Musings from Joel

I recently decided to repair the broken LCD screen on my girlfriends Jenn-Air

Original Logic Clock board was white

double built in wall oven.

After doing some research on line I decided it was an easy repair and shouldn’t take too long. First, of course, I had to order the part. I found the part number 71001872 at Appliance Zone for $120 to be the cheapest on line and it arrived within a few days.  The repair is a no brainer. There are 3 screws on the bottom of the face that are visible with the top oven door open. Once they are removed the face must slide up 6″ to come off the guides that hold it in place. When you remove it you will notice 2 sets of cables on the back that fasten into the clock logic board.

Notice 2 cables coming from oven going to logic board

They simply pull off then you can set the face down on a table with a towel under it. Once you have it set down, make sure you remove the ribbon cable that powers the buttons in front. To do this look closely at the side edges of the ribbon cable adapter and you will notice to small notched brackets coming up and pointing outwards. Using your fingernails simply pull these up and the ribbon cable will release. Then, there are 4- 1/4″ SAE sheet metal screws holding the clock logic board in place.

Notice small brackets on the ribbon cable fastener. These lift up to release the ribbon cable.

Using a ratchet or similar tool unscrew the 4 screws. Re-installation is the opposite. Total time for me was 15minutes. Money saved from hiring a pro at least $200.

Range electronic control 71001872 is used on Maytag, Amana, Admiral, Norge, Crosley, Estate, Jenn Air, Magic Chef, and some Sears, Kenmore ranges

Replaces 71001872R, AP4090010, 695197,

PS2077427, PT12263997

Here are a few of the models that use range electronic control 71001872,

ACB6260AB, ACB6260AS, ACB6260AW, ACB6280AS, MEW6627BAB, MEW6627BAC,?

MEW6627BAQ, MEW6627BAS, MEW6627BAW, MEW6627CAS, MEW6630BAB, MEW6630BAC,? MEW6630BAQ, MEW6630BAS, MEW6630BAW, MEW6630CAS, WW27430B, WW27430BC,? WW27430P, WW27430PF, WW27430PG, WW27430PK, WW27430PR, WW27430PU,? WW27430W, WW27430WC, WW30430B, WW30430P, WW30430PC, WW30430PF,? WW30430PG, WW30430PK, WW30430PR,

Remove the ribbon cable by lifting the small corner brackets with? your finger nails, then remove the 4 sheet metal screws.

WW30430PU, WW30430W

My son has attended Lake Highlands Junior High for the past two years. He has ADHD, and as a result has some special needs.? The school accommodates him by sending him to one special education class every day. We have had several ARDs over the past 2 years, most with very little being accomplished. They usually ended up with the administration saying that my son needed to buckle down, pay more attention, and do his work. Never mind that he has been diagnosed as ADHD since he was 3 and has a serious lack of attention span, which results in lost paperwork, lost homework, lost assignments and lost time on test. Their answer has always been the same, he needed to make changes.

In January of this past year my son started to have more severe emotional issues that resulted in a series of traumatic events which culminated with the school having my son arrested and sent to Timberlawn. I was frantic and didn’t know where to turn so I called an old friend who recommended a child advocate. Not knowing what they did, I spent some time speaking to her on the phone and discovered a whole world of rights and services that had been denied to my son.
I was told that I needed to immediately call for an emergency ARD at Lake Highland JH and that she would come with me to ensure that proper procedures were followed and that we would ask for several changes to his IEP. So in early February we had his ARD and what happened in this meeting was nothing short of shocking. I have been going to ARD meetings with my son since he was 3 in Houston. So I know what to expect in these. When we set down and my advocate introduced herself the Vice Principal appeared to get noticeably more uncomfortable. My advocate immediately requested that minutes be taken and insisted that the meeting be recorded ( which is standard protocol apparently). As the meeting progressed my advocate made several request for services from the school for my son.? Repeatedly the Vice Principal would proceed to talk over her and insist that my advocate was not the parent and did not have a right to talk to her. I repeated, as did my advocate that she was representing me and had every right to make request on my behalf. This did not matter to the VP, she kept interrupting and talking ( or shouting) over my advocate.? This kept going on for an hour and a half until the VP got so upset that she quiped ” this meeting is over” and proceeded to get up and leave. During this meeting my advocate asked to see my son’s folder that the school keeps, which is my right by Federal Law. We were repeatedly refused, which culminated when my advocate attempted to take the folder at the end of the meeting and had a tug of war with the VP over the folder which my advocate lost. Essentially this meeting turned into a ” cover our ass” meeting for the school as they stonewalled us and refused to accomplish anything else other than assigning a shadow to my son, who it turned out seemed to have a grudge against my son and would trump teacher’s decisions and tell my son that he was not permitted to do things that other kids were doing. My advocate and I were so disgusted with the the school’s completely unprofessional approach to my son’s issues that we decided to go to the state for Arbitration.

