Therapeutic maintenance. I dig it. And yeah, anything around the CPU is always a step up in complexity. Back when I built my own, that bracket was always the high point of anxiety. Was that a good snap? Or a bad snap!?
Glad you're back in the game.
Last night I had a small anxiety spike after I made that post, the bad part of my brain said instead of showing empathy from a shared pain, I was doing the douchebag one upping thing.
Smoke, think of it like this, at least you've got those customers, and I hope they're loyal. My mom was in the trades, and it was a real shotgun scatter of customers. Sometimes she had people who memorized her phone number for ten years, and called her first and only. Thankfully she only got flat out ripped off once. Whenever we'd drive through that area, I was tempted to toss the bitches patio furniture into the canyon adjacent to her house.
Her specific complaint was "It didn't look how she thought it should." so she didn't have to pay.
And what you are doing is a skill. A diligent, resourceful skill. You're putting food on the table, and you're doing it well.
I can't speak for your family, but I know I always appreciated what my mom did. Oddly enough, Dad still pulls his weight, despite being 19 years dead, in the form of a pension. We'd be homeless without that.
Dads are important.
