Today is the spring equinox. From an orbital perspective, this marks the beginning of spring in the northern hemisphere. The tilt of the rotation of the Earth, relative to the line through the middle of the sun about which we orbit, is what drives seasons on this planet. For all my friends in the southern hemisphere, they are headed toward winter; we here in the north are headed toward summer. ((c.f. https://blogs.nasa.gov/Watch_the_Skies/2022/03/18/march-equinox-welcomes-astronomical-spring/))
This celestial moment coincides with a perfectly lovely weekend of weather here in North Texas. The sky is blue. The breezes are pleasant. It’s been in the 70s-80s Fahrenheit. Honestly, it really feels like spring.
A baby oak tree is bursting through the soil on the ground next to me. Last season, an acorn must have become buried here during our front yard patio work. Now, fueled by the biochemical processes that mark this stage of life, it shoots its reproductive and feeding systems up through the dirt and toward the clear blue sky. Below the ground, its brain – its root system – is growing as well.
The grasses that were planted in our front yard last year are still dormant. To me, they look dead. I suppose this is the difference between a physicist and a botanist. A botanist sees the truth of each plant’s life … a physicist just assumes they have killed everything because when it’s brown, it must be dead. Right?
Over the past few weeks, I have made some improvements to the maintenance and upkeep of our house and our yard. We had extensive irrigation work done in parallel with the front yard reboot. This was to tune the system to properly water the kinds of plants now found in front of our home. The problem was the irrigation system control box. It’s been in the house since we bought it 11 years ago and it was probably old by 2011 standards. Recently, when I wired in a new freeze/rain sensor I noticed the LCD display on the old controller was printing nonsense. It was a sign that the underlying hardware was dying.
I am afraid of precisely two things in this world: spiders and plumbing. As far as I am concerned, installing a new lawn watering control box is plumbing with extra steps. Sure, it’s not messing with pipes. But it IS messing with the system that tells water when to flow through pipes, which has got to be just as bad. I figured if I tried to install a new control box myself I’d wind up with the damned thing flushing all our toilets, and with the toilet handles now controlling the yard watering system.
It was not as bad as I thought. I got a new (and fancy!) irrigation control box and had it installed on the wall of the garage in less than an hour. What’s more, it worked! What’s even more, it has wireless control features that also worked. Not only does our system now water when it is supposed to, and for the duration Jodi and I asked, but it doesn’t forget its settings when there is a (brief) power outage and I can check it with my phone or tablet.
The yard should be happier now that it is definitely getting watered when it’s supposed to get watered.
Last weekend, the clothes dryer stopped drying. No surprise why: the heating element burned out AGAIN. The last time this happened was 2019, about 10 years after we first bought the unit. Replacing the heating element was easy, once I figured out how to access it. I was pretty proud of myself for doing that in 2019, and it was especially handy when the pandemic started and it became IMPOSSIBLE to get new high-end appliances.
But here we are in 2022 and the element fried again. I was not amused. Nevertheless, I knew what part to order and how to install it. When I took the dryer apart, I was surprised to find a lot of lint inside the unit. It’s supposed to be designed to prevent lint from getting into the air intakes for the heating coil, since the dryer air exit line is isolated from the dryer air intakes. What was going on?
The problem was the dryer hose. It was old, too … at least as old as our ownership of this house (almost 11 years). The cats like to crawl around behind the washer and dryer … because … cats. It seems that their adventures put a tear in the old hose, and it’s been leaking lint-contaminated air for … well, for a while. The air intake for the heating element is right above where the failed hose section was located. So, basically, the dryer was sucking in linty air for the last 2 years or so. This likely sped the failure of the heating element, evidenced by the fact that I found burned lint caking the inside of the housing for the element.
Replacing the element was a snap. Replacing the dryer hose with a brand new one (and making it harder for the cats to climb all over it) was also fairly easy. The dryer works like a treat now. It’s nice to breathe new life into aging appliances.
This weekend brought a final home challenge. A few weeks ago the main boot drive on “Stevo,” my home-brew personal video recorder (think TiVO but open-source, using MythTV) started to fail. I quickly cloned the drive partitions and replaced them with a new SSD and a magnetic drive (the SSD holds the main OS, while the new magnetic drive is for slow data storage for recording TV). This weekend I decided everything was working and closed up the case for good.
When I powered it back on, the computer would not stay on for more than 30 seconds before powering itself off. At first, I assumed it was a bad power supply, but after swapping in a backup unit the same symptom persisted. I unplugged everything from the motherboard – hard drives, USB devices, etc. – but the problem persisted. The issue had to be either the CPU or the motherboard.
Jodi gave me the permission I needed as I agonized over what to do. “Just buy a new one. Make this easy on yourself,” she said.
Of course! Money can be used to solve problems like this! I think I read this somewhere.
So I did. I bought a new ASUS motherboard, an Intel Core i5 processor, and 16GB of DDR4 RAM. That all arrived this morning. After some drama regarding plugging computer case cables into the motherboard (I had plugged the reset button into the wrong pins on the board and this prevented booting!), it was all working again.
Crisis averted … again!
Spring break is over tomorrow and I return to the classroom and the office. I have caught up over the break … I am even ahead for 1-2 weeks on teaching. I did a little research over the break, but this coming week is a lost cause so I won’t get anything useful done this week. Instead, I just have to get through this week and then I can get back to something resembling a routine. I also did a LOT of sleeping and exercise over the break.
For now, I am just enjoying my Sunday and my equinox. It sure it lovely outside.
