Wasting time.

I was able to spend an hour spacing out and daydreaming without feeling guilty about not looking at my casebooks. All I had to do was get a needle jammed into my too-deep veins and have a pint of blood drained from my body. Sure, I almost passed out twice, but I got cookies and apple juice when I was done.

This week is looking worse than last. Legal research continues to waste my time with its insipid assignments. I have my first meeting with my torts study group Wednesday morning. There’s a mandatory professional development meeting on Thursday. Memo re-writes and our contract drafting assignment are due Thursday. Legal writing is canceled Friday but our memo outline is due that Monday so my weekend will be spent memo-ing.

My treadmill debacle is still a debacle. In fact, as I write this, I’m on hold with the manufacturer to see if they’ll send me free parts. I’m sure they won’t. Even if they do, I’m not sure I’ll be able to fix the thing. So I’m anticipating going back to Wal-Mart and telling them they better refund me AND arrange for someone to come to my apartment and haul this thing away without my having to disassemble and repackage it. (I still have all the packing materials but I had to rip apart the largest box which was secured with industrial-quality staples.) This has turned into a much bigger thing than I anticipated.

But I still want a treadmill.

As soon as this is all over, I’m going to try again and buy a new one. But it really is awful for now. It’s taking up my whole apartment. I can’t even read on the floor like I like to.

And I’m STILL on hold!

- – - – -

Huh. Looks like they will send me the parts free of charge. Now the next challenge is to see if I can fix this thing all by myself even with the replacement parts. I’ve never been adept at this kind of thing. I didn’t take physics and although we had a physics unit in 8th grade, my balsa wood bridge collapsed under the slightest pressure. In this case, I had assembled the treadmill (all by myself even though they say two people are needed) without the broken part thinking it was too small to be of consequence. I stepped onto the side rails and ran the belt. The belt kept veering left and bunching up into the side of the machine so I turned it off and went to my manual to troubleshoot. Turns out I had to use hex keys to tighten the belt. I was able to tighten the right side without incident, but I couldn’t even find the bolt in the left side. So I took her apart (this part was assembled in the box) to investigate. I now saw that that little part belonged here, in the left rear of the machine and served some purpose having to do with tightening the belt. The left side of the bar was all out of whack but I managed to even it out with the right side. I turned put her back together, stepped on the side rails, and started up the belt again. This time she ran evenly! Ready to begin my run I put one foot on the belt — and it stopped. (I’m nowhere near the 275lb weight limit for this machine.) It was utterly perplexed. No amount of tightening and loosening would fix the problem.

I’m just not convinced that the presence of this little part is going to fix my machine. Although — I do have a 90 day warranty so it shouldn’t be a problem even if it doesn’t.

And I’ve put studying off long enough…