So a month later we spent the day at RISD’s administration building in Richardson. RISD doesn’t mess around, they brought their in-house lawyer and a very expensive hired gun. We started in earnest trying to get them to do what was right with my son and accommodate his disabilities. Something seemingly as trivial as emailing me his homework assignments and putting in place a comprehensive behavior improvement plan ended up being deal breakers. We were told that we would continue working with this hired gun to come to an agreement. Well, it is now July, and this ” hired gun” played dumb waiting until the very end of May to ask us what the hold up was. We had sent her the changes no less than 3 times between March and June and she seemed to never have them and always said she would get back to us in a week.

The school district is being investigated by the Fed’s OCR division that deals with these things, but I don’t expect much from them. It is coming down to our word against theirs and we have discovered that RISD administration has no problem with stonewalling, changing documents, misrepresenting the truth and throwing tax payers money at high priced lawyers who apparently don’t do anything. I have run up a $3500 bill to date just trying to get what is fair for my son.? If you stumbled across this because you are in a similar situation please feel free to contact me and I’ll help you prepare and tell you what to expect. In short expect no mercy, you might as well be going after an evil corporation. They will circle the wagons and cover their ass rather than help your child. You will be harassed and made to feel like you are at fault.

They went so far as to hold my son in his Special Ed class all day several times and count him absent, which resulted in a letter from the County attorney stating that my son had a court date for truancy. I had to make several request to get this fixed. Problem is I don’t know if it has been fixed. The district may have fixed it on their side but that does not mean the county has closed his case.

Everyone has an opinion on this and I’m no exception. The health care debate will continue for years no doubt. But I feel compelled to mention my recent experience with the system. I have chronic lower back pain. I have had it for 10 years and steadfastly refused to go see a doctor about it believing there was nothing they could do other than medicate me. I have used yoga to control the pain and maintain a level of flexibility that most men approaching 40 don’t have. But my most recent bout of back pain made me decide that rather than wait the month or two it takes for the episode to pass I would try a doctor. So I went to a sports medicine Doctor who looked my back, put a TENS unit on it for 30 minutes and referred me to another Doctor. I then went to a Spine Doctor who decided to give me 4 cortisone shots in my lower spine on the right side. Now this is an involved procedure requiring a surgery center, an Anesthesiologist, and my Doctor to do the injection through x ray vision. The whole procedure took all of 20 minutes and I was out of the center in an hour. Total bill, over $3000. Now I do not have insurance, I am self employed and have always considered it too expensive. Everyone keeps telling me I should get some to at least cover catastrophic, but I haven’t seen a need to do it. I am healthy as an ox and never get sick, even colds tend to bounce off me. Of course the really aggravating thing is that if I had had insurance it would not have covered any of this. But, spending $3000 for a 20 minute procedure that, here’s the kicker, didn’t work, is absolutely insane. I would have had more fun taking a cruise and gambling the entire time than staring at my credit card bill for this worthless exercise. I can’t comprehend how my doctor justifies a $1500 bill for 20 minutes. I know 4 shots of cortisone don’t cost more than a couple of hundred dollars. I know he went to school an extra few years and did an internship and residency somewhere for a few years but is that really worth $3000 an hour? No fucking way, it’s highway robbery. The Anesthesiologist charged me $450 and all he did was inject an iv and watch the monitor. The surgery center charged me $1050 to sit in their bed, talk to a few nurses and use their space for an hour. The system is truly and completely shot and needs to be overhauled top to bottom. If my doctor billed everyone they way he billed me then he must clear $6M a year. Even if he only bills everyone 4 hours a day like I was billed it would net him over $3M.

Owning both of these mats and getting questions about them all the time I thought I would update where I am today with these mats in reference to my post last year. I now practice at 2 locations that my studio has here in Dallas and I have the Manduka at one Studio and the Jade at the other. The Manduka is, in my opinion, the best mat on the market. I have constantly used it for the better part of a year and it has held up flawlessly. It is a heavier more ” industrial mat” that I think is ideal for a really serious yoga practitioner. It has held its shape, has not blistered and does a very nice job of not absorbing the massive amounts of sweat I drench it with on a regular basis. I have only bothered to wipe it down with vinegar one time to remove a little stickiness. For me it is the best mat on the market. Do be aware it is not a soft giving mat. Part of its durability is the hard surface it has.
The Jade on the the other hand has really not held up terribly well. I demoted this mat to back up mat until Febuary when my studio opened up a second location. I then started using it there. While the bizarre stretching seems to have disappeared the mat is now blistering on one side. I can only assume the stretching was sweat related and giving the mat 8 months of hiatus was enough to dry it back out.
I am planning on swapping out the mat soon and purchasing another Manduka.

