The Diary of A Simple Man

[I'm experimenting with copying a post from Google Plus to Dreamwidth/LiveJournal. Pasting the text and photo from G+ into the Dreamwidth Rich Text editor seems to work, although I had to get the public link for the photo. For some reason the LJ-to-Facebook connection doesn't seem to be working.]

My dad came over today. We've been having a couple of electrical problems, and he was trained in electronics by the army. Plus he's handy, which I, unfortunately, am not. Or not very.

The first problem was the ceiling light in the den. It kept flickering and making buzzing noises. He took things apart and figured out that the problem was that the contact in the base of the socket was depressed; it wasn't making proper contact. He pried it up, and now the light works perfectly. I'll have to look into getting a shade for it.

The second problem was the ceiling fan in Sebastian's room, which is next to the den. The light tended to go on and off randomly, and the ceiling fan rarely worked; instead, it hummed and made a burning electrical smell.

So we took it down. Dad examined and tested the wiring, and it seemed fine. But the motor was burned out on the ceiling fan. We went over to Lowe's. Teri and I wanted to get a fan much like the one he'd had, but Sebastian insisted on a short-bladed and admittedly cooler-looking fan, an allen+roth. The salesman said the fan would be virtually imperceptible, but eventually we gave in.

When we got home and opened the box, we got worried. It was complicated; the estimated assembly time was two hours! Dad and I spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. I don't know about Dad, but I'm pretty sure that my shoulders will ache for days! And toward the end we were working in darkness, since the circuit breaker for that lamp also covers the whole room.

But we got it put together and mounted. Dad did the wiring, which is good because wiring makes me nervous. It was great when the light went on! And when we turned on the fan, go figure: the breeze was far stronger than our old fan's had been. It blew papers right off Sebastian's desk.

It feels good to get something like that done!

Our water has been coming in dark brown today. There's no smell, but what appears to be silt is settling in the toilet.

Maybe they're cleaning out the pipes, which has happened before - although it has never made the water quite as brown as this. Or, it's possible that a water line has burst under our foundation. In which case, we're probably in a lot of trouble.

The water - ah, I just spoke to someone at the Water Department. There's a huge fire nearby, another old mill complex burning down. So it's not our pipes after all. What a relief!

A couple of days ago the town shut off all the street lights down the middle of our street. The two ends of the street are still lit, but the middle portion is not. I assume it's a cost-saving measure.

It's pretty dark out there. I have to wonder if this increases the chances that we'll be burgled (which isn't something I stay up nights worrying about, by the way).

There's a full moon tonight. It made a ghostly glow on the driveway when I took out the trash. Kind of pretty...it almost looked like snow on the ground. Normally the street light washes out the moonlight.

I wonder if the lights will ever go back on again?

I don't want that incredibly annoying encounter in WoW tonight to be the end of my day, so:

Teri complained yesterday that the living room AC smelled bad. She didn't think I could do anything about it. So while she was out, I did some research.

Vaccuumed and cleaned with a toothbrush, vinegar & water; it's amazing how much gunk & fur was in there! Then a little Lysol. Now it has no odor and is much colder. Felt good to have accomplished something!

I also recorded some lullabies for Sebatian. I'll spare you having to listen to those, though. ;D

Posted via LjBeetle

I give up. The DuPont faucet filter had the same problems that all the other ones did; roughly one out of four filters worked properly, and the rest lasted a week or less.

Our water is NOT hard or particularly bad. So my best guess is that hot water is occasionally feeding into the cold water, and thereby ruining the filters.

So this weekend we bought a Brita dispenser, one of the big ones with a tap in the front, and put it in the refrigerator. We'll see how it works out. I'm going to fill it by filling up a pitcher and then pouring that water into the dispenser; that way if there's a surge of hot water, it will never reach the filter (the heat being moderated by being mixed with all the water in the pitcher first). Also, the filter itself will be cooler because it's in the refrigerator!

Unfortunately the Brita filter apparently doesn't filter anywhere near as much stuff as the DuPont did, but we can't afford to buy new filters every week.

Plants were growing out of the gutters on the side of the roof that faces the back yard. So recently, shortly after Sebastian got his cast removed, I got out the ladder and climbed up onto the roof to clean them out.

Sebastian really wanted to come up with me. Teri didn't want him to. But he's getting big, and it's time for him to be able to be a little more adventurous; so I prevailed on her to let him do it.

He loved it up on the roof. He helped a bit, carrying things around. The gutters are, unfortunately, still not hung right; water pools in the middle, and they were filled with decayed-leaf glop and sprouting tree shoots. One of them was close to three feet high! I scooped out all the stuff and dumped it onto the side yard where the grass hasn't been growing well. That part of the yard needs fertilizer badly.

When it came time for Sebastian to climb down the roof, he got pretty nervous. In fact he got scared. But he made it down safely...and so did I.

I wish I'd thought to have Teri video or photograph us up there!

Petro left a voicemail for us yesterday. They want us to call them to discuss our account. I hope they're not going to try to hit us for a cancellation fee, because our contract expired.

Incidentally, when we cancelled Teri told me to ask them to send us a hard copy confirmation that our account had been cancelled. The operator got annoyed and said "Your account is cancelled. I just cancelled it."

I wonder what they're going to say? I'm not going to be calling them, of course. As far as I'm concerned, I'm done with them. If they want to talk to me, they can call when I'm in. But they're not going to get any more money out of me.

Petro screwed us once, and stole a thousand dollars from us. That's it, as far as I'm concerned.

We signed up with a new heating oil provider and dumped Petro. Boy did they fight hard to keep us from canceling! By the end, she was pretty mad at me - although I was very polite.

We're going to Pennsylvania tomorrow, and won't be back until Sunday. I'll be reading The Hobbit to Sebastian in the car, thus the title of this post.

Tomorrow morning will be busy, though; before we go, we're going to sign up with a new heating-oil provider. Petro screwed us over, and now I'm dumping them. I think we'll save money in the process, too! I researched things rather carefully.

All three cats kept clustering together around different spots near the baseboard heaters tonight. They were all very excited and agitated. I suspected a mouse.

It wasn't long before I had no doubt: it had to be a mouse, or some similar small creature. They were too excited for anything else.

Teri and Sebastian were both already asleep, by the way.

Later I heard a wild high-pitched squeaking, so high that I thought it might be a bat rather than a mouse. But it was a mouse, a good-sized plump one, and Baby was chasing it (followed closely by Widget). It dashed into one of Teri's slippers. I had a quick glimpse; it may have been injured and had definitely been roughed up, but I saw no sign of a critical injury. So I gently but quickly clapped her other slipper on top of the opening to keep the mouse from getting away, took it outside, and tossed it onto our front lawn. I should have taken it further away, but I was a little excited myself.

I hope it doesn't come back to our house...but with three cats here who have already shown their ability as mousers, that could only be classified as suicide.