Well, more experiments with the window and it still makes noise. But the Pella guys called and said they’d replace the window part of the window (not the frame). So there’s progress!

I have a couple of phone calls I have to make (to doctors offices) and I have to ask my sister (who isn’t taking my calls right now, the little snob) about salt for a Neti pot. Of course, I’ve had to do these things all week and I keep forgetting. Plus, I should call the window people back and see if they got my email with the weird sound recording.

I guess I’m in a good mood today because Amazon isn’t as weak as I’d thought. I ordered a Bluetooth headset, a holster, and a charger, all for my magenta Razr cell phone (it isn’t pink, OK?) Well, I ordered it on the 15th of January and it is scheduled to be delivered on the 16th of FEBRUARY or later. But I got email today saying that it was shipped today. Since I paid for “regular” shipping, it should be arriving in several days.

Which reminds me, my friend Sun sent me a birthday present last year months late because of the awesome speed of Amazon. I need to send her a birthday present, but I probably already missed it. Woo. Someone needs to get a social secretary or something. Wait, I just found the email from last year. Someone remind me in early February about this, OK?

OK, so maybe I am crazy but I’m not having auditory hallucinations. Here’s the buzzy sound from my window. Yeah, they’re still not going to do anything about it but at least there’s proof that there’s something wrong. I’m not sure if I should file a complaint with the contractor’s board. Ah, well.

I felt kinda miserable at work today, a little off my feed. Not that it kept me from eating or anything. It sure didn’t stop Dave from torturing me for an hour. I can’t even remember what sort of odd pushup hybrid he had me doing that made me lose my breath. Oh, well, that’s what I pay him for.

Well, I saw the high wind warning and you can imagine what I’m doing right now. I’m listening to my window buzz. I took the Pella window guy’s advice and taped down all of the “rain seal” but it did no good. I had my voice recorder taped to the window, but it didn’t record any of the wind-induced buzz. I can give the frame a little thump and make it buzz, though, so I know it’s there.

In other news I found out the scratch in my trunk lid will cost about four or five hundred dollars to fix (it goes all the way through the paint.) Covering over it with a sticker would be much cheaper, but I’m not driving a car that crappy. And this evening I got an email from my project lead at Megacorp saying, “DO NOT USE THE (shared) COMPUTER UNTIL I SAY IT IS OK.” I don’t know why he was so upset about. I guess I’ll find out tomorrow.

Morning update: the voice recorder’s automatic “start” will not work on the buzzy noise, so I have very little audio recorded. However, taping the voice recorder to the middle of the window stopped most of the quiet buzzing, but none of the loud buzzing. So, if I have to tape something to the middle of the window, it’s broken, right?

Last night my brother-in-law said, “Hey, how come your mom and dad have colds and you don’t?” Well, this morning I woke up with a headache and I felt like I had a head cold. Nothing that a bit of Advil can’t take care of.

Good thing I took some Advil, too, because some idiot stole the Honda emblem off the back of my car. A stinking HONDA emblem. What am I, a Simpsons episode? And there are BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes parked right down the street. The cheapest Honda emblem I found online was $80. Since the miscreants scratched the paint, I need to add a couple hundred dollars to that. Ah, well.

Oh, and here’s a picture of my dad from last week when he had a cold. He fell asleep while eating his pizza in front of the TV. Notice he’s still holding a phantom piece of pizza.

I had dinner with my friend Greg at about 5PM and had a nice prime rib. But later on, I had to meet Megan, who just got into town. A bunch of us met at Pho Van and I had another dinner at 9PM. Yar.

The picture below is what Megan thinks of my new phone. Well, the picture WILL BE of Megan when I fix a problem I’m having.

I got in a bit of an argument at work, mainly because I’m so tired of what I’m working on. It’s poorly documented and hard to understand. While I was in the middle of that, I got a call from the service department at Pella. He left a long message telling me that the buzzing was probably from an electrical transformer. Well, the nearest transformer is in front of the neighbor’s house. I’ve stood outside trying to hear the window make noise and if it was the transformer, I would have noticed it.

I called the Pella guy back and he repeated his mantra, “In my 19 years at Pella, I’ve never seen this problem.”

I told him that it couldn’t be the transformer and to send someone to try the goofy fix he wanted me to do myself (cutting off some of the weatherstripping). He refused.