My daily routine consist of waking up and reading my morning news on-line visiting MSNBC, CNN and our local paper the Dallas Morning News. There are always stories that irk and inspire me, but rarely are there stories that make me crossed eyed and that I want to vent over. This morning I read an article about a HOA located Northwest of Dallas called Wellington Home Owners Association in Flower Mound. This appears to be a typical suburban cookie cutter looking development born from some farmer’s cattle field 10 years ago. It looks pretty enough, I suppose, if you like that sort of lifestyle. Obviously, new houses are still being built out there and the neighborhood is evolving.

Normally, I wouldn’t give an organization like this a second thought. But, today in the news I read that this HOA is suing one of its homeowners because he installed solar panels on his roof. The association thinks the panels are ugly and an eye sore. Nevermind that the homeowner is removing the weight of an average car from the atmosphere in CO2 emissions every year, or helping to slow the depletion of Texas’ natural gas reserves which power most of the electricy in this state. All these people care about are aesthetics, and apparently solar panels don’t agree with their idea of what a house should look like. Mind you this homeowner installed the panels on the back of his house so they aren’t visible from the street. It took some busy body neighbors complaining to get this lawsuit filed.

Of course my response is what I always love to say to people who think global warming and CO2 emissions are a farce. Go sit in your garage with the garage door down and run your car for an hour. Then we will talk CO2. These people should be sent up to the Boreal Forest to cut down all the dead trees no longer converting CO2 to O2, perhaps that will wake them up. I think the real concern is that this sort of crap continues to happen in Texas and it makes this state look so backwards and uneducated about the world around us. Uneducated people are a dime a dozen in this state and their mantra seems to be out of site out of mind when it comes to our environment. I applaud this progressive homeowner and hope he prevails against this narrow minded HOA which clearly should be run out of town.

I have lived in Junius Heights since 2002 and have always known what a great, unique neighborhood we live in. It is the largest historic neighborhood in Dallas and has some of the most architecturally interesting houses in the city. These styles include craftsman, tudor and prairie styles.

Our neighborhood worked hard in 2005 to have the area designated as historic and placed on the national registry. This has stopped the Mc mansion invasion from moving south into our area, unlike much of the M Streets which was gutted of its older homes in the late 90′s in favor of tacky, 3 story homes with little or no character.

All this hard work is finally paying dividends. This Old House has designated Junius Heights as the best family friendly neighborhood in Dallas for 2010.

Sarah Palin is up to her shenanigans again.  While I have had enough of her to last a life time, apparently there are lots of individuals who still think she is the second coming of Christ. I fully expect her to run in 2012 and I look forward to her making a fool out of herself again, unless she starts cramming on foreign policy and learns what countries are where and a lot of history to boot.  We are talking about a person who thinks Afghanistan borders the U.S and our government has a Dept. of Law.

It comes down to one thing, professionalism. Can we as a people of these United States imagine a POTUS that looks down at his/her hand to come up with the answers or remember what to say? We all know what happens when someone like GW Bush starts ad libing and talking about Doctors practicing their love with women. Presidents have to look and act Presidential. Wondering what to say next while talking to Russia’s Premier Putin would look down right pathetic and definitely would not come from a point of strength. Of course, she is a real hit with the tea party fanatics whose movement is disintegrating faster than ice in the desert. Maybe she can run on their ticket in 2012 and offer to tea bag her opponents.

I just wrapped up trip number two to see my sister and her family in Utah this week. I had a great time seeing them and my son and I managed to ski a few days while we were there. I’m old school and he is all about the board and is finally getting comfortable using it on the blues. So the experience was great as far as the skiing goes, but I have to complain about the way the service is run. On our first day we decided to eat at the lodge, both ordering food and drinks and spending $32. There was no where to sit so we sat outside. I had iced tea, since I’m Texan, we drink it by the gallon. They serve their $2.00 drinks in small cups that are probably 20ozs. I assumed the Tea had free refills. I asked my son to get me a refill inside since he did not have hard to walk in ski boots on. He went in and came back empty handed, telling me that security had stopped him and said there were no free refills. On what planet does a restaurant manager not offer free tea refills? I have been to the ugliest, seediest rat holes in town and spent under $5 and always gotten free refills.  So my response was not to eat at the lodge anymore while we skied. On the final day we did a half day of skiing. A full day cost around $65 while a half is $9 cheaper. Quite a discount for showing up at 12. I went to the ticket booth and tried to buy tickets but they would not sell them until 12:15 on the nose, so we waited and waited. When we got our tickets and went to get on the needle express to go to the top of the mountain, we were told we could not get on until 12:30 on the nose. So we waited ( mind you this on Monday and there was no one else on line) and waited and waited. Finally getting to board the gondola. I might understand them being sticklers if the half day ticket was half price, but that is not the case. So where do these short sighted morons running the mountain think treating people this way is a bright idea?  I believe rule number one is the customer is always right. My son and I have decided we will be going to powder mountain next time we head up to ski.

