life on the wand

Joyce called me at work on Thursday and announced that several of the outside and garage outlets on our house weren't working. She looked for tripped breakers or GFCI's but none were tripped. So, today I did some investigation and decided that the problem was a bad connection somewhere in the middle of one of the circuits. I guessed that all the bad outlets (three of them) were on the same circuit, and ended up taking the boxes apart and disconnecting all the wires so I could trace the wiring from outlet to outlet. Amazingly, the circuit goes from an outlet in the garage (the last working one in the circuit), to one outside the front door, back to another outlet in the garage, and then to an outlet outside the back door. I found the bad connection once I knew which outlet was bad. If you look carefully at the picture below, you can see that the neutral (white) wire looks a bit burnt on the copper. That is because the electrician that wired this house didn't believe in tightening the screws enough. This is the second (or third?) time a loose wire has caused problems since we bought this house 15 months ago.


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Sunday morning both the Pontiac and Joyce's van were very low on gas, so we decided to take my van to church. Something felt funny with the brakes as we went out of the garage, and at the first stop sign when I hit the brakes it felt like we rolled over a board. I suspected that the pad had come off one of the rear brake shoes, based on this happening to other people on my favorite user group. So, I immediately turned around and we went back to the house and swapped over to one of the other cars.

The new brake shoes I ordered arrived on Wednesday, the day I returned from a two-day business trip to Atlanta. I went ahead and pulled the rear brake drum and sure enough, the pad was at the bottom of the drum. This picture shows the shoe with the pad lying on the ground.



The rear brakes on the '93 VW Eurovan don't really do anything. I know because those are the original brake pads, have 181,000 miles on them, and are barely worn. However, several people on 93 Eurovan user group on Yahoo have reported that after 14 or years or so the pad fell off their shoe, and at least one person had the pad get caught in such a way that the rear tire locked up while he was driving. So, I was lucky this happened in only one block from home at a very low speed, and that I was able to continue driving.

The shoes were relatively easy to replace, though the right rear brakes dragged a bit for the first 30 miles or so, but whatever was dragging seems to have worn off and all is well now. Here is a picture with the new shoes.


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Joyce and I decided to get some big ugly plants out of our yard yesterday. They have been cut back many times so the root area was actually quite large. For a while I thought the roots might win, but eventually (with persistence) I overcame. Here is a picture of the "trophy" root.


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The Bridgeway Church youth group had a mission trip planned to build a small house in Juarez for a poor family. This is part of Amor Ministries. The whole story is kind of long, so I will just put the short one up here. Philip and Cara were signed up to go, and somehow my name got on the list as well. I wasn't real excited about going but since Philip is a senior this year I thought this might be one of the last chances I would have to do something like this with him. So, we got up about 0400 on Saturday and went to the building where we loaded up two vans with trailers and headed to Ciudad Juarez. We got to the camp site by about 6 PM Juarez time -- 8 PM Dallas time. We cheerfully set up camp and had a campfire. You can see one of the vans with a trailer behind it in this picture. Also, please note the pretty blue tent in the background -- that is the one I slept in the first night.



The next day, Sunday, we framed up a couple of the walls while the majority of the group (there were 20 of us) hand mixed and placed a 22' x 11' concrete slab.




This went fairly well for the first part of the day, but then a nasty dust storm with winds up to 60 mph came through and it was hard to see, breath, walk, etc. Then the electricity went out in the area from the high winds, which meant that the water went out too. And that is a problem for mixing concrete. We were eventually able to get more water, but it involved loading up one of the trailers with barrels, getting the van stuck in the sand twice for about 45 minutes, etc. Here is a picture of the sky after the dust storm had settled down for the most part -- that is dust in sky, not clouds.



When we arrived back at the camp site we found that one of our tents had blown away with all the stuff in it (later rescued and re-erected), but the tent that I was sleeping in was pretty much trash. The main support poles had broken in multiple places, the fly was ripped up, etc. We threw it away and borrowed a cabin tent from another group. Here are some pictures of the destroyed tent and the amount of dirt inside the other tents from the dust storm (tents that were closed up, by the way).





I managed to go to bed with a migraine headache that night, too. That is only the second migraine that I have had -- not a good day. Oh, and I managed to lose my right contact lens during the dust storm. A hard contact that I had been wearing for 20+ years. So, for the rest of the trip I wore glasses that worked less and less well while my eyes started reshaping from not wearing contacts. I could barely see by the time we headed home.

The rest of the trip went much better. We got the walls and roof put up on Monday. Tuesday we installed the windows and door and mixed the stucco and put up the first coat. Wednesday we put on the second coat which is the end of our house building. We turned the house and keys over to the new homeowners and headed back to the US.




We spent Wednesday night in Van Horn and got back to Dallas about 5PM on Thursday. Short trip, but eventful!
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