It’s been a couple of weeks since my Sears refrigerator has been repaired. Apparently, it’s going to work for a while. I bought a gauge from Walmart that is designed to display the temperature of a remote sensor along with the temperature of the base unit. It has been reflecting the set temperatures since its installation. That’s great news. The emergency is over and it looks like we’re back to normal.
Now I have to review the situation and make sure that all the rash things that I said when the failure first happened are fair. I’m a scientific Skeptic and would like to think that I judge things fairly. In my first “There are Days” blog article I said, “Don’t Buy Sears or LG Refrigerators.” The emergency is over and I want to review what I said. Do I mean it now that the storm has passed?
Yes and no. I’ll probably buy from Sears again. After all, it was their team that came through with the replacement parts when other appliance repair shops wouldn’t consider attempting a repair once they found out that the box came from LG. However, I’m going to be quite a bit more careful and look into the original manufacturer. I found out that there are two brands of refrigerators that should be avoided. They are LG and Samsung and both for the same reason. The information I read stated that while the boxes are not more likely to fail they are troublesome to repair because of the lack of an adequate infrastructure. In my sample of one, I had 100 percent failure but I can’t know for certain what the overall failure rate actually is because…well…I have a sample of one. One would have to know the total number of LG boxes sold by Sears and the percentage of those that failed to get any meaningful statistics on the matter. Perhaps Consumer’s Union has those numbers and used them to base their high recommendation. Perhaps, but I still will not base my future purchases of durable goods based solely on their recommendations. I’ll also look past their main article to the user comments. I neglected to do that and while I realize that the user comments are part of a self-selected data set of bad experiences, I might consider a high number of poor reviews as significant enough to consider the Consumer Unions positive recommendation.
By the way, Sears sells fancy refrigerators from other manufacturers and the repairmen I’ve talked to say that they see lots of LG and Samsung boxes but very few GEs but don’t take advice from a blog…
Today is Labor Day. It is the traditional end of summer and a chance to escape from reality, apparently. In Atlanta Georgia people attend 
most of the attendees and the crowd at Burning Man is a bit younger. I might be getting 
too old to attend that event but as I write this, I’m reminded that I didn’t report on the one national event that I did attend—The 
Of course my pathetic little R2 looked small compared to their highly detailed full sized models but they put it on display front and center.
I took a stroll out on my favorite path yesterday. In an effort to keep myself fit (and sane) I try and walk four miles per day. Lately, I’ve settled on a path that runs around the whole of Tucson. It’s called The Loop. Mainly it is a bicycle path but it’s also for pedestrians. It has the advantage of being away from vehicular traffic. It is well maintained and I particularly like the fact that it has trash cans located along the path. 
It’s back to the workshop and I couldn’t be happier. Years ago right after retirement, I drew up plans for a workshop. It is 12 x 24 feet, attached to the house, and finished so that it matches complete with cement tiles and stucco siding. There are French doors on both ends—one set opens to the front yard and the other opens to the back yard. There are no windows. Instead there are two 3×4 foot skylights. Sitting next to the holes in the ceiling are two 4 bulb high pressure fluorescent light fixtures that provide lighting when the skylights can’t. A large number of wall sockets are scattered around the workspace 4 foot from the floor. Most important for a Tucson based workshop is the 220V AC/Heat unit mounted high on the wall.
LEDs or other electronic components are usually bought in bulk and on-sale. Surplus houses often have a wide variety of useful stuff but you can’t guarantee that it will be always readily available. So FedEx, USPS, and UPS trucks often visit my house throughout the year and stuff starts to stack up. Regular readers of this blog know that I built 
Finally, I was able to sit down and concentrate. The resulting owls may be part of a computerized display or they may be placed in random locations. I haven’t decided yet but they’re cool and I’m ready to move on to more challenging builds.
We are indeed living in “interesting times!”
Normalcy returns. Yesterday, the Sears repair technician came to the house with a new compressor for my Kenmore Elite (LG) refrigerator. He left a mere 3 hours later and my behemoth stainless steel kitchen decoration has the potential once again to be a useful appliance. Of course, it won’t be fully graduated to that status until the ice maker bin is once again full of those half-moon shaped gems that make life in the Arizona Desert bearable. Tony, the very courteous and understanding Sears technician sublimated my pure hatred of anything from Sears and anything made in Korea into now guarded optimism that, at least for a time, life in the Lacey house can resume as before.
Generally, my life is great and I really don’t have much to complain about. However, my contentment seems overly fragile at times. Today, I’m between big events and commitments. It’s a great time to binge watch TV and expand the available recording space on the DVR. I’m sipping on beers left over from previous parties. Then Nancy tells me that the refrigerator has stopped making ice. “OK, I’ll look at it,” I tell her. Then I’m just about to order replacement parts when she says, “The refrigerator is warm too.” More trouble shooting and I determine that the freezer is working fine but the refrigerator is warmer than it should be. Also, there is probably nothing wrong with the ice maker. We bought the refrigerator last year with great fanfare. It was a huge fancy beast—the best that Sears had to offer—a Kenmore Elite. It cost 3 thousand dollars and it was replacing our previous Maytag that we had for 16 years. Surely, this would be the last refrigerator that we’ll need to buy in our lifetimes. It’s only a year and a half old and now the refrigerator is not cooling as it should. Now my life is not quite as good as it was. Now, I have to think about something that I thought I wouldn’t have to think about ever again. I did what I could and reached out for help. There is a local appliance repairman that we’ve used in the past. He asked about the model number and told me that he couldn’t help with this fancy machine. He wasn’t equipped to fix it. He did recommend someone else who also thought it was not something that he could handle. So I had to call Sears Appliance Repair…
The 26th Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems 
. Three teams had system failures that didn’t allow them to compete at all. Several began preparations but were unable to turn their vehicles over to computer control. At the end of the day there were four teams that flew autonomously: 
I was surprised by a Road Runner this afternoon when I started my four mile walk. The plucky little bird captured a small lizard and wandered off down the road. It was cool. The Road Runner is an interesting creature. They look like they’re going really fast when they’re standing still. In Tucson, it is not unusual to see one of these from time to time. When I first moved here in January 2000, I saw one of these 
to muster the resources for 24 campers to build Beetle Bots.
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