I already own a pair of Prana and 2 pairs of Be Present yoga pants so I thought I would try lululemons since all the women in my studio rave about them. At a $100 they are pricey, but I am impressed with the elasticity of the fabric. They fit me snugly around the crotch and thighs, but I’m not a thin build and since they stretch it is a comfortable fit, surprisingly. The attention to detail, I think, is what separates these from the other 2 manufactures that I own. They have an elastic band at the waste that is stretchy fabric, rather than a material with elastic sown through it. They also have a continuous elastic drawstring with no ends so you don’t have to worry about the washing machine pulling it out during the spin cycle.

On the minus side I wish they did not have front pockets, they simply pooch out a bit and aren’t flattering. They were also long when I bought them but the store took them up for free. Problem is they are still long.

Of course the ultimate test is how they perform in the studio, which I am quite pleased with. Since they are very elastic they flex without problem, even in Utthan Pristhasana (lizard). They also do a nice job of breathing and letting me sweat since I leave a pool everyday. Definitely worth the money if you plan on wearing them often.

It’s Friday Morning and I am driving my son to school on Skillman, like we do everyday.  But, today I notice something that really concerns me in the southbound lane, just after Mockingbird, near my favorite donut shop. Scattered all over both lanes are dozens of shotgun shells, which look brand new and ready to shoot. Brain dead commuters heading down Skillman don’t seem to be giving them any thought, driving over them like large chunks of gravel. Being the concerned citizen I am, I decide to call 311, but after being on hold for 5 minutes, I opt to call 911. Maybe I’m a tad paranoid but I don’t want to read in the news about some tragic shooting as a result of shotgun shell rounds going off under oblivious commuters tires and I don’t want my precious donut shop destroyed either. So I call 911, which puts me on hold and dumps me back over to 311, where I sit on hold for 25 minutes.

After I drop my son off at school, I decide that if I happen upon a cop I will ask him what he thinks. Luck is with me because I spot one a few minutes later sitting in a parking lot, in front of a donut shop (go figure). I pull up and tell him my story, all the while still on hold with 311. He makes a call into Central and they tell him they will send a car to check it out. About this time 311 picks up and proceeds to tell me they don’t have the intersection of Skillman and Mockingbird in their system. Then they ask me if it is in University Park? Are the city’s GIS systems so bad that they can’t find a major 90 year old intersection to fix a problem, or can’t this operator spell her way out of a wet paper bag?  If I robbed stores this would be a great intersection to hit, the system wouldn’t know what to do with the request. Anyway, I digress, 5 minutes later and apparently requiring a MAPSCO, the operator tells me the street crew will respond in 1-24 hours. Realizing the whole neighborhood could be swiss cheese by then, I hang up and expressed my frustration to this cop. He proceeds to tell me how stupid people can be and imparts this funny story on me, which I will try to regurgitate below.

Last night while patrolling around White Rock Lake (which is his beat), he spots a car sitting in one of the open park areas. As he moves in to check it out a suspect runs off and disappears, leaving behind a t-shirt and one puma tennis shoe. The officer uses his detective skills and decides to pull back a block and watch and wait for the suspect knowing he will return for his shirt, shoe, and car. He parks in front of a house and while waiting notices someone coming up the street to his car from behind. The man asks the officer what he is doing there and if there is a problem. The officer responds that he is just observing a situation and that there is no problem.  The man starts to walk off, but the astute officer notices that the man has no shirt on and is missing a puma tennis shoe. A light bulb goes off in his head and he decides to get out of his patrol car and ask the man where his shirt and shoe are. The suspect responds that they were in his parents house, which happens to be the house the patrol car is parked out in front of. The officer knowing he is lying decides to play along.

It is also obvious to the cop at this point that the man is intoxicated and tells him that he needs to go home and sleep it off.  The drunk man tells the cop that he really doesn’t want to disturb his parents and would sleep in their backyard. The officer responds to him that it is not safe and insists on knocking on the door to speak with his parents. So the officer goes to the front door, knocks, and after several minutes an elderly woman answers the door. When the officer tells her that her son is drunk and needs to come in, she responds ” son? what son?” At that moment an elderly man comes to the door and the officer asks him about his “son” and shines his flashlight at the suspect’s face.  The old man curtly responds, ” he isn’t our son, and he isn’t from around here!”  At which point the cop goes back to the suspect and decides he is going to arrest him for public intoxication. The suspect knowing what is coming preemptively faces the cop car and puts his hands behind his back and says ” I really wish you hadn’t bothered them.”

The officer finishes this story to me with, ” people really are dumb, this guy practically arrests himself, and then is upset that I knocked on these people’s door to check out his story.”