Mis-Aligned.

After some delays and a wait for parts, I finished building my Align T-Rex 500. The next step would be to calibrate it, so I had to charge the battery.

The battery is big and heavy and cost $115 plus shipping. The Align battery charger was even more expensive, and the battery connected to it via an adapter. Here are the adapter instructions:

(You might be able to read that by clicking on it, but I'm not sure. I'm using the native Blogspot editor, since my old editor stopped working when Apple upgraded their OS. Apple doesn't really care a lot about backward compatibility.)


Although reading instructions without really having to is kind of girly, I did it. And they didn't make a lot of sense to me. 2.5mm pitch plugs? Thunder Power? - that doesn't appear anywhere. It was all a lot of mumbo jumbo, so I decided to do what I usually do - try it.


There were two plugs on the battery, and they only fit in the three sockets at the end of the adapter. Those are supposed to be Thunder Power sockets but... it was what it was. I started by trying only the 6-pin plug, first in one socket, then the other. Then I tried only the 4-pin plug. None of those attempts worked, so I inserted both plugs in the two sockets on the left of the adapter. That didn't work, either, so I unplugged the 6-pin plug and plugged it into the socket on the right side of the adapter. The wiring from the battery immediately burst into flame, burning a groove though my index finger. I minimized the damage by putting my finger under cold water right away and then again whenever it started to hurt a lot.

 (A few days later.)

Well, that was a bummer. I wrote to Align and asked them to replace the battery and adapter under warranty. They didn't respond, so I wrote again, suggesting they might have liability issues, and the Director of Marketing responded:

First of all I would like to point on in the Instruction manual page 4, illustration 4 at the bottom of the page it shows which type of connectors are to be plugged into the balanced charge adapter. There are Thunder Power or TP connectors, which enable the charging of 2-3 cell packs, and using this same connector with the 6s battery and then placing the second tab into the adjacent battery station for a 6s type pack. The next charge/balance port connection shows 4-5 cell. This is not to be used with 6s batteries. The other ports on the adapter are for JST 2 cell lipo and a 5 cell lipo.

If you have any further questions or would like to order a new connector please call us and we can asist you with the purchase of a new balance connector.

I was like, hello? TP connectors? 6s type pack? JST 2 cell lipo? WTF was he talking about? I didn't know, but it was obvious they didn't want to replace my battery or adapter.

I thought about it. I'd inserted two plugs into two nearly-adjacent sockets on a circuit board, and the wiring burst into flames. My injury was minor, if you don't count the psychological damage. Will I ever again feel comfortable around batteries? And if a woman could sue McDonalds because she spilled hot coffee on herself, winning $640,000, might not a legal remedy be available?

Twice I wrote back, the final time saying that if they didn't agree by Monday to replace the battery, I would sue them. Now, you might think that a company in this instance would rather give me parts that probably cost them $80, rather than having their attorneys go to court to get the suit dismissed, probably minimum $1000. But there is testosterone involved.

I've already ordered a new battery, but I'm really into the idea of suing. Maybe Align will pay for my retirement. I don't know if I'll be able to find a product liability or personal injury attorney willing to take the case on a contingency basis, but I think it will be fun to try.

Any bets on whether I'll hear from Align tomorrow?

Odd Days: Eating fried bees does not make you an adventurous eater

I admit to looking down my nose at individuals I deem to be *un*adventurous eaters. Perhaps I subconsciously associate adventurous eating with a love of adventure in general, even though I probably have more counter examples than examples.

My father would be my prime counter example. He started the science fair in Archbold Ohio and, at his insistance, one of the booths was an exotic foods booth. Each year brave eaters would wander up to the booth to see the current offering -- a new dead bug on a cracker. If the person ate it, the reward was a button or ribbon or something that said he or she had eaten a bee, or a cricket or a cockroach or whatever. If the booth lacked customers, Dad would grab one of his kids (both toddlers) and have the kid demonstrate what adventurous eating looked like. I, myself, have eaten my share of bugs at the Archbold Science Fair.

The important fact to note here, is that as far as I know, my father never ate any of those bugs. Not surprising because I also recall that if my mother placed a dinner on the table that was anything but meat, potatoes and ice cream, my father would turn different shades of green.

Flash forward to today and my own nuclear family. Durf is the most adventurous eater I've ever known. If there's something on a menu he doesn't recognize he'll order it and eat it. Or if there is something horrifyingly familiar but not previously known to be edible, that's even better (snake, kangaroo, bull balls, you name it).

