Minor Accomplishments About Which You Are Inordinately Proud

Last Thursday, just ahead of the massive cold front that came in Friday and has plunged us into sub-zero temps, we fired up our 1999 Ford F350 4WD pickup and hooked up our gooseneck equipment trailer and took off to pick up 8 round bales of hay, at about 1000 lbs each, at a farm about an hour away.  we got the hay, made it home, dropped the trailer, and headed back to the same town to pick up a washer and drier for a friend who just had a baby.  It was getting dark as we headed back, and I remarked that the lights on the truck weren't very bright. We planned to stay off the interstate and keep to two lane roads, but the highway we were on, funnels you directly onto I-57 if you are not paying close attention. We ended up on the interstate for about 15 miles before we were able to exit.  We stopped to get some dinner.  When we got back in the truck it wouldn't start, batteries were dead.
   At this point, we had our first stroke of good fortune. As I was standing there with the hood up, a guy pulls up and says "I have jumper cables, if you need a jump".  A couple of minutes later we were on our way again.  I said to Mrs. Floyd, "Lets go to ORileys and have them check the alternator".  We limped the truck there and parked under a pole light in their parking lot.  More amazing good luck. While the alternator did indeed check bad, they had the correct replacement in stock. This is where our good luck reaches into almost karmic territory: the alternator in this truck sits directly on top of the engine block and is mounted by just three bolts.  It only took about 10 minutes for me to change it out, right there in the parking lot, under the streetlight.  The folks at ORileys loaned me tools to replace the alternator, and even a step ladder to reach the engine. We still needed to be jump started, and all they had was this tiny battery pack about the size of a carton of cigarettes.  We hooked the battery pack up and watched as it's charge went from 98% down to maybe 25%.  We hit the starter and the truck fired right up.  
  This all could have gone so badly so many different ways.  It could have died when we had 8000 pounds of hay hooked to it, it could have died along the interstate, we could have tried to limp the truck on home, the alternator could have been out of stock, it could have been mounted in such a way that we would have had to take the truck apart to mount it, the battery box could easily not have had enough juice to start the engine, OR, all of this could have happened the next day with wind chills of -20.
  So much good luck in such a short time, I'm still floored by it.

Congrats! My wife and I recently swapped out a box spring on a shitty, squeaky metal frame out with a real bedframe. She got the box spring and frame when she got a new mattress with her ex-boyfriend over 20 years ago.

We got a bedframe pretty quickly but still don't have a headboard for our bedroom. The guest room bed has a headboard though, because the bed is in front of the windows so there was nowhere to lean against.

Paid off my car loan after less than a year! Thanks, EV tax credit.

I've now had my dreamy, designer-brand, stupid-expensive new refrigerator for about 18 months, and there's been one minor (or maybe not quite as minor as I wanted to think?) problem with it.  The lowest of the adjustable shelves in the main compartment of the fridge has been a bit saggy.  I set up the shelves when the fridge was installed, got that adjusted so it was the shelf that could hold the tallest items, and then a few months later I noticed it was tilting a bit.  Boomer admitted she'd jostled it when trying to put a too-tall item below it, so I chalked it up to that, re-jiggered it in the adjustable-shelf notches on the back of the fridge, and it straightened out.  A few months later it seemed to be tilting a bit.  I emptied everything off the shelf, re-set it in the adjustable-shelf notches in the back, and it seemed fine.  Until a few months later, and it was sagging again.  I finally decided there was something I should probably get addressed by customer service while this was still under warranty, so I went to, like, chat-text their support line... and it turns out they only have a phone number.  UGH!  Knowing I'd had to talk to an actual human about getting service attention, I took a closer look at the shelf to try to be able to really explain what was wrong...

...and discovered my problem was that I'd set it on too low a notch in the adjustable-shelf notches, and just had to push it up one more notch (so the bottom of the strut was also locking into a notch on the track).  This was going to be a pain in the ass, though, because I really needed a shelf with the height this one offered, if just to hold the industrial-sized gallon container we have of maple syrup in the fridge (it's a really fancy syrup, it was a lot cheaper to order it in bulk, we eat a lot of pancakes, shut up it's totally normal to have a gas-can-sized container of maple syrup!); Hugs and I discussed rearranging the fridge layout and I was ready to do that...

...but then I decided to just acquire some quart-sized glass bottles, decanted the syrup into that, readjusted the shelf, and now my fridge is trim and tidy and the syrup is actually easier to deal with in smaller bottles and all is well.  I AM SUCH AN AMAZING PROBLEM-SOLVER!

And at no point did I have to humiliate myself in front of a Sub-Zero repair person by calling them to my home to fix my "malfunctioning" shelf that was really just failing because of user error!

I realized I get 4 times as many Amex points from spending at the grocery store than I do from my Netflix payment, so I bought a Netflix gift card at the grocery store and added it to my account.

This might be the most TIF picture that ever existed. Well done, Mun. Well. Done.

We all survived the high drama of the Seventh Grade Dance Party. 

We had a fairly strong thunderstorm last night, and our power went out a little before dark, so I fired up our generator.  It took me about an hour of tinkering around with it because with everything going on the last year, I hadn't started it in ages and the battery was dead.  I had to take the battery out of my 82 S 10 truck and just to be safe run some jumper cables across the carport to our Ford F 550 truck to boost it, but I finally got it started, and we used it till the power came back on.  I am really proud of it because it is a WWII army surplus signal corp beauty, which is basically the front half (engine and radiator) of a Willys Jeep attached to a 10KW generator.  Despite being 80 years old, it fired up and ran perfectly. 

After decades of "regular" fishing, I started fucking around with a fly fishing rod this summer. Caught a few less-desirable species (creek chub, shiner, pumpkinseed, etc.) but this weekend I finally caught my first (rainbow) trout on the fly. Behold this mighty beast:

Scored a big steelhead filet at No Frills that was mistakenly labeled as chicken legs and was therefore priced at $1.40 instead of the 9-ish dollars it should have been
(I rifled through the whole bin and sadly it was the only one labeled that way)

Went to put the EV on to charge yesterday only to discover a scaffolding lorry parked across the two bays of the charging point in the street round the corner from us. Had a nice chat with the workies, who politely agreed to move said lorry, and I was able to charge as planned. It was all terribly reasonable and didn't involve a) a protracted argument or b) just not bothering and running away deciding to do it later.