I had an episode today that sort of affirmed I'm not in direct control of how my brain processes the things that happen to me, and it came about as a byproduct of having something profoundly annoying and inconvenient happen to me, further inconveniencing a friend, and costing a small pile of money.
I was on campus a few minutes past when my coworkers all left. I had a few text messages to send and a voicemail to delete (thanks "Student Loan Services," I thought we were done with that scam), and by the time I got around to trying to start my car, it was about 7 or 8 minutes after everyone else left. Press button, nada. Just relay clicking behind the instrument panel and occasional odd chunking sounds from under the hood responded to my efforts. I tried shutting down as much extraneous stuff in the car as possible, but no dice. The hard start I had this morning was the battery chooching its last. Brief aside: the date code on Ford Motorcraft batteries is a two-character stamping on the side of the lid. Mine came in characters two and three and was J2, which correspnds to October 2012; I believe this was original to the car, but I don't know for sure. The car is a 2013 and I've seen one other stamp that indicated an October assembly timeframe, so it tracks that the battery was nearly seven entire years old and was probably the reason I wasn't able to listen to music for more than three minutes after killing the engine.
I got someone to come back to school by instead suggesting I call our campus transportation folks and making them come jump my car, so I had one thing go right that I'll feel bad about for a couple weeks. Even after about a minute of being attached to his car, mine did not want to start and only succeeded after two or three rapid-succession tries. Okay, great, car running, drive up to Autozone, die of old age waiting for the two guys in front of me to figure out their stuff and have one of the staff members help me out, get the battery out to the car and we find out that I only half remember how to take the battery box apart. The employee joins me and we puzzle over it for a while and finally accidentally pop the rest of the battery cover off the back half of the box and get the thing removed. I start working on disconnecting it while he helps someone with a less stupidly-designed vehicle... this required me to use needle nose pliers to wedge the negative terminal off the old battery, freeing it from probably a couple years of leak-induced corrosion and leaving that wonderful blue buildup all over everything. I checked out my parts tub looking for a battery brush and found not only that, but also an unused package of the little felt anti-corrosion rings. A few bucks later, I had a can of battery cleaner, too, and did my best to wipe everything down and clear as much garbage as possible, and a few moments later, we had the new battery in and the car up and running. A quick jaunt across to the Wawa and I was gassed up and finally ready to go home, about 90 minutes after I was released from work.
Down in excess of $180 and over an hour of my life to a stupid problem that someone at the dealership should have tested for last year before I bought the car, I would normally have been irritated beyond words... Instead, I found myself in the best mood I've been in for years. I felt like I was on top of the world, having diagnosed a failure and performed most of the replacement work myself. Additionally, hey: half day, got stuff to do, gonna get caught up on stuff, et cetera et cetera.
So the rest of my day consisted of: set up for an oil change, talk to the neighbor who's moving back down here to get out of construction and start driving for UPS, do my oil change, clean up after same, pull the trash can around back, talk to my other neighbor, drive off to recycle my oil, come home (now 4:30, when I'd normally get off work), empty the dishwasher and put my stuff from last night into the dishwasher (thing needs time to dry, ran it late last night), go downstairs and start work converting my Ibanez SRMD200 to C-standard tuning. I hemmed and hawed over which bass would be better for the job - the SR Mezzo or my Squier short-scale Jaguar Bass - while I waited for the strings to come. Some of this was general indecisiveness, as I feel the SR Mezzo sounds less inspiring than the Jaguar, but I also needed to know which instrument the strings were going to fit before I filed the nut slots to accommodate the thicker strings. I went with a short-scale DR five-string set (SNMR5-45, helpfully stocked by Fret Nation for those playing at home) with the intent to go .065-.125 for C standard on a 32" scale. This should have been somewhere between 32" E standard tension and 34" B standard tension, but I don't know for sure because I don't know the mass per length of the DR strings and also don't care (it's more of a theoretical nicety than anything that makes a real difference, as long as it's not hilariously high tension). The strings came, they were going to work on the Ibanez, so I picked it as it has the easier nut to replace if I want to go back. The slots were filed pretty generously from the factory, with the lowest string being .115, so the filing was short work and the strings went on quickly and I got it up to pitch. It needed about a fifth of a turn on the truss rod, that was it. Two of the strings were a tiny bit flat on intonation, but no other playability setup needed to take place. I dropped the action a bit because I don't think I ever set the neck back correctly after moving the instrument from Eb standard to E standard, so that helped make it even better, and as far as I can tell, no issues with tension and floppiness or anything. I say that coming from a now dedicated short-scale player, with three 30" scale instruments and one 32". I can tell there's a difference if I think about it, but they feel natural to me like a 34" does... I don't care what it feels like to fret and pluck, just how it sounds and whether it makes me want to do the work of playing it. Anyway, it sounds pretty good... I don't think I'm super sold on the strings I picked, but it looks like the only answer for getting a .040 and .060 on the top two strings with a .105 and .125 on the bottom is to merge two sets (expensive) or hope someone can sell me a custom gauge set. Key is compatibility with the medium scale instrument, as winding length is important - I need the taper to happen before the tuning post if I'm using a .125 or .130. After playing the instrument in its new tuning for a while, I had dinner, I watched a brief moment of a football game I didn't care about, and then I went back downstairs to play some more on that and on the short-scale StingRay.
It's been a busy evening, an even busier day. I'm kind of exhausted but my brain hasn't shut down yet - my mind is still racing, still on that elevated mood trip. I was hoping I could have a beer to help settle that, but the one I grabbed was, while being labeled a blond ale, hopped like an IPA. It was the most disappointing thing I've ever had to drink. And so, prescription pharmaceuticals to the rescue, I guess... I don't like that all that much, but considering it's been written for me specifically to make my brain stop so I can sleep, I'll take it.
Oh and if you're worried about it - I have blue light filters on all my electronic devices. As soon as I'm done yammering here, I'll be closing this and moving on to audio-based shutdown procedure.
So that's been a lot of words that I don't think I initially set out to type. I'm glad I've cycled out of depression and am feeling better about the world, but I really have to get a handle on this million miles an hour thing from the hypomanic phases. Maybe I should build and sell some amplifiers, but that takes a lot of setup work. Still should be pretty worth it at this point... I don't think I'd have to relearn the whole trade.
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