Skewered

It was awful.  The party machine went on until 2 AM. 

I don't even want to talk about it anymore.  I arose after 4 hours' sleep to find my precious Torbie curled up in bed. 

I gave her morning kisses and petting as I do every day, and took a shower.  I did my God Time later. 

I ate some yogurt, but not enough, and took my antidepressant.  I got pretty queasy.  Metrolift was on time, but we got the scenic tour or north Houston before they dropped us off. 

The warehouse greeter offered me a pastry, which I declined.  I had to explain my medication had made me queasy.  She was really shocked to hear that. 

Shocked that I am on medication maybe?  I don't know. 

Anyway, we didn't have much money so we got the basics we knew we needed.  I got some chips, would have liked more. 

I didn't need the pastry.  I thought I did.  I'm glad I didn't get it.

Oh, boy.  Now my legs are erupting in hives.  This is not fun.  I took a benadryl. 

I got 2 boxes of chips and Ron's soda.  We went to work and stocked.  I need more merchandise.  They really like what I'm stocking. 

Snack #2 is even accepting bills again.  Awesome. 

Ron asked me to do a pull.  It's a fancy term for "take the money out of the vending machine".  You notice I never talk about plans to do this, beforehand.  I did, but as I worked on the Beast (bottle vendor) I noticed it had error messages and a flashing error light. 

The coin mech is very tricky and slides out with great difficulty.  Ron's told me he wants to be the only one to do it "So I won't blame you".  He did that. 

I discovered we had a horrific coin jam on the "highway" between the coin mech and the bucket.  Example: You buy a soda.  You pay in quarters, but the coin mech is full.  It doesn't need the quarters so it chutes them off to the bucket in the bottom of the machine (all machines have that setup, with variations).  The chute was jammed. 

It also tapered from top to bottom, so it became progressively more difficult to extract the coins.  I ended up using very bad language and taking a walk at one point. 

Remember I was pretty sleep deprived, too. 

I sat down and decided to do something I could do, I filled the change bank.  It needed dimes and nickels, and I had it right there, so why not? 

Ron and I decided we needed a skewer of some sort.  I found a piece of scrap metal in some construction debris, a straight wire about 8 inches long.  It was about the diameter of a pencil lead.  We got working with that.  No luck at first. 

I borrowed a mallet and got to work.  You'd be surprised to learn how often "fixing" a machine means beating on it with a heavy object. 

I began hitting the side of the chute with the mallet as Ron skewered it from above.  We could hear large coin falls - groups of them falling at once.  A couple of those and we were fixed.  Thank God. 

Then we had to remount the coin mech (harder than you'd think) and get the bugger to slide back into place.  It's the kind of work that either strengthens your faith, because you know only God can get this going again; or makes a complete athiest out of you because you doubt a loving God could do this to you! 

We had a bit to say about the state of Texas and "lowest bidders" as well.  Agh.

When this all started, I told Ron "We have 12 minutes before we have to go outside". We had to suspend our ride.  But we got a new ride pretty fast when we were ready.  We only had to wait 45 minutes.

But the driver was nice. 

Best of all, I got a nap.  #6 had the little kids outside and I had some wierd dreams (I could hear them babbling, playing, and someone got a boo-boo), but I still slept great for about 2 hours. 

It's sad to see how badly I'm affected by a little sleep deprivation.