Rants and Revelations

Vicki asked me to stay home this morning because the furnace guy was coming to do one of the inspections on the hideously expensive maintenance contract we signed up for due to a hard sell sales pitch. She wanted me to stay because she says the furnace guy gives her a real hard sell every time for something that we absolutely must replace or we’re killing babies and torturing puppies. I’m not sure where she’s been for the last 11 years, but by now you’d think she’d realize that I’m no better at resisting those sorts of sales pitches either. But hey, this spreads the blame around for the stupid stuff we get talked into and takes the pressure off her, so I’m willing to do it for her sake.

The guy came, did the usual poking around in the basement, and came up and said “Your ignitor unit is testing at 99 ohms and we recommend replacing it any time it gets to 100 ohms, so you’re due”. I asked for a price, and he showed me it woud be $160 now, or $280 if it was an off-hours call. So I thought I’d outsmart him and ask if he had one in stock, and he said no, he’d checked the truck and he didn’t have one. I figured that would mean that if it *did* fail in middle of the night, we’d have to wait for a day or more while they ordered the part, and we’d risk the birds dying if that happened, so I said to go ahead and order it. A few minutes later, as he’s leaving, I asked when they were coming to install the part, and he said “I had another look around the truck, and found one, so it’s installed already”.

Dammit, he played me for a chump. He must have known that if he’d said they had one in the truck that I would figure they’re easy to come by and so I could afford to wait until it failed, but if they didn’t I’d want to replace it pre-emptively. I’m such a sucker.

Vicki and I flew our airplane (well, the flying club’s, but it feels like ours) down to New Jersey to pick out the soapstone slabs that they’ll use to make our custom counters in our kitchen remodel in our beautiful 1922 Arts and Crafts house. How yuppie is that?
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A. Because he heard we’re getting a snow blower.

Today’s large snow fall was the last straw - we have in and bought a snow blower. Home Despot had them for 30% off, and an additional 10% off if you got their credit card. We got a 5.5hp 2 stage Ariens with electric start and multiple forward and reverse speeds, and with the discount it was less than the list price for the Yard Machines 5.5hp one I was originally looking at that didn’t have electric start and only one forward speed.

It’s still hard work to push through the snow, but it’s got to be better than shoveling another plow hump.

Update:Added the “Where is this body you want disposed of” picture.

We had a Energy Star energy audit of our house recently. One of the things the audit mentioned that there was some asbestos on one of the vent pipes in the basement, and that would have to be “abated” before they could work. Today I decided to take care of it. The pipe in question goes through “the scary room”, one of two dirt floored areas of the basement. Until today, I’ve never set foot in either one of them. There is no apparent reason why this particular pipe has been wrapped in asbestos - the portion of the pipe that is wrapped isn’t close to the furnace so it’s not very hot, nor is it in contact with insulation or something flammable. The register it serves is in the “breakfast nook”, which we suspect wasn’t part of the original build of the house.

I got advice from experts in the field who assured me that the sort of asbestos that forms into sheets isn’t the dangerous kind, but I should still take some precautions.

So armed with a tyvec painter’s coverall, dust mask, googles and rubber gloves, I entered the scary room to do battle with the evil asbestos. And that’s when I discovered that the asbestos wrap evidently held condensation or external water against the bottom of the vent, and now the vent pipe has rusted completely away on the bottom. But it’s fine at the top, which means there is a part between the bottom and the top where there are sharp edges and flakes of rust. So instead of just removing the asbestos wrapping, I ended up hacking out the whole rusty pipe, and stomping it flat to throw it away. And the sharp edges cut my gloves to ribbons, but at least I didn’t get any visible cuts in my skin. Unfortunately the unwrapped part of the pipe only had one hangar on the whole length, so it fell down without the added support on one end. And the “box” where it went into the register in the breakfast nook was also wrapped and rusty so I had to remove it as well.

It wasn’t until after I was done that I noticed the notice on the air mask that said it’s not for asbestos. Sigh.

Well, the whole thing is down now. Hopefully I didn’t do myself any damage doing it.

We got the results of our EnergyStar audit on Saturday. They’re recommending $20,000 worth of work, and promising that we’ll probably save at least $150 a month on average based on last years energy bills. They also said we could save another $150 a month if we did the windows, but doing them in a way that’s sensitive to the age and architecture of the house (ie. not replacing leaded glass windows and wood frames with modern plastic crap) would be really expensive - maybe $30,000 to $40,000.

The problem is that the net present value of $150 a month for 10 years (which is the expected lifetime of the new furnace) is only about $14,000. Obviously energy prices will go up, and the only energy year we have records for, last year, was unusually mild, so the savings might be greater in a year like this year. But it’s still hard to say “go ahead and spend that money” with such an uncertain pay-back. So I have to think about the non-monetary pay-back as well, like the fact that the house will be more comfortable, and it will reduce our carbon footprint, and it might have a small positive affect on the value of the house.

Still, $20,000.

Sigh.

My experiments with SQLite have been on hold for the last week or so because Vicki signed me up to be on the web committee for the Browncroft Neighborhood Association. The current page is functional but not pretty, plus it’s hosted on an AOL member’s account. If I were to host it myself, they’d have gigabytes of space instead of the 2 megabytes they have now.

