Okay, so maybe the weekend wasn't totally crappy. The men's basketball team was disappointing. The women's basketball team gave the #11 Texas team a scare but came up short. Wrestling continued the remarkable turnaround by again winning 8 of 10 matches and beating Fresno State, a team that had beaten ISU last year.
So I get back to Cedar Rapids at sundown and my first task is to blow the snow off my driveway. I go to start the old riding lawn mower which is now dedicated for use as a snowblower. It doesn't start. No problem. When you haven't used it in a while, the battery can sometimes lose its charge. So I get out my portable charger and hook it up. Oh no! Shortly after hooking it up smoke is coming out of the charger. That's not good. I probably fried that. I'm not sure what the issue was, but that was the end of that. So I get out my shovel and go to work. My driveway is too long to clear the entire thing by hand, but I cleared the area where the cars back out of the garage and cleared the sidewalk and called it good. Not exactly what I wanted to be doing when I got home.
We must have had twice the snow that fell in Ames as the stuff was pretty deep. So tomorrow I get to figure out what's going on with the mower. I wonder if a sprayer wire was shorting something out, but if that's the case a fuse should have blown. It's almost as if the battery was shorting out the charger. I'll inspect the mower in the morning, but I suppose I'll pull out the battery and take it to Interstate Battery and have them check it out and try to charge it up to see if it can hold a charge. I think I replaced it not too long ago, but maybe it was longer than I remember.
The other aspect of this deal is that I often clear the driveways of my neighbors. One neighbor I do it because if I'm gone he will often do mine. But no matter if I clear his 10 times and he clears mine once, he reminds me of that like I am forever in debt to him. So when I left for Ames knowing there would be snow, I told him I'd clear it when I got back. So I kind of built my own trap. The neighbors even saw me out shovelling and no one offered to jump on their machine and help me out. I probably don't deserve it anyway.
So I get back to Cedar Rapids at sundown and my first task is to blow the snow off my driveway. I go to start the old riding lawn mower which is now dedicated for use as a snowblower. It doesn't start. No problem. When you haven't used it in a while, the battery can sometimes lose its charge. So I get out my portable charger and hook it up. Oh no! Shortly after hooking it up smoke is coming out of the charger. That's not good. I probably fried that. I'm not sure what the issue was, but that was the end of that. So I get out my shovel and go to work. My driveway is too long to clear the entire thing by hand, but I cleared the area where the cars back out of the garage and cleared the sidewalk and called it good. Not exactly what I wanted to be doing when I got home.
We must have had twice the snow that fell in Ames as the stuff was pretty deep. So tomorrow I get to figure out what's going on with the mower. I wonder if a sprayer wire was shorting something out, but if that's the case a fuse should have blown. It's almost as if the battery was shorting out the charger. I'll inspect the mower in the morning, but I suppose I'll pull out the battery and take it to Interstate Battery and have them check it out and try to charge it up to see if it can hold a charge. I think I replaced it not too long ago, but maybe it was longer than I remember.
The other aspect of this deal is that I often clear the driveways of my neighbors. One neighbor I do it because if I'm gone he will often do mine. But no matter if I clear his 10 times and he clears mine once, he reminds me of that like I am forever in debt to him. So when I left for Ames knowing there would be snow, I told him I'd clear it when I got back. So I kind of built my own trap. The neighbors even saw me out shovelling and no one offered to jump on their machine and help me out. I probably don't deserve it anyway.
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