I on the other hand am not an adventurous eater, in spite of my science fair prowess (of which I was quite proud, I must say). Oh I'll try the occasional new thing, but only because I don't want to look like one of those people who won't try new things. But if nobody is looking, I'll continue to eat all of my favorite foods and that's it.

All this by way of saying I tasted mussels for the first time in my life when I was in NY. And damn if I didn't order them again last night, right here in Colorado. Does that make me an adventurer?

Colorado score: +1 (not that mussels are better in CO. the +1 is for trying.)

Home work, Part 2.

Having shown the toilet who's boss, I looked around for new worlds to conquer. And there it was:

We had a garage build a few years ago to house our truck and our boat. It's a nice garage, but there was a problem - no electricity. As anyone with a garage, a boat, a truck, and a Y chromosome knows, power tools, shop vacs, battery chargers, and air pumps will be needed. For years I ran an extension cord out there when any work had to be done, but it was an inelegant (and sometimes illegal) solution. So a few weeks ago I thought, "How expensive could it be to run power out there?"

I had an electrical contractor come out and he estimated $850 - after I had someone dig a trench across the driveway to run the wires. That would probably be another $850, so I gazed lovingly at my extension cord. Then I had a thought - solar! I filled out a form on the web that guaranteed that solar panel installers would soon be knocking at the door and salivating all over themselves in hopes of getting the job. However, no-one responded.

GRRRRR!

I took things into my own hands. I bought a set of solar panels on Amazon for $271, then added an upgraded power inverter and cables for $120. The solar panels were intended to be mounted in a frame that stands on the ground, but I wanted them on the roof of the garage. I had to make some modifications. The panels were heavy, so I decided to take them up to the roof one at a time and do the assembly up there. That was during a week when the temperatures kept going above 100 degrees, so I soon gained added appreciation for the cat, even though our roof was hot steel, not tin. I assembled, clamped, drilled holes, ran wires, built shelves, and finally, voila!

I still have to shorten the wires from the battery to the power inverter and tidy up a little, but it works. I used it for power to vacuum the garage.

Next - a garage door opener.

Odd Days: The world has gone mad

The evidence:

The Texas governor wants to force everyone to pray.
China wants to force everyone not to pray.
San Francisco wants to ban circumcision.
John Fox wants Tim Tebow to start for the Broncos.
Durf has taken a hacksaw to our toilet caddy.
And Congress...where do I start? For a while we thought Congress was synonymous with corrupt do-nothings. Now we know that was way too generous a desccription.

I'm thinking there's a dementia virus out there that's taken hold and we're in the midst of a veritable pandemic.

Don't worry folks, I have a solution.... Just give me a minute. It's on the tip of my tongue. What was I saying?

The toilet from hell.

If there is anything that could get a person blogging again, it's a toilet. After all, we have somewhat of an intimate relationship with them, and when they fail us it can be like a romance gone astray.


Toilets do, of course, fail with some regularity. No doubt everyone has taken the top off a tank now and then to get a toilet to flush or stop it from running. In an age when your telephone is also a computer and we're thinking of sending men to Mars, it's surprising that toilets aren't more reliable.


A few weeks ago the toilet in our master bathroom failed, for some reason. I went to Home Depot to buy the usual parts:

I could have spent $20 for the usual kit and have been done with it for another year, but I was entranced by new technology. Both the water inlet and shutoff device and the flush valve assemblies of this modern design were made by the same company, meant to work together. Instead of a float ball, the inlet device had a bobber around the inlet tube and several adjustment knobs. The flush valve assembly was entirely different. Best of all, you flushed by pressing one of two buttons: one for yellow, the other for brown. Not only would you save water, but flushing with buttons seemed entirely cool. So I eagerly shelled out $50, rushed home, and converted our old toilet into a space age pooper.


It almost worked. It took several adjustments, but eventually the "brown" button did an adequate flush. The "yellow" button, however, did not. As soon as you released that button, flushing would stop. It took a while to work out that the cable from the button was binding somehow. I tried and tried, but I couldn't route it so it wouldn't bind - our tank was just too small. I wrote to the company to ask for help, and they wanted to send a new unit, and they asked that I report after installing it. I guess they'd had other complaints. But by that time I'd decided that pushing buttons was too hard, anyway, so I declined the offer. I went back to Home Depot to get a standard flush valve device.


