Wednesday, October 13, 2010

A Leaky Exhaust Fan, and an Eternal Download

We woke up this morning to a puddle of water on our stove top. It had rained last night, and apparently a leak that had been repaired before we moved in, had opened up again. We cleaned it up, had breakfast, and Oliver and Wyatt left. A few hours later, it rained again. And there was another flood.

This time, I was so annoyed I called Oliver at work to make sure he remembered to put in a work order about it. When I hung up, I didn't really feel any better about it, though. He's put work orders in for lots of stuff, but they only ever show up to take care of half of it. I've recaulked a window and repaired a few other things on my own, but a leaky exhaust fan is a little outside my skill level. Also, when they do show up, the repairs are often not that well done, like the window I ended up recaulking as it had clearly been incorrectly installed in the first place. (Okay, what it actually is is a pane of Plexiglas, not real glass, which baffles me just a bit - we do have glass windows here...) I'm going to take back my complaining about the military housing we lived in in Washington. While it was no finely run business and was not worth what we paid for it, it was amazingly efficient compared to living here.

After that frustration, I turned to our computer, where we are trying to download a 4.76 gig file we need and can get no other way. Our download rate averages about 64-96 kbt a second. Yeah, do the math on that one... Basically, we started it last night, it went for a few hours, then we restarted it this morning (because our computers, despite our best efforts, still go into hibernation despite being set not to do so, sigh). I'm sitting at just over 4 gig right now, and hopefully will be done in two more hours. Hopefully.

Because the other problem is that someone on our street does not know how to configure their repeater correctly. For some crazy reason, they gave it the same name as the wifi signal we have to connect to. Because signals fluctuate, this means that sometimes our repeater will drop the real signal and pick up theirs because it can't tell the difference - it just goes for the strongest one. Because their repeater is also not configured to let us connect through it, we just lose internet. That necessitates resetting our repeater. Sometimes, we can get through most of the day without doing this. Sometimes, it happens constantly through the day, especially when the weather is bad. So, not only do I have to leave this download running and keep the computer from hibernating on me, I have to babysit our internet connection.

Ugh. Not a great day. On the plus side, the garden is looking fantastic so far this year. Our summer is kind like winter in the States. It's really too hot to grow much. Between that and our move that killed off some of my best plants, I gave up and just made dirt. But, I've got some plants going now, and have high hopes for them. I'll get around to posting some pics; I just keep thinking about it when it's raining, which it has done a lot of the last few weeks.

Now, I must go eat some cake. We had tons of leftover frosting from Oscar's birthday cake, so I just had to make another one to use it up. Today was a perfect day to do that!

0 sonar pings: