Month: September 2009

When I moved into my house about 12 years ago, the Frigidaire dishwasher was pretty new. It worked fine for the most part, but the soap tray wouldn’t stay closed, or if it did, it would never open during the cycle and would still have soggy soap in it when the cycle was done. At one point it wouldn’t come on at all and I had to call a repair man. I watched him take it apart and he showed me that the handle that you turn to lock it down wasn’t pressing down hard enough on the safety switch. He said I would need a new handle for $120. I said don’t worry about it and when he left I took it back apart like he had done and put a piece of cardboard underneath the switch so it would sit up higher and now the handle would trigger the switch. So either a $120 handle or a piece of cardboard would have fixed it. It’s worked for years after that.

Continue reading “New Dishwasher”

Tonight the space shuttle landed at Edwards Air Force Base in California after being waved off two days in a row from Florida. This got me thinking about the 747 that carries the space shuttle. Wikipedia points out that there are two Shuttle Carrier Aircraft. Both were originally flown by airlines, the first by American Airlines, and the second by a Japanese airline. The engines had to be upgraded and all extra weight was stripped from the plane, but there are still a few seats left in the first class section in the front of the plane. There have only been these two and the first one was the one that launched the unpowered shuttle prototype Enterprise back in 1977. The shuttle has landed at Edwards 54 times.

One funny thing in the Wikipedia article is the following picture of one of the mounts on top of the 747 where the shuttle connects to the plane:

Today, like all Thursdays, we went to lunch at Firehouse Subs. But unlike all previous Thursdays, today they had a new coke fountain installed. I had heard about these before, but had not actually seen one. This soda fountain can deliver over 100 different beverages. I was hoping it would be like the World of Coke’s room where they have flavors from around the world, but really a lot of the combinations seem to come from mixing pretty standard flavors. So you can get Coke, but you can also get lime Coke, vanilla Coke, cherry Coke, orange Coke, and raspberry Coke. I got an orange coke and you could see it running orange, so it is probably just mixing Coke and Fanta Orange.

There are a number of flavors of Fanta (including Peach which is supposed to be pretty good) and Sprite, but also Vault and Powerade in addition to Dasani flavored water. I don’t even want most of this stuff. There are also a number of different Zero flavors, so I had a Pibb Zero first which tasted kind of flat to me.

You use a touchscreen which has the basic flavors. When you click one of those you go to a screen of flavors based on that first choice. I didn’t want to spend too long checking everything out because there were people in line behind me, so I couldn’t play around with it much. Two people I ate with tried raspberry Cokes and agreed that it wasn’t very good. The orange Coke was okay, I thought, but I could have probably made one at their old fountain too.

The downside is the machine also makes ice and Firehouse used to have really good ice (the little crushed ice pellets) and now it is just regular ice.

Last night I was at Sears shopping for a dishwasher. Because of where I parked I had to walk past the hardware section, so I thought I would look and see what kind of Torx screwdriver sets they had, even though now I am reasonably happy with the set I got from Home Depot. While looking around (I didn’t find quite what I was looking for) I came across this tool, which made me laugh.

I’m not a Craftsman nut and already have plenty of bottle openers, but I liked the idea. In searching for a picture of it online, I also found out that Sears makes a Craftsman set of grilling tools.