A few problems appeared immediately. The toilet tank is not only small, but the part where the flush lever goes through it is at a 45 degree angle. Getting the lift rod around the very modern and somewhat larger water inlet apparatus was not easy. Then there is this wooden thing over and around the toilet - shelves to hold TP and whatever. Very handy, but it is screwed to the wall, and it was so close to the toilet that a standard flush lever would not fit. Then there was the issue of the flapper, left over from the high tech device, and which was designed to save water.


I'd purchased a very nice flush lever assembly, but it hit the shelf thing. I went back to HD to get another, but I forgot to account for the 45 degree angle where it mounted. Finally I had the idea to install the nice assembly upside-down, so the lever pointed away from the shelf thing. That required lifting the lever instead of pressing it down to flush, but that was kind of cool. I bent the lift rod so it would fit.


Unfortunately, I soon learned that the flush was not strong enough for "brown". You had to flush twice to get even TP to go down. I figured out that the high tech flapper was the problem. It was attempting to save water. I went back to HD (a 20-minute drive, btw) and bought a standard flapper, but it didn't fit. To install it I'd have to replace the entire flush valve assembly, which would mean I'd have to take off the tank again. I didn't want to do that, so I removed the new flapper to check it out.


There is a valve at the bottom of the flapper that controls the rate at which water leaks out. I messed with that awhile, but without success. Finally I figured out how it works. (How a flapper works... life just keeps getting more complicated.) When the flapper is down, water leaks out from the bottom and it fills with air. When you lift it, air leaks out from a hole in the side, and when the air is gone the flapper goes down and stops the flush. It was going down too fast. I had to slow the rate at which air escapes.


Plugging a hole in plastic underwater poses some challenges. I tried pop rivets and this and that, and eventually used a machine screw, washer, and nut. That seemed to work.


It wasn't long, though, before we realized that the flush still was not strong enough. I discovered that the upside-down flush lever wasn't lifting the flapper high enough. I tried every possible adjustment, but the range of the lever was too limited. By this time I was getting really tired of having my head in the toilet tank. I took the lever off and into our garage, where I modified it on a grinding wheel. I ground the metal that limited the range to 1/4 of its size, and that was perfect! Finally the toilet was fixed!


Then our housecleaner came. She went into the bathroom and pressed down on the lever, but nothing happened. We'd forgotten to tell her to lift rather than press. So she pressed harder. And harder. Then the part I'd ground down broke off completely.


I wasn't having a good day anyway, but toilets are important. I went to Lowe's (30 minutes) instead of HD, and carefully selected a universal lever that would fit on our 45 degree tank. And it did, but it was too long and hit the shelf thingy. There was no way to install it upside-down. That was a final straw. I went out to the garage and got a saw and cut the shelf thing away so that the lever would fit. I don't think Twila noticed that yet, so this is my confession.


At least now, many hours and $75 later, the toilet is working. I've already resolved that if it breaks again, I'm either going to call a plumber or replace it with a new toilet. High-tech.

Odd Days: Durf's not a hypochondriac. Me neither.

Really, I'm not. I have a reasonably high tolerance for pain and I do not run to the doctor when I have a runny nose. However, if I suspect a terminal illness or an imminent catastrophe, I'll be heading out the door in a flash. The tricky part is to be able to identify those illnesses/events. To wit:

1. I woke up one day with a rash on my palm. The next day the redness appeared to be migrating up my arm, following the nerve. And my neck was incredibly sore. I could barely lift my head from a prone position. It was an easy diagnosis: meningitis. I dashed off to the doctor, and as fast as I had diagnosed meningitis, she diagnosed shingles.

2. Last Thursday, I noticed flashes of light in my peripheral vision. At first I swatted at them, thinking I was once again being harassed by insects that swarm around me at night. But the flashes persisted -- that night and again the next. Plus I had a new floater. Uh oh. Diagnosis: Detached retina waiting to happen. Off I went to the doc. Her diagnosis: harmless (operative word) PVD.

Contrast this behavior with Durf's approach to medical care. To wit: We both notice a growth on his leg. I say, "get it checked." He says, "Naw, it's normal." Two weeks later, it's twice the size it was. I say, "Egads, get it checked. It's growing." He says, "No it's not." Two months later it's the size of an orange. I say, "OMG, I can see it growing before my very eyes. Get it checked or it's going to leach all the blood from your brain." So Durf ambles to the doc. He gets his basal cell diagnosis and says, "See, I told you it was nothing."

