Still exhausted from the week

I can't say I've had an uneventful work week with a bus running out of fuel, a bus not starting and a bus that shuddered violently due to (as it transpired) water in the government diesel. Working 12 hours a day is pretty shattering too.

I ordered a new vent for the roof. That arrived and today I climbed up to the roof and cleared the drain holes on my existing vent. I'll get around to replacing it later. That's not a priority right now. The priority is getting the underbus stuff done before the insects decide to make their presence known.

As can be seen, pulling the caulk out of the vent drain hole has probably done a lot. The next heavy rainstorm will tell the tale. I unblocked all 4 drain holes. I have a feeling I should get a rubber gasket to install the new vent. Aluminium rivets should be good enough for most of the riveting but there are four key rivets that would be best done with steel.

I started today by sitting quietly and putting a black twin wire and a single (orange) wire through some cable wrap. As I opted not to buy a tool to put cable into cable wrap, it takes a while. I decided that I really didn't need the tool since it was quite expensive and I can do it by hand anyway. Once that was done I installed a bridge rectifier on the ceiling. The other side will lead toward a junction for all my solar inputs before they enter the charge controller. At the moment that's a DIY rectifier but I'm thinking I should put a real bridge rectifier in instead. Just to keep things tidier.

Once all that was done, I attached the cable to the bridge rectifier but did not connect the single wire. The single wire will go to the fuse box but since the fuse box always has current going through due to the blown fuse indicator, I didn't.

Working on the cable installation I ran out of self-drilling screws and ran low on cable attachments. I could probably have completed the cable leading to the external solar input had not the battery drill run out of juice. Had I not been still utterly exhausted from the work week I might have done some other things as well.

I looked at changing the wires on my solar panels. They looked straightforward enough to change. I'll have to see whether any wire is left over from my wire routing to the external solar input. I know there will be plenty. When I've done with the solar input, I'll replace the wires on my latest solar panels thus switching the MC4 connectors over to Anderson 2-pin connectors. The Anderson connectors are much less fiddly to separate. I'm just so tired on a Saturday that I really don't want to do too much anyway so I left those as is for now. I'll get to them tomorrow or next weekend.

In my hunt for spare screws I went into an old trailer used as storage and surprised a huge rat. Had I been in there with my air pistol, I'd have taken a shot at it. It glowered at me and scurried away. While I was there I found one of my collapsible water containers had leaked badly. Taking it outside I could see that a rat had chewed a hole in it. Clearly something needs to be done about the rat problem. Glue traps and mouse/rat traps seem to have no effect. Poison would but I'm loathe to use something that might also poison innocent creatures outside the trailer that might eat the corpse of a dead rat.

So I really need some 1 inch self drilling screws, some 2 inch self drilling screws and some 8-24 1 inch countersunk head screws to go with my existing 8-24 lock nuts. That sounds like a shopping trip. I really don't want to drive far on the weekends though. During the week I drive 30 miles a day round trip to work and 200 miles a day for work. That combined with a 12 hour day from 5:30AM to 5PM does leave me exhausted. By Sunday I'm just about recovered. I might delay the shopping until Monday after work and get as far as I can with the stuff I can do. I know I need to re-site the fan in the shower. That's not that hard to do. I might even complete the wiring for that and get that fully operational rather than notionally operational.

I suppose I need to get some aluminium rivets too - to fill the holes left by my self-drilling screws where I had the fan installed the first time. Then I'll have to touch up paint. I'll probably have to get a sample pot for each of the three main colors since the paints are pretty ancient.

While I was on the ladder to look at the roof vent, I also looked at the wing mirrors to see why the flat mirrors are angled downwards slightly. I see now what I did. I angled the mounts differently so if I line those up correctly, my mirrors will be straight as they're supposed to be. I don't need them angled now that I have my (almost) perfect mirror system in place. I decided to adjust them, of course, after I put the step ladder away and as you can tell - I'm just too exhausted to drag it out again.

Meanwhile if you remember last week's saga where I broke my worn-out indicator stalk, I found several people offering them new at prices that are pretty similar. $117 from Napa, $119 from School Bus Warehouse (or something similar) and $139 from WW Williams (where I had my bus serviced). As I'm at work when WW Williams is open, I can't go there. That leaves the website or Napa. Thus I used Napa's online ordering system to order it for instore delivery but thus far have heard absolutely nothing. I wouldn't mind betting that the website doesn't really work. I know quite a few websites that do not really work. I can fill in order forms and whatnot until I'm blue in the face and nothing ever comes of it. In that way, I suppose it's similar to those stupid job application websites. I've never had anything from them - I get all my work from personal contact. I suppose I'll have to physically go to Napa to order it as their website as I said, probably is just there to look pretty. In fact I remember years ago an attorney telling me writing letters, sending emails and phoning people was just a waste of time - one had to actually turn up and bang one's fist on the counter to get any service or attention.

One of the common complaints is that service in the USA truly sucks. Most of this is down to the way employment is organised. Initiative and thought are penalized and all companies want is low-wage slave labor that can't think. The kind of staff they can fire without the risk of them turning round with a lawsuit. Of course all that does is to grind the company even further into the mud.

Well, today didn't get much accomplished but it laid the roots for tomorrow. I probably won't get under the bus tomorrow but I might get ready to pass the cable through the floor and I might get the shower fan properly installed.