Patio Furniture

This is the new patio furniture that has been wet since I finished putting it together.

Suna and I celebrated Valentine’s Day early this year. We went to Z-Tejas, a restaurant that has some of the best food and deafening acoustics. Hopefully, the next time we go there, it will be warm enough to sit outside.

The other part of our Valentine’s Day celebration was to go to the Home Depot and buy some new patio furniture for our new patio. While we were deciding which set we wanted, we ran into the guy who built it for us. That was kind of a cool irony.

So I spent a good part of the weekend assembling the furniture. Even Ikea could learn something about packaging from Home Depot’s Hamilton Bay brand. Not only did they package all the tools required (as does Ikea), the shrink wrapped the nuts, bolts, washers, and spacers to cardboard backing that was labeled with the part reference from the assembly instructions. I was astounded.

This week, I am grateful for my special Valentine, Suna. Not to mention that I am also grateful for the new patio furniture and the patio to put it on. I’m looking forward to sitting out on the patio and sipping some cold beverages while getting to know the neighbors better.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that we got a healthy rain last night. It wasn’t enough to break the drought, but I appreciate every drop.

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10 February Update: Added the picture I didn’t get to take when I was putting the furniture together.

Madman across the Water

This is the seat I wish were on my bike.

Photo source: Cycle Spot

There’s a joke and I know it very well

It’s one of those that I told you long ago

Take my word I’m a madman don’t you know

—Bernie Taupin

The joke is on me this time. It’s an old one in tech writing circles: assume a piece of information is so basic that everyone already knows it. In this, the basic knowledge was how to remove the seat on a 2003 Honda VTX 1800R.

One writer even said that the procedure was so easy, he would not not explain it. “Besides, you’ve probably don it a thousand times already.” OK. That was pass was in a procedure for hunting down ground problems. So, maybe he gets a pass.

Why am I ranting on this topic again? I needed to change the battery on my bike after it left me stranded. To do that, I had to remove the rider’s seat. I spent two days trying to find out how. Once I had the secret, the whole operation took less than a half hour— and that only because I was going very slowly.

So what is the secret? The two bolts that hold the seat on really have allen heads. The hex indentions are covered by chrome caps. The owner’s manual even says to remove the caps, but it point to the wrong bolts and never says how to remove them. Turns out there are two ways:

• Push hard and pry with your fingernail.
• Pop them off with a flat head screwdriver.

I reccommend the second option.

Handyman

Installed Dishwasher

Well, here it is. Suna and I went to Home Depot today and found this beauty on closeout. It is a good match to the new fridge. Suna bought the dishwasher and I spent a few hours installing it.

“A few hours?” you might ask. A few hours. I’m not as fast at this kind of thing as I could be. X2B had me pretty much convinced that installing a dishwasher—perhaps even changing a lightbulb—was beyond my ability to do without direct supervision.

But Hah! Here is proof that I am not totally inept. There are no leaks, and I built the pigtail myself. Wire nuts are not the arcane science previously postulated.

My only complaint is that the installation manual had only a dozen complete sentences to describe pages and pages of text. It is a perfect example of taking simplification to the extreme. A few hints as to what the pictures meant would probably have trimmed 90 minutes off this job. Instead, there was a lot of getting to step 20 and realizing “Oh! So that’s what Step 15 was trying to say.” There is still cause to hire writers on English.