Doldrums

I turned 26 on Monday in what has to be the largest heap of a self-pitying funk ever heaped by a human being. I spent the day frantically coding a backend for the ever-worthy project [Blogathon 2005](http://www.blogathon.org/) and reading Harry Potter spoilers on [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) because UPS saw fit to reschedule my book delivery for the 19th, which as far as I was concerned was about 3 days too late.

So, things. Things are decent. I was ganking some of my old pagination code from [Globe of Blogs](http://www.globeofblogs.com/) and noticed that when I coded it, I’d apparently never heard of LEFT JOIN and other useful things like um, running a SELECT on more than one table. I think it is more a failure on my part to grok the sorts of queries that make multiple SELECT statements obsolete. That might explain some of its issues, which really means that I need to review the codebase and otherwise fix it. Go, me!

I still need to order the kids’ curricula for the next year of homeschooling, which is annoying (I hate talking on the phone, period), but well worth the effort.

The air conditioner motor finally bit the dust–closer inspection reveals that it is probably the second motor for the unit, and replacing it isn’t that difficult. The oil reservoir sponge was completely broken down. Cost of a new blower motor? $74.04. Spending three days in July waiting for it to arrive? Fracking annoying.

Really, the unit is _not_ in bad shape. We disassembled the blower and Matthew went in and cleaned the cooling fins and you know what? It worked. It did not cost $2200 to fix. It cost a bit of sweat equity and some skinned knuckles (mostly Matthew’s), but really, the whole culture of “it’s old and looks kinda dingy, let’s throw it out and get a brand new one” is wearing on me.

(And just now, I checked the estimate and the line item for “blower motor and capacitor” says $584. What the frack. Even with installation and labor, what the frack.)