Tuesday, a massive storm blew through town, turning the entire area into a disaster and an emergency was declared. This happened to our trees. The light-colored house is the neighbor’s house that one of the trees hit.
(To be fair, we were luckier than some, like people whose cars got destroyed or their windows shattered and so on.)
The power went out and was out almost the entire day the next day. My wife and daughter were at an amusement park, but I was home to work on house stuff, make sure the dogs weren’t too stressed, and get cleanup estimates from tree companies. The temperature was above 90F/32C most of the day. Not only was the internet out, obviously, but I had one bar of cell signal and data only went through about a quarter of the time. I had a power bank that kept my phone charged through the night and I did go to a cafe for a short while, along with the library for about an hour, just to cool off and have some decent internet.
The power came on that night, around 10 pm.
The next day we agreed to one of the estimates I got. It was $3200. We paid because we had no choice. At least it’s the neighbor’s responsibility to fix the fence since that part of the fence is theirs (although I had to put up a temporary blockade to stop our dogs from escaping) and their insurance is going to cover the damage where the tree hit their house. No one’s insurance around here covers the tree cleanup though. That’s an “act of god.”
Yesterday, we came home after visiting my mom in another town to the power being out again for hours. Flickering on and off sometimes. Thankfully, the house wasn’t ridiculously hot.
This morning, we woke up to find out that a water main broke and the whole area is under an order to boil water for at least three minutes before using it for any sort of food or drink.
On top of all of that, it was my birthday this week and the day started with my wife and daughter getting into a massive fight because my daughter suddenly didn’t want to go on a birthday family trip for me (she’s a teenager). And the fun part of that is that I’m so exhausted from health issues that I really just wanted to relax on my birthday and I was only doing the trip because my wife really wanted me to enjoy it and I didn’t want to disappoint her because she worries about me enough.
But at least I was able to put $200 towards my massive bill from the Mayo Clinic. The $200 birthday present I got from my mom.
Hooray me.
Funny you said VHS. I learned something interesting yesterday after reading earlier in the day about Redbox declaring bankruptcy. (This is totally off-topic, but I thought it was really interesting and a funny coincidence that it got brought up this morning.)
My wife, a librarian, was having a conversation on the phone with her friend-
Her friend said she had stopped getting DVDs from the library because they were so often too scratched to play. My wife said that is not in any way uncommon and that while there are devices that can repair scratched DVDs, the ones that do it on any sort of large capacity or industrial scale are incredibly expensive.
So the library usually just throws them out and buys a new copy. Since you’re talking maybe five or ten DVDs a month, it’s usually not all that costly, but when you look at a business the size of Netflix or Redbox, I can see why they didn’t want to keep investing in it.
My wife also mentioned that this was absolutely not an issue with VHS, because the tapes lasted forever (as we all know when we used to replay our favorite tapes over and over).
Anyway, no VHS player here. I get my movies and TV by sailing the high seas these days. Hopefully the power bank we ordered with an AC outlet and a solar panel to charge it will power our NAS and router though.
I will link to a buffer from harbor freight, and I don’t usually recommend tools from there if they are important or you require a certain quality, but this 6" buffer seems to be holding up well over the years. With this cheap buffer from h.f. I rescued a ton of dvd’s for netflix. I would get them and they would be so scratched my player would have issues. So I would take the dvd out to the shop and give it a once over with the buffer. You have to pay attention to the direction the buffer is spinning and only polish/buff from the center out on the disc, only use a fine polishing compound at the start, and never let the dvd sit in one spot on the buffer or it will do some real damage to it. But I was very successful getting a lot of dvd’s repaired back to a working state with this method. It takes time, and you have be patient, but you can buff them out pretty nicely. Might save the library some money.
https://www.harborfreight.com/6-in-buffer-61557.html?_br_psugg_q=buffer+polisher
I don’t know that most U.S. libraries, and I doubt hers, have the staff or the funding to get someone to do that and not pay them overtime, but thank you for the suggestion.
She’s second from the top at the library. I don’t know the full details because I haven’t asked, but I am sure that she and her boss have crunched the numbers and figured throwing them out and purchasing new copies is the most cost-effective and time-effective measure.’
Again, though, thank you for the suggestion. I will bring it up.