Saturday, August 25, 2018

Incompetence is making alot of work for me

It's been 2-1/2 months since I've had a caregiver coming in.  Just when everything is going smoothly *crap* school starts.  So she's taking classes toward a nursing degree and I only get her 3 days a week.  She'll be a good nurse and she has a passion for clients with dementia.  The first trained substitute is no longer available.  There's another substitute, but she's not trained to do stuff the way we like. Heck, she couldn't make instant coffee.  So things are up in the air for 2 days/week right now.

A month ago, I hired carpet cleaners off of a local coupon book.  They showed up and pulled a bait & switch.  I showed them the door, they came back and bargained. So I let them just do the downstairs.  It looked clean when they left but it didn't feel clean.  I had to go over it with my own carpet cleaner, a plain water rinse. The collected water was literally black. End result was good enough, but I need to do it again because dirt is coming up in the high traffic areas even though we're not wearing outside footwear inside.  I wanted to do it this weekend, but I don't have enough time.

A year ago I bought a solar-charging battery banks with the intent to use it for my raspberry pi projects.  It didn't work out because #1 it didn't charge my phone to 100%, it would stop around 97%.  #2 The pi projects didn't draw enough current to keep it on, so it would keep going to sleep.  I complained to the company, they sent out another one and a cheap, random "gift."  It wasn't totally useless, I loved the flashlight function--came in handy for a couple of electrical blackouts.

Well, the replacement battery bank was just the same, so it I just had to accept that it the wrong battery for my purpose.  But last weekend, it was dark while I was plugging it in to charge and the input mini-USB connector broke off.  I took it apart hoping it was fixable, but my soldering iron (and eyes) aren't fine enough.  For their part, they cheaped out on assembly.  If they had just soldered down the housing, it would have prevented the connector breaking off the way that it did.   This weekend I took the battery out of it and made the battery power supply I wanted in the first place.  It's still charging now, so I'm going to test it tomorrow to see how long it lasts.