July insomnia posting

 "With age comes wisdom, but sometimes the age comes alone." - Oscar Wilde

The US is now looking more and more like the old Soviet Union, with corrupt and decrepit geriatric leadership allowing the apathetic population to shrug and the country to sink into oblivion.  Who doesn't have parts on the shelves now?  LOL.  Interesting times.

That's not what this post is really about.  It's a brief update.  Independence day came and went.  I took an extra day off to make a four-day weekend of it for some much-needed downtime.  I grilled some meat and we ate potato salad and watermelon.  And fireworks freaked out the poor dog all night long.  I also dusted off the mountain bike and went for a short trail ride, which was nice.

I had a chance to tinker a bit.  I'd long wanted Wi-Fi in the shop, and had purchased a direct-bury CAT 5 cable to get the job done.  The cable was 250ft long (76 meters), which I believed was far more than needed.  As it turned out, I had to route the cable so much further than planned that I only had a couple of feet excess.  

I'd intended to run the cable under the sidewalk to the shop, but then thought better of it, that the concrete might crack if I dug out from under it.  So I went the long route.

Below:  The cable exits the house under the deck below the potted tomato plant, goes all the way over to the right, then is buried next to the sidewalk on the grass side.  Longer route than I'd planned.

But now I have enough bandwidth in the shop to watch 4k video, and I can research and order parts without having to return to the house!

I've had some issues with the S600 this year, one of which turned into a dark comedy.  I drove it to work a few times in the early spring.  It's had an issue with the Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS).  The batteries went dead in the sending units inside the tires.  I had them replaced with "Universal" sending units, but Mercedes apparently doesn't listen to those.  Money down the drain.  So I took the car to the local MB dealer (40 miles away, in Washington State), but they only had two TPMS senders in stock.  They also said I needed new front tires and an alignment.  I had them replace the rear TPMS senders.

So I bought new front tires and have scheduled installation of the last two front TPMS senders, and hopefully that damn light will stop coming on every time I get in the car.

The dark comedy is this.  Something is draining the battery of the S600, and I didn't plug it back in into the trickle charger the last time I drove it to work.  So the next time I got in, the dome light didn't even work.  The comedy thing is that the battery is in the trunk, and the trunk cannot be opened with a key.  You need a charged 12 volt battery to unlatch and hydraulically open the trunk!  It's a catch-22.

To get the trunk open when the car has a dead battery, you pull up the passenger side carpet from the firewall, remove an aluminum panel, and that exposes the other end of the positive battery cable.

I tried the trickle charger, but it wasn't having any of it.  It refused to try to charge a dead battery.  Next I tried the little motorcycle lithium-ion battery.  Not quite enough juice.  Next I brought out my big dumb wheeled charger and nuked the battery for an hour.  That did it!  The latch clicked and the hydraulic pump opened the trunk.  I removed the battery and took it to the auto parts store so that I could ensure the replacement was identical - and wouldn't have to make two trips to return the dead battery.

When I returned, the trunk had drifted shut and latched.  So now I had to figure out how to open the trunk with NO battery in the circuit.  In the end I used the little motorcycle battery hooked up under the passenger floorboard in addition to one of those jump-start battery packs, which opened the trunk for the final time so that I could install the new battery.  What a pain in the arse this car is getting to be.  It's also developed a misfire on cylinder #1, so I need to figure out what's up with that now.

At work things are still very interesting.  We went through a difficult 77 day outage, started up and ran for about 3 weeks, and now we are in another outage where the vendor is doing a bit of warranty work from the bungled re-assembly - an oil leak arising from lack of sealant on one of the bearing mating surfaces.  Can't catch a break, LOL.