I told him that I paid a lot of money for this awful thing and to just take it back and refund my money. I’ll replace it with a sheet of plywood. He refused.

On my side, I promised to call the power company, but I told him that if they laughed at me I’d call him right back.

I honestly have no idea why he even called me today, unless it’s just to remind me what an idiot I was to buy a Pella window.

OK, so I can’t get too worked up about my window. I’ve been trying, but really it works fine except for the waking me up in the middle of the night part. That annoys me for a day, and then it’s back to being an overpriced window. That’s why I might need to hire someone (hence a lawyer) to be annoyed for me. It’s trickle up economics.

I should have known when Dave the trainer said, “You probably ought to lay off the legs for a while,” that my legs were going to get sore tonight. Heck, they were starting to get sore early on in the day. I’ll be limping around tomorrow.

I went to the gym for a very short time today (just under an hour), but I doubt I could have done much more. Dave the trainer had me do exercises with this odd bondage equipment on so he could pull on me while I was trying to do lunges or step up onto a bench. I was tired enough that I had to sit down to catch my breath. We headed over to Joe’s Cellar afterwards and I forced myself to eat a grilled cheese sandwich (with bacon and tomato) with some tomato basil soup. I had one whole Pabst Blue Ribbon and had quite a buzz on. Now I’m just enjoying the endorphin rush.

Oh, and I called Pella Windows again about the noise and I have to tell anyone who is thinking of buying one to avoid them like the plague. The local service guy believes me when I tell him it’s making sound in the wind, but he’s never heard of anyone else with that problem in the 20 years he’s worked at Pella and he wants me to fix it myself. It’s a TWENTY-FIVE HUNDRED DOLLAR window. It’s probably like FIVE TIMES what I could have paid for a cheapie, and it MAKES A HIDEOUS NOISE when the wind blows. And the Pella service guy wants me to fix it myself. I finally found the number of the main Pella office in Indiana and they told me that they would NOT talk to me and I had to talk to the local guy. I’m wondering if it would be worth another $2500 to hire a lawyer and have the lawyer get on their case to have the window fixed.

Honestly, anything that regularly wakes me up in the middle of the night like that seriously pisses me off. Now if I could get a good night’s sleep, I probably would feel better.

P.S. I want a new iMac and a MacBook Pro.

It’s only two things so far. First, I found that neither my laptop nor my voice recorder were able to record the sound from the window. I’m guessing the buzzy sound, which was loud enough that I had to sleep with earplugs, is too low in frequency to be picked up by the cheesy little microphones in the voice recorder or my laptop. I asked a guy at work with experience in sound (the head sound guy on the road for Bob Dylan at one point) and he suggested PZM microphones or contact microphones. After researching that, I think I’ve decided to tape the voice recorder directly to the window to see if that works.

The second thing: apparently it takes a lot longer to get gas ON my car than IN my car and I was a little later to work than I usually am. I live in the only state where you can’t legally pump your own gas, and the attendant didn’t see that his pump was broken. It never clicked off and it poured gasoline all over the side of my car. Oh, well.

OK, so it wasn’t so bad. It was just that I kept staring at the same bit of a computer program and it kept doing the wrong thing. I started by reading the documentation, then by looking at the code, then by poking around. What a nightmare.

Speaking of nightmares, tonight is supposed to be the windiest night of the year and I still don’t know if I have a proper recording solution to record the sound of my horrible window. I think I need to get a decent microphone and stick it up near the window. A laptop microphone just isn’t cutting the mustard. Oh, well. We’ll see how it goes.

But what stupidity on one of the items. I went to the Apple store and bought a microphone because I had a gift card I wanted to kill. Otherwise it was getting to the 1 year mark and a lot of gift cards start stealing $5 from you each month. I bought a microphone for my iPod, but it’s pretty darn weak. I can record the whirring of the iPod’s hard disk but it can’t hear me talking to it from a foot away. I’m thinking that it might go back to the store.

I tried to buy my sister a print server so both of her computers could use the same printer but OfficeMax lied and the store didn’t have any in stock. And the price for the stilly things have gone up $30 since last week.

The other thing I did was to try on some Blundstone boots. There was a guy in the store (another customer) talking about how they were the standard work boot in Australia and how they just plain felt funny when you wore them. At least they don’t feel like regular boots. The best part was the woman who worked at the shoe store was rather attractive, not that it made me any more likely to buy funny-feeling boots. I think I I need to get out more.