Now we get to find out what the country gets with Trump. I'm neither optimistic or pessimistic – more like just trying to prepare myself for any eventuality...
This morning I plowed my driveway, as we had a couple inches of snow on the ground and today was allegedly going to be clear. Immediately after I finished plowing, it started to snow – hard. Now we have a couple more inches on the ground, but the sun finally did come out.
I received a freight shipment today from my friend Mike B. in North Carolina. It's the vacuum table component of the numerically controlled milling machine we're building. He's doing the fabrication, and this is the biggest component of that effort. It's about 250 pounds of wood that makes a 4' x 4' table; it's very stiff (by design) and has hundreds of small holes in the top and a vacuum compartment on the inside. Right now it's all packed on a pallet; I'll be unpacking it to see it later today.
I'm also hoping to get some repair work done on my tractor today – replacing a broken turn signal and a cracked gear shifter shroud.
Yesterday I noticed that there was a problem on my Model X: the spoiler wasn't automatically retracting and extending like it's supposed to. It's stuck in the fully extended position. This doesn't really affect anything at all about driving it, so there's nothing urgent about fixing it. But the fact of the problem provoked my first support call to Tesla – and the experience was very reassuring. I had a tech on the phone in mere seconds, and about a half hour after my initial call I got an email from them. They had (somehow!) remotely accessed the car and verified that there was indeed a problem with the spoiler. They could not, however, find the root cause remotely. They asked me to reboot the computer (with the Tesla equivalent of CTL-ALT-DEL!) to see if that fixed it; it did not. So now I've got an appointment to visit the Tesla service center in Salt Lake City for diagnosis. They scheduled it for a day when I was going to be in Salt Lake City anyway, very convenient for me. If we're lucky, they'll be able to diagnose and fix it. If the repair can't be done on that day, they'll send a “ranger” out to our house to do the actual repair. Nice!
Debbie and I have been going through a bit of a life change here. Since we picked up her car, for the first time in our life together we have our cars in a garage. This is really strange for us – even the everyday experience of parking in a garage, and pulling the car out of the garage, is new to us. It's all new in a good way, mind you, but still new and strange. I'm especially enjoying the fact that we can climb straight into the car in the middle of the winter without having to scrape ice and snow off our windows! :)
