cellio | Entries tagged with house

The roof is nearing the end of its lifespan. No acute problems, but it's about time to start talking to purveyors of replacements. There are books on the third floor, after all. :-)

If you have comments (pro or con) about roofers in the Pittsburgh area, I'd appreciate hearing them.

If you have favorite resources (particularly if they're on the web) that will help us make whatever decisions are involved (materials, what else?), I'd definitely like to hear about them.

( Dogs in the Vineyard )

( Shabbat lunch )

( Purim SCA event )

( short takes )

The fridge, but not the freezer, is no longer doing its temperature-control job. It's less than two years old. Well, at least it ought to still be under warranty. I'm so glad I decided not to go grocery shopping on the way home tonight.

Can anyone give me a summary of the last four minutes of tonight's 24? I didn't know that everything was being shifted 20 minutes; my generally-excessive 15-minute cushion on the tape didn't quite do it for me. The last thing I saw was ( spoiler )

A couple of weeks ago an electrician we hired pointed a finger at Duquesne Light. They said they didn't think it was their problem but they replaced the line from the pole to the house anyway. We've had no further problems; I hope that continues.

I ordered a memory card for my printer, which had become cranky about printing full pages. It came in yesterday's mail, so this afternoon I popped it in and things are now printing normally. I'm glad that it turned out to be an inexpensive solution. The pictures in the HP documentation didn't match the physical card, but fortunately there were enough similarities to work out the correct orientation.

Erik's appetite was back to normal as of a couple days ago. Today it's above normal; he's eaten two whole cans of food so far today (and I'll bet he'll want a bedtime snack). The vet suggested I water him daily for a few days (starting last Monday) and then drop down to every other day; I think given what he's been eating I can make tonight the transition into "every other day". The fluids do help a lot, though I really hate having to stick him with a needle to administer them. I can tell he's uncomfortable; I would be too!

I've written before about our recent weird electrical problems, where several times a week we lose some but not all power for anywhere from 5 minutes to a few hours. We were finally able to get some time from an electrician today.

A coworker who knows way more about house wiring than I do had hypothesized that our problem was a faulty main breaker. According to him, power comes into the house at 240v and the main breaker splits it into two streams of 120, each stream going to half the breakers.

The electrician examined the breaker box in some detail and pronounced it sound. We then went to the meter, which he also pronounced sound. He complimented the electrician who upgraded our service to 200 amps last summer. Because he couldn't think of anything more promising, he then proceeded to examine the subpanel on the second floor and pronounced it sound, though he didn't compliment the unknown electrician who put that in. At this point I asked about the main-breaker theory, and he said that's not how our service works. Even so, he took another look at that part of the breaker box and pronounced it still sound.

According to him, our power comes in on two 120v lines. So that means it is possible that a 50% outage could be a Duquesne Light problem. We went outside to look at the connections to the house and the pole; he didn't have a large-enough ladder with him, but he believes the connection to the house is sound and the one at the pole is suspect. (He speculated about which wire based on the types of connectors they used.) He said I should call Duquesne Light, report what he'd said, and ask them to come out.

As we were walking back into the house he said "y'know, I'm doing some work for Duquesne Light tomorrow -- I can get a specific person for you to call". So he's going to call tomorrow morning with that information, which should expedite things.

For all of this he charged me $20. I tried to argue it, saying it had to be more than that, and he said no. His reasoning was that he'd been here less than an hour (though it couldn't have been more than 10 minutes shy of that) and his rate is $30/hour. I told him he has our future business. (He was, in turn, recommended to us by someone else.)

His name is Steve Heinl. (I don't have a phone number at the moment.)

For a few weeks now, we've been having intermittent electrical glitches at home. They take the form of really quick power flickers; we see lights dim but not go out, and the UPSs click and maybe beep once while switching to battery and immediately back to current. When it happens it often happens several times in an hour, but it also goes long stretches without happening. We wanted to call an electrician, but wondered how we would demonstrate the problem on demand.

In the wee hours of Friday morning, we got this sort of thing frequently for about three hours (sometimes at 5- or 10-second intervals). The UPSs were what woke us up (they beep when on battery power); while awake I noticed that our alarm clock would usually flicker in time with the beeps. (The alarm clock has battery backup, so there was no reset.) This was pretty annoying. I was awake enough to realize that unplugging the UPSs would do nothing at all (that being the point), but not awake enough to realize that UPSs have on/off switches (duh). It sounded like it was pretty windy outside at the time, so I figured something was jossling the