We’ve got a committee together, so the first thing I did was set up a mailing list for the web committee. After a week, though, not one member of the list has sent any messages to it except for me.

The second thing I did was register the domain BrowncroftNA.org and set up virtual hosting on my home server.

The third thing I did was spend some time at OpenSourceCMS.com trying out different Content Management Systems (CMS). One that caught my eye was ModX, which has a really nice AJAX-y administration interface. So I set it up on my server to experiment with. Obviously, I’m going to have to wait for the committee to decide on what content they want and where they want it, and that sort of thing. But I think a CMS looks like the way to go for the basic framework.

One thing I haven’t figured out how to do with this CMS is how to create role accounts that can upload files and link them to one particular web site - so, for example, the news letter editor can upload PDFs of the newsletters and link them from a news letter page. Or the History Committee can upload pictures and articles about the history of the neighborhood. Maybe I can do it, or maybe I’ll have to switch to a different CMS.

One thing that some CMS have, but this one doesn’t, is a web forum. I don’t like web forums much myself - I much prefer email lists. Some people like them though, so perhaps what I should look for is a web forum that can also email out posts to a mailing list as well as through an RSS feed. That way everybody can be happy.

The search continues.

…pick up a pair of vice grips and head towards the bathroom, just shoot me. I just can’t seem to get it right.

The downstairs powder room sink drains really slowly, and Vicki says it started after the carolling party. I tried plungering it, and didn’t help. (Plungering sinks is a bit of a waste of time anyway, because all it does it blow water out of the overflow hole.) So I tried taking the trap off. Didn’t find anything blocking it, so I tried to put it back on. And I couldn’t get the damn thing to stop leaking no matter how hard I tightened it. Then I discovered that in tightening it, I’d managed to knock a big chunk out the the trap. So I went to the hardware store to buy a replacement trap.

While I was there, I picked up a replacment for the handle and arm of the upstairs en-suite toilet. The current one keeps falling off the arm thingy all the time.

When I got home, I put the trap on, but because I forgot to buy teflon tape it still leaks a bit. And of course it didn’t fix the real problem - the blockage is evidently further down.

Then I tried the replacement for the handle. The existing one has a bend in it, but when I tried to bend the new one, I bent it at one of the holes and broke it. So off I went to the hardware store, and bought the exact same type again. And when I carefully bent it at the non-hole part, it broke again. Of course it wasn’t until then that Vicki mentioned to me that there are bendy type arms and non-bendy type arms. Who knew?

Rather than making ANOTHER trip to Myers hardware, I pushed the existing handle on the existing arm on as hard as I could, and hoped that can hold for a while.

I finished migrating my image gallery this afternoon. It wasn’t easy - it kept getting hung up at the same pictures. Upgrading from 1.4.4 to 1.5.1 and deleting the aborted albums out of the G2 album area helped, but some pictures just refused to migrate for some reason, including one whole album. In each case I had to copy the files to /tmp, delete the problematic ones, migrate the album, and import the picture from /tmp. I guess there were about 25 pictures I had to do that way. Not bad out of 2500+, I guess, but it was a pain. But the gallery looks a lot better now.

This afternoon/evening was our annual Christmas Carolling Party. I’m sure Vicki will blog about it in huge detail, but it was a rousing success. One of the things I like best about the party is that we invite people from church, people from work, and people from the neighbourhood, and I keep looking around to make sure that they’re not breaking up into homogeneous groups. Especially this year when we’re in a new neighbourhood. And it worked well. I think everybody got along with each other.

I love this house, and I love this neighbourhood.

It’s our first year in the new neighbourhood. It’s in the city, and it’s pretty nice neighbourhood, so it’s no surprise that people come from far and wide to trick or treat here. So there’s been a pretty steady parade of kids. But you hold out a bowl full of “fun size” chocolate bars and Hershey’s Kisses, and they ONLY TAKE ONE. Even if the kid takes a Kiss and you say “take a big one too”, they just say “no thank you” and leave.

It’s creeping me out.

Evidently the weekend’s activities weren’t as successful as originally thought. As well as this palm-to-armpit cast thanks to being rammed by a canoe full of idiot girl scouts, I also seem to have totally fucked up the light over the garage. As of yesterday, there is no power at all in the garage, not to the new light, nor to the inside light and plug socket. And the circuit breaker is not tripped. I even tried resetting it just to see if that would help. I swear there is a secret switch in the house for the power to the garage, and we’re switching it without realizing it.

Saturday, I woke up to an email saying that my waypoint generator had a bunch of Canadian airports with US-style identifiers (instead of CYRP, Carp was KYRP). I fixed that first. Then Vicki and I replaced the outside front floodlight which had a wonky socket. And we replaced the floodlights over the garage, which supposedly had a light sensor (although it was more of a randomness generator) with one that had a motion detector. Since we can’t find a switch for these lights, I like the idea that they won’t be on all night. This involved hacksawing off a bit of iron pipe conduit that was sticking out too far to put the box where I wanted it and some simple wiring. Or at least it would probably be simple wiring for somebody who isn’t scared of ladders and electricity (gee, my brother used to shock me with electricity and throw me off barn beams - see a connection?). But we got it done - I’m so domestic it hurts.

