Absa-bloody-lutely exhausted

This has been a standard week for work - driving school busses from the bus yard to the school via children's homes and the reverse. Well, it all sounds standard until you deal with no aide on a bus that absolutely needs an aide and where an aide is a legal requirement. What do you do when there's no aide? The children still have to get to school! It makes the driver's life harder to the point almost of distracted driving. It has been this way for a couple of weeks since my aide has been driving other people's busses while they have been off sick. Needless to say, that leaves me just absolutely exhausted. Exhausted to the point I just want a dark corner with my tablet and a bottle of cheap vodka, from where I would probably post regrettable comments online.

After Eric left, I noted that the toilet despite having two days of poo in it did not smell. That cat lit sure does the trick! Anyway, as said before I was absolutely shattered after long days of driving, many with no midday nap. You try driving from 5:30AM to 4:50PM without having a nap between shifts if you think that's wimpy! Then try it with a 35 foot, 16 ton bus in heavy and unpredictable traffic where people can and do ignore stop signs, flashing lights and can't see a great big yellow bus on the road. More than that, try it with a bus load of hyperactive, sometimes violent children with behavioral disorders. Then try it on roads that are collapsing due to underground subsidence. So, I was exhausted most days.

The bag of poo that I jettisoned out through the side door was still where it was when I threw it out during the week. Hence, today I got a shovel and buried it. I chose an anthill as the best place to dig because the ants had already loosened the soil underneath. Then having buried the aforementioned bag of poo, I covered the lot over with the leaves that had been there before I started.

I have to say that it looks almost as though there never has been any digging there. That's pretty good in my opinion as I can clearly disguise burial sites without much difficulty. I wonder whether it would be as easy to disguise the burial sites of the bodies of unpopular figures such as Saddam Hussein etc? Oh well, since no government never took me on as a hit man on one of their assassination squads, I guess I'll never know.

Inside the bus was a pleasant 75 a few minutes ago though this has now climbed to 77. I expect my extraction fan will kick in sooner rather than later. I sit here looking at all the stuff I want to do and not feeling like doing anything. I am literally exhausted.

I need to get down to welding a holder for my 35AH Harbor Freight battery. Researching online, I found a nice PDF of bolt strengths. My preferred bolt for fastening things under the bus is a 5/16 though I have reservations as to how strong the C section steel girders are. It seems they should hold 270LBS each at the thread root. I'm not worried about sheer strength which is pretty impressive for that size of bolt - something like 4000 - 8000 pounds.

My battery weighs about 20LBs so supported in a welded cage suspended from two lengths of angle iron, both bolted using four bolts each end, each bolt will be supporting just about one pound of battery weight plus a portion of the battery holder weight. I'm going to say that it all should work out nicely. I see what the bus mechanic from work said when he saw my waste barrel attachements as he asked how many tons of lead I wished to put in them.

Eric is somebody that has done a lot of his own welding in the past. He used to run a taxicab company and left me with the advice that the only thing that separates amateur welding from professional welding is that professionals clean their welds using an angle grinder. That would probably have two advantages. The first is that it reduces the surface area, eliminating nooks and crannies where water can accumulate and cause rust and the second is just that it looks more professional. From a personal point of view, I don't give a rat's arse what my welds look like as long as they work.

Another bit of advice Eric gave was again based on his taxi company. In an effort to maximize profits, he experimented with tyres buying new off brand tyres, new premium brand tyres, remold tyres and used premium brand tyres. The best value for money was in used premium brand tyres. Now that's something I had considered. I have four remolds at the back and two undated premium brand on the front. I'm concerned about the lack of a date on my front Dunlop tyres. I'm not a fan of remolds having seen remolds fall apart.

As can be seen, this remold has fallen apart. Worse - it happened while the user was driving, last year. I've seen all kinds of horrible things happen with remolds which is why - no matter how little I earn - I refuse to touch remolds. They're for the truly desperate. For my daily vehicle, I use premium brand tyres and it shows - I've had the same tyres now for 50,000 miles and there's still plenty tread.

So, what needs doing on the bus?

• I need to complete the wiring that runs from the front to the back, underneath the bus - including adding in a section where one wire is too short. 
• There's a wire that needs to go from the bedroom to the back of the bus.
• The battery controls all need to lead to the back of the bus as I decided that's where I was going to put everything.
• The battery cage needs to be built and mounted under the bus. Then I need to run wires from that to the control box at the back of the bus.
• I'd like to add a water inlet so that I can have fresh water going into the handbasin. That would involve finding the faucet I removed from the handbasin when I said I was just going to use a jug of water only. I'm not sure where that faucet has vanished to.
• I have a timer unit and a fuse box I want to put on the solar system together with installing a second fan and possibly changing the exhaust vent covers from the current mushroom vents to a louvered flap vent.
• I'd like to install an instant water heater. That involves a little plumbing and some wiring from my 120v distribution panel.
• I have a code lock for my front door lock - I just need to install it and to add a button on the inside that allows me to close the door lock from the inside, without a key.
• Although my toilet works just fine, I want eventually to put in a flush toilet. Thinking about it, if I can use an old stainless steel beer keg (that involves welding stainless steel and buying a respirator) then that shouldn't be too costly.

In terms of doing stuff today, I'm rather disappointed that I really don't feel like doing anything much. I'd love to dive straight in but I'm just exhausted from the week just past. Normally when I felt like this in the past, I'd just go to Harbor Freight or someplace else for supplies but I have enough supplies to finish the electrical work on the 12V side and don't want to go overboard. I've tended to skip from one project to another throughout the process and it has worked. I want to complete one project at a time now since so few projects remain.