Colorado score: -1 (Doctor's office is 45 minutes away. I could die before I get there!)

Odd Days: The doctor who lost his patient

In California, I generally loved my doctors. If I didn't, I switched. And for the most part, I felt well cared for. But strange things happened with disturbing frequency. For example, once I went in for an imaging test. I was ushered into the room with the machine and told to undress. And then they forgot about me. Seriously! I won't embarrass myself by telling you how long I stayed in there. Let's just say, I might still be there if I hadn't gotten hungry.

On another occasion a doctor came in and started talking to me about a disorder that I didn't have. Oops, wrong room, I guess.

I believe those things happened because there are too many people in California and too many of them went to the doctor when I did. I know for a fact that the doctors were supposed to keep their appointments to 15 minutes, which makes for a certain amount of haphazardness. And, to be honest, I often felt rushed. You know the feeling...you are about to ask the doctor a question but he has already walked out the door.

Well, that sort of thing doesn't happen in CO. My first eye exam here in this great state took 1.5 hours! I felt as though my eyes were running a marathon. When I see my internist, she comes in, sits down, leans back, crosses her legs and asks to see my list -- but only after asking what adventure I've been on recently. When I cry over a (minor) diagnosis, she doesn't laugh at me, she offers me prozac.

We pay a lot more for health care here, but we get a lot more love.

Colorado score: +1

Odd Days: Twins

I decided to explain why Durf and I both own Subaru Outbacks. I'm explaining it because everyone I know has asked me about it.

Durf and I are rapidly becoming twins. It started slowly, but over the years the morphing into twin-ness has accelerated. Some of you might find that statement pretty hilarious. Even I find it hilarious. On the face of it, the statement is ridiculous, but when I take a close look, I see that it's true.

The latest piece of evidence, of course, would be our identical Subarus. Before that, we both owned Prii. Before that, we both had the same carbon fiber bicycle, the same windbreaker, the same water bottle. The list goes on.

Twenty years from now, we're going to be those two ancient people you see walking down the street. If you don't notice us at first, you'll notice the kids tittering and pointing. Then you'll look. You won't be able tell if the two ancients (that would be D and I) are male or female. However, you will see that they look exactly alike. They are both wearing "I climbed Pikes Peak t-shirts." They'll have on mid-thigh shorts that emphasize their knobby knees and flaps of wrinkled skin. They'll have matching walking sticks (canes, don't you know) and wrap-around sunglasses. And their 20-year-old running shoes will be laced with elastic laces.

All kidding aside, I could offer some well-reasoned explanations for how each of these confluences has come about, but I decided to speak the truth. The truth is that Durf's taste has improved over the years.

Odd Days: The Statistics of Death

A few final (so to speak) words about the Pikes Peak odyssey.

As Durf so artfully described, I deal with my neuroses by obsessing over them. I've already alluded to my detailed investigation into the route up the mountain. I tried to find photos of the scary places to see just how scary they would be. That research produced sweaty feet, as you now know.

Much more reassuring was the research I did on the number and types of accidents that have occurred on the mountain. My research produced a surprisingly short list of 13 accidents in my lifetime.

Upon further reading, I discovered that two of the accidents did *not* result in death. Of the fatal accidents, three were the result of snowboarding and mountain biking misjudgments (euphemistically speaking). And since I'm not a member of the high-testosterone-leap-before-you-think club, I figured I had the number of deaths worth obsessing about down to eight -- a fairly manageable number. I was feeling better by the second.

Then just before we left, I read the story of Inestine Roberts who was found dead of unknown causes in a snowbank on the mountain in 1957. At first I was unsettled by this discovery. But soon I learned that she had gotten into some sort of altercation at the summit. Whew, good to know. She had apparently stomped off the peak in a huff and headed back down the mountain -- in the dark, through the snow. Even more reassuring: that trip was Inestine's 14th. She was 87 years old when she died and had completed her previous trip up the mountain when she was 86. Good lord, if an 86 year old woman could climb that mountain, surely I could too. Statistics were in my favor. Common sense was in my favor. I just had to make sure I didn't get into any fights.

Colorado score: +1 (trail altercations are rare)

My birthday card.

Amen!