Insomnia

I woke up coughing up phlegm at about 3:45 AM and couldn't go back to sleep.  Not being able to sleep seems to be happening to me more often now.  Maybe something having to do with age?

So I got online to book my flight to Jackson Hole in February.  I went to the Upromise site like I normally do to earn some money for my kids' college education.  At Upromise I normally book flights through Expedia where I received back 2% of the total spend.  It seems Expedia made a change and now only gives like $0.94 per booking.  Before I was getting $3 to $9 depending.

So now I booked this flight using Upromise and Orbitz which gives me $3.25 per booking- better but still not great.  I am beginning to wonder if it is worth my time is use Upromise.

I tried the Upromise Turbosaver but it sucks because it messed up the view of some web pages that I visit on a regular basis.

By the way, Expedia kicks Orbitz ass.  The overall look and feed of the Expedia site it much better than Orbitz and the deals are pretty much the same between the two sites.  What I really dislike about the Orbitz site is that they don't offer an iCalendar attachment to download into my calendar to automatically put the itinerary information on my calendar.  You would think that a site like Orbitz that has the traffic they do would attempt to make things easier for the user by offering such a feature.

Whirlpool Compactor Part 9871140 Sucks!

I have an older Whirlpool trash compactor model GX900QPHB. I don't know how old it is but it was here when we bought the house in 2007 and it was fully operational without any issues. There are three switches on the front of the panel- "Off", "On" and "Start". You press the "On" button and it stays "On." Then to get it to compact the trash you press "Start" and it will cycle pressing the ram downward to compact the trash and then reversing at a certain point to bring the ram back up. When the ram is fully raised normally the cycle will automatically stop- the motor would stop running. We would not then press the "Off" button, we would just leave the "On" button pressed so you don't have to press two different buttons the next time you want to compact.

In April of 2009, it started malfunctioning. The ram would go through the downstroke and the upstroke but it wouldn't automatically stop. When it got to the top of the upstroke the motor kept running and the ram would be at the top of the cycle at the top of the worm gear that operates the ram. The motor would continue to run and turn the worm gear and since the ram was at the top of the stroke it would just keep dropping back down on the channel of the worm gear and make a continuous thud, thud, thud, thud until someone pressed the "Stop" button. I took the compactor to a local Whirlpool repair shop and they repaired it by replacing the start switch which is the module that contains the aforementioned buttons. This is Whirlpool part number 9871140. The part cost $104.88 and then $65.00 in labor and $7.34 in taxes brought my total to $177.22.

The Whirlpool GX900QPHB worked fine until about a month ago. It started doing the same thing. This time I knew what to do so I ordered the part from Searspartsdirect.com costing me $94.45.  I received the part quickly and inspected it.  It was the exact same part I was replacing.

Front of the part with buttons:

Rear of the part with connections

It was very easy to replace.  I just removed two screews on the top portion of the front of the compactor and removed the top face plate.  The switch was attached to the top of this face plate.  I removed connections to the switch and then the screws holding the switch to the panel.  I replaced the switch with the new one using the same method in reverse.

So why does this very expensive part only last three years?  because this is the second switch I have purchased I am beginning to think that this part is defective.  I can't find anything on the web about his crappy part.

Reading Breakthrough

This week Adrienne has had a reading breakthrough. It is kind of weird. It is almost like something just clicked in her. She reads with much more confidence and she seems to be able to read much more smoothly and is able to recognize a significant amount more words than she was able to just a week ago. London had a meltdown because her science project is due in less than a week and there is a lot of work to do. Atticus told his mother that he didn't like her cooking and that the hash brown casserole that she made for dinner tonight was gross. She told him that if he wanted to eat something that he either had to eat what she made or make something himself. He instead went into the pantry and got a Clif bar.

Another way Charter Cable sucks

Charter Cable is a horrible cable company. They keep reaffirming this to me continuously. It took them 8 months to bury a cable that had been stretched across my driveway My cable internet connections drops for an extended period of time every time it rains hard. I pay almost $200 per month to get the channels I want but have to take hundreds of channels of crap with it. And now, I have enrolled in their rewards program since I spend so much money with them. It is called Live It with Charter. Let me tell you that Live It with Charter is without a doubt the world's shittiest rewards program. They have auctions on crap like Mad Men dolls, autographed baseballs and guitars. You can spend your points on awesome valuable stuff like a 7' ethernet cable, a cable splitter and other cable related accessories. If you don't like that you can enter a sweepstakes with your points or get 2 or 3% off at participating retailers- except they don't give you the discount up front... the discount is credited to your cable bill not at the end of the month but at the end of the quarter!!! If none of this suits you, there always is "Charter Days" where they offer you for a limited time more worthless crap. They don't even offer a way to use my 70k of worthless points to donate to a worthy cause. So don't even bother signing up for this worthless program. Trying to spend the points is so difficult and the selection is so limited that it just isn't even worth collecting the points.

Probably not out of the woods

I am in Roatán He beautiful beach weather and diving with my soon to be ex plant manager. we didd a beautiful dive yesterday called Dixie. We saw a nice slow moving beautiful sea turtle. csfthe dive lasted for 4 minutes can I still had 500 pounds of air left when we finished. I am getting better at my rate of air consumption or breathing efficiency. when I was getting ready last night to go out for the evening I noticed that I had a sore spot underneath my armpit. it is red and raised. now I'm worried that my rrrrrrlymph nodes are swn and that it could be something bad

Wall Street Journal Web Site Cookie Handling Sucks

I have a print and online subscription to The Wall Street Journal which is my favorite place for news. I have turned off all cookies in my browser and am allowing only certain specified cookies to be saved on my computer. Wall Street Journal's site will not seem to work this way. I can get all other sites to works properly by turning global acceptance of all cookies, browsing to the site, browsing around the site for a little while to save all the shitty cookies that the site wants to put on my computer and then turning off global cookie access. But not the Journal's site. Sucks! Why should they dictate how I handle my own cookies? Seems unfair and unjust to me. Now I have to turn on global cookie access every time I want to read their site. Maybe I should get my news elsewhere?

My neck, my back, my ***** and my crack? Plus the Best Ice Cream on the face of Earth

The wife left for a girl's weekend and I had the kids to night. After we ate dinner at home I took them to Wal-Mart to buy an ergonomic neck pillow because my neck and back are still bothering me six weeks later. The pain is not as bad- mostly gone but still noticeable. I have been to an ortho doctor and had x-rays but nothing serious showed up on x-rays except some narrowing between my vertebrae and the curve in my neck straightens out a little more than normal. Doctor Campbell says it isn't anything to worry about now. He gave me some exercises to do and sent me on my way.

So I took the kids to Udderly Delicious in Conover tonight after the wondrous trip to Wally World. I always get Preacher's Coffee Ice cream. That shit is so damn good! It has coffee ice cream with chocolate fudge swirls and almonds I think. I only had one scoop but I could have eaten seven.