Disaster Area

Fri, 30 Aug 2024 08:46:00 -0500

It's been a month back in Baton Rouge and back to real life, and for the most part, it has sucked.

We knew we were coming back to some boat maintenance, but our house was a disaster area.

Starting in the driveway, the Jeep battery was dead. I called AAA to deal with it, but their driver diagnosed a bad alternator. A tow truck showed up, and even with a jump start, it was almost impossible to get to the street so the truck could lift it. Every light on the dash was on.

It turns out that a completely dead battery makes every system think that it's malfunctioning. So a battery replacement was all that was needed.

But get this -- the 2020 Jeep Gladiator has two batteries. One is right under the hood like you expect a battery to be. The other is under the fuse box. So you either have to remove that box and deal with all its wiring, or go in through the wheel well to get in there and replace that. Nice work, Chrysler.

Meanwhile, one of the upstairs split-unit air conditioners spit enough water into its drain hose that it rusted through and dripped all over the floor. That lead to dripping through the downstairs ceiling, and all of that lead to new airconditioning, duct work, and sheet rock repair. The house was a nightmare of dust and plastic sheeting for a week or more.

Under the house, an outlet box came undone and the wiggling wires tripped the circuit and ended the power supply to the back yard.

Thankfully, a friend of ours came over before we got home and cleared the jungle that was our back yard. It looks almost normal, but I still need to fix sprinklers, reset landscape lights, run new tree lights, and repair the swing in back. None of that is fun, so I'm typing this post rather than venturing out into the rain to deal with any of that.

On a brighter note, I did finally manage to snag a bathtub drain hair clog that had been eluding me for a good year. It used to be that my bodily grime settled as sediment as the water drained. It's nice to be done with that.