Stumped

It’s been something of a good news/bad news week.

Good News

Got my car back from the repair shop, and most of the work it needed was covered by my warranty. I needed an oil change but I also wanted them to look at an intermittent Check Engine light, see about replacing the rear TPMS sensors, figure out why the Auto Stop/Start wasn’t working, and deal with an intermittent failure of the electronics to realize the car was in Park.

Got all that?

The TPMS sensors failed on my trip to Pennsylvania, and the service writer wasn’t sure the warranty would cover them. They did though. I was prepared to just ignore them until I got the tires replaced.

The Check Engine light turned out to be the upstream O2 sensor.

The Auto Stop/Start issue was caused in part by a bad battery sensor, which wasn’t covered because it was part of the battery cabling. C’est la vie.

The transmission issue was annoying. I’d put the car in Park and turn it off, but the message center would occasionally tell me to put the car in Park, even though it let me turn it off. That meant I had to restart the car, move the transmission to Drive then back to Park, and shut the car off again. Diana’s car had a similar issue. It turned out to be the transmission control module, which was covered by the warranty.

Other good news: I got my computer back! They just replaced three things: the CPU, the motherboard, and the cooler.

Yeah.

Bad News

When I got my computer back, I expected to have to deal with some security stuff because they replaced so much hardware. CyberPowerPC told me they reset the Trusted Platform Module though, so I didn’t expect to have a lot of trouble.

Yeah.

When I tried to log in, I got this message:

Something happened and your PIN isn’t available. Click to set up your PIN again.

No worries. Not unexpected. I clicked the link which tried to log me into my Hotmail account. Except new hardware, remember? It wanted to send a code to my Hotmail account to reset the PIN.

Except I couldn’t access Hotmail on that computer because I couldn’t log in. Over to the laptop where I try to log in to Hotmail.

Except I hadn’t logged in to Hotmail on the laptop before, so Microsoft wanted to send a code to my backup account, which is my Ravensbeak email.

Which I’ve been using the web interface since the desktop went into the shop.

Get the code from my Ravensbeak email. Log in to Hotmail to see…no code message from Microsoft.

I tried half a dozen times over the next half hour and never got a code. I tried sending messages from my Gmail and Ravensbeak accounts, and those went through just fine. No clue what’s going on. I have to think it’s a Microsoft issue at this point, though I’ve got an email in to CyberPowerPC support to see if they’ve got a suggestion.

Pool Stuff

We got into the pool Tuesday.

Actually, Diana and Middle Daughter were floating a bit Sunday (or was it Monday?) as we finalized a few things. I got in for the first time Tuesday along with the grandchildren. Well, the girls, anyway. First Grandson isn’t tall enough; the water in the pool comes up to his nose, give or take. We’re in the process of setting some space ready for an easy-set pool that he’ll be able to use. Groandaughter may use it too. She’s tall enough for the big pool, but only just. She’ll appreciate the smaller pool.

One of the things we needed to do was remove the stump of the old sweet gum tree. We’d had the tree taken out several years ago when we put the solar panels in because the tree blocked most of the easter sun. I had the tree guys leave the stump about three feet tall because I had the dream of putting a small deck on it for a playhouse.

Never got around to it. Shocker, I know.

At any rate, the stump started rotting away and sat in the way of where we wanted to put the smaller pool. After chopping as much away as I could with a chainsaw, I rented a stump grinder this weekend.

Several pieces of the trailer deck crumbled away as the rental company loaded the grinder, so before I could unload it at the house, I had to run to Lowe’s to get lumber. We knew we needed to replace the deck; we were hoping to wait a little longer though.

The stump grinder turned out to be amazingly satisfying to run. I enjoyed making wood chips fly everywhere. It maybe wasn’t quite as much fun after a couple of hours of standing around in the sun, sweeping the grinding wheel back and forth and back and forth.

So the big stump is gone, and I took care of four smaller stumps around the property. Now we need to level the spot for the smaller pool, possibly compact that ground, and we can get it set up early next week.

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