Day 1635

I woke up about 8.  I was competing in a game again, so I stayed in bed until after 9.  I wasn't hungry, so I just did pet stuff.  I wasn't hungry because I'm pissing a lot of blood an I'm worried.  Some of it was even halfway congealed.

I went out to the garage and took the cover off the breaker panel.  I didn't see anything amiss.  My theory was a bad circuit breaker, but because the panel labels are crap I couldn't be for sure.  I took a couple of pictures and went inside to call John.  We talked for quite awhile.  He suggested buying a circuit tester.

So Ellen and I went to Home Depot and got the tester and a circuit breaker.  The tester was on sale.  We had to wait in line for about 15 minutes to get in.  We stopped at a hamburger place for lunch.  It's the first restaurant meal we've had in weeks.  Then it was the post office and home.

When we got home I went back to the apartment.  I didn't have much luck with the tester.  Everything I checked measured fine.  This should have been a clue, but I chalked it up to operator error. 

So I tried the hard way.  I turned everything on in the apartment and then tripped each of the 24 breakers separately.  About half of them were mislabeled.  That took quite awhile.  Only one turned off the working outlets in the garage.  One circuit for the garage, but the idiot had wired a whole 20A circuit to a single outlet mounted 5 feet up in the main hallway. 

I figured there might be a GFI I didn't know about.  The idiot that wired the house put the GFI for the outside outlets in the guest bathroom and the one for the master bathroom in the kitchen.  The same idiot wired the apartment.  I spent a lot of time in a very hot and humid attic tracing the wires for the garage outlets.  I found an outlet I didn't know about in one corner of the attic, but no GFI's.

That finally led me to a junction box high up on the garage wall (ladder time).  I had installed an outlet for the garage opener a couple of years ago and that's where I'd tied into the garage outlet wiring.  I opened up the box and everything looked fine.  I decided to tighten the wire nuts just to make sure.  The first was fine.  When I touched the second (black) sparks flew (yeah, I hadn't turned off the breaker).  So I turned off the breaker and investigated.  The wire nut had come apart.  It was in three pieces.  I replaced it and the dead outlets started to work. 

I'll never know why the wire nut decided to die the night of a thunderstorm that caused a power outage.  Murphy got me.

The whole operation took 4 or more hours.  I was really tired and soaked in sweat - too tired to take a shower.  I sat at the computer and made up an accurate breaker label for the panel.  By then I'd recovered and took a shower.

Ellen fixed chicken stir fry for dinner.  It was really good.  Dessert was a donut we'd bought when we were out.  After dinner was TV until there wasn't anything to watch.  Then it was surfing.