavy door up.  It initially had trouble staying up, but I made a few adjustments and got it working for a couple months.  Last week the garage door opener failed.  I purchased and installed a new garage door opener, but even a heavy duty garage door opener made today requires having a door well balanced by springs.  I debated my options, researched a little.  Finally, I settled on the idea of using two extension springs on the side with the failed torsion spring.  Torsion springs are just too hard to adjust and maintain.  It worked out remarkably well.  They do sell a hardware kit to put up tandem springs, but I just used two sets of single spring mountings and improvised a little.  At some point I should replace the remaining torsion spring with a similar setup as it is bound to fail.  I just hate releasing those things as it takes a little care to keep from hurting yourself.

If I can, I will wait for warmer weather to do any more work that requires opening the garage door.  It has turned brutally cold.  This morning was eight below.  The worst part is that my car is now outside in the cold since the van takes up my garage space.  Of course the car is always cold coming home from work, but it was nice having a warm car in the morning.  At least Kris is happy that I got the garage door functioning again so her car is warm in the morning.

I used my cross country skis on Sunday.  Kris wasn’t feeling well so I went out on our normal lake loop on the greenbelt.  It was cold and the conditions were pretty fast.  I thought I was going to finish the loop in less than 30 minutes, but I faded in the second half.  My legs are still sore.  I guess there are some muscles that I haven’t used that much in awhile.

Kris’ sister appears to be recovering well.  We can only imagine the disruption to life of spending weeks in the hospital followed by weeks of regaining your strength.  Life isn’t always normal.