Good Luck

This is an acknowledgement to the god of luck. I had a couple of small things happen that just made my life a little easier. Last week when I was first trying to get this Zbox thing working, I needed some cables to connect stuff up. I needed a DVI cable to connect the Zbox to a computer monitor, so I could see if I could get on the internet before I went to the trouble of wiring the TV room. The TV uses an HDMI cable, which won't work with a computer monitor. The TV is too big, clumsy and heavy to drag across the house for a quick test like this. And I have to make the test, because you know Murphy, if I connect up the wired internet connection first, it won't work. Anyway, I look around and I find one, which is really weird, because I didn't think I had one. It could have come with the Zbox, or with the monitor I bought back in January. In any case I didn't need it at the time, but I saved it, meaning I threw it in the box with the other nine thousand cables I have collected.

Then I need an adapter to connect the headphone jack on the Zbox to the RCA jacks on the home theater sound system. I have needed one before and had to make it out of pieces from other cables, and I am fully prepared to have to make one this time (make or buy? Make will take a quarter hour or so, but will require no money. Buy will require about the same amount of time and a small amount of money, but would mean talking to people at Radio Shack who always ask you for your address, and if you say no, they ask again. Screw you, Radio Shack.). But I look in my big box of cables, and looky here, I have one, factory made even. Where did that come from? No matter, it works.

Yesterday I am going to wash some cat bedding in the garage sink, because of the continuing war on fleas you know, and the stuff is NOT coming in the house, but it really needs to be decontaminated, so I am going to wash it by hand, but the stopper, you know, the rubber plug thingy, has disappeared. What do I have that I can use for this? I look around, and my eye lights on a milk jug lid. Could it possibly? Well, yes, it actually might. But if you press this thing in there, how are you going to ever get it out? Well, it is a fairly thin piece of plastic, I can always cut a hole in it with my knife, or use a corkscrew. I put the lid in the drain and put a couple of inches of water in the sink and then I use a claw hammer to try and remove it and it comes right out. That right there is an amazing piece of double luck. A piece from another planet that fits the hole, and it does not become irretrievably jammed.