Sunday, I got up bright and early to be a safety pilot for Paul P. He’s been my safety pilot in the past, so it was only fair, even if it did mean getting up ungodly early. I took some pictures while he was buzzing around, but most of them sucked. Here are a few that didn’t suck too bad.

Back at the airport, there was an ancient Dornier flying boat re-engined with modern turboprop engines. Cool!

After that, I went kayaking again. This time I went a little slower, and went up all the way to Blossom Road. The river was still quite shallow, and fast. I lost track of the number of times I had to put down my paddle and push down and forward or backward on the bottom of the river because I was bottomed out. (Try that with a canoe!)

On the way back I took one of the other branches because this canoe full of girls can careering across the river and rammed me without making the slightest effort to slow down or avoid me - after they saw they were on a collision course, they all stopped paddling - and when I got to the fork there was another one of these canoes full of girls sideways in the river. But it worked out well - there was a Great Blue Heron on the bank of the river that I got a couple of shots of, and then some “ducks in a row”, and then a Green Heron, which I ‘ve seen very few of over the years.

The best pictures from today’s paddling.

Unfortunately on the way home I noticed that I had a really badly sprained wrist. Unfortunately it’s my left one (I’m left handed), but I suppose the right would have been worse since it would be hard to shift my car like that. It was literally a big pain trying to put my kayak away afterwards.

I feel like my life for the last few weeks revolved around packing boxes, and for the next few months or years it’s going to revolve around unpacking boxes.

Tuesday was moving day. I guess the movers did an adequate job, except it seems that they were hampered by the fact that the guy who was supposed to pack us up the day before did about 1/4 of what he was supposed to do and buggered off at 11:30am when we had stepped out to do other stuff. But over all I’m not impressed with how much work we had to do before, during and after. I thought paying movers meant that muscular young men would do all the work while Vicki and I could sit around sipping our mai tais saying “oh, put that in that room, and be sure not to scratch it.” The reality was a lot sweatier, and a lot less satisfactory in terms of collatoral damage to furniture, door frames, plaster, etc.

For the last two days, I’ve been stuggling to get my office set up. It’s the most complicated, because of course I have to keep downtime on my server (this very server that hosts this blog) up and running as much as possible. Plus I’m trying (and not succeeding very well) to avoid having a rats nest of wires like I kept having at the old place, and also I’m trying to set aside an area for bill paying and other important papers, and another area for aviation stuff (charts and passenger headsets etc) so I can find it all when I want to plan a trip or leave for one. I’m slightly hampered in this by the fact that I can’t find one of my desks, one I took apart and now I can’t find where the movers put the bits.

Two days of work, and all I have to show for it are four empty boxes and a bunch of full shelves. Only about 6 billion more boxes to empty.

Another problem hampering this whole process is the fact that in many ways this house seems more cramped than the old house. This isn’t totally crazy, because this house is bigger, but most of that bigger-ness is in the living room, the dining room and the master bed room , and the hallways. The biggest problem is that we don’t have an equivalent to the finished basement in the old house. That was one large room that acted as library, computer room and entertainment center, and sometimes a bird room. In this house, we’ve got separate bird room, library, office/computer room, and the TV/TiVo/DVD/Stereo are going into the living room.

Oh well, back to the boxes.

Last night, a big storm ended a very long drought. Today the temperature is down under 70 degrees, after weeks up over 90 with high humidity. And you want to know why? Because today Taylor Heating came and installed central air conditioning in our new house. I’m predicting that the temperature will stay low for the rest of the year.

The night before last I slept in the new house, and with Vicki away there hasn’t been any cooking or dish washing going on, so this morning’s shower was probably the first time anybody but Laura has used the hot water since the engineer’s inspection on Tuesday. And this morning I discovered that the water in the tank was stone cold - the pilot light was out. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the pilot light went out because of something the inspector did. I don’t know if Laura had had any hot water during the last couple of days - this wouldn’t be the first time where something wasn’t working right but she never bothered to tell anybody in a position to fix it - or if the tank just cooled down overnight.

I’ve got to say, though, that crawling around on my hands and knees lighting the pilot light, and then taking a sponge bath with tepid water, is not my favourite way to start the day.

Vicki and I spent our first night in the new house. We’re not moved in or anything, but since we had to be out of the old house yesterday for a few potential buyers to tour it, we decided to just come over here and make a night of it. That’s also a good way to make sure the old house stays presentable. It’s just delightful to wake up in this big new bed in this bright and sunny room, with the birds singing outside of our window (and our birds downstairs singing back to them).

Buddy is a little out of sorts, but that’s at least partially because we forgot to bring his food.

About the only drawback is the fact that the TV is back at the old house, so I have to follow the Tour via the cyclingnews.com web site, and there are no three prong plug sockets downstairs so I have to run the laptop off of batteries if I want to sit down with the birds. Not that I want to leave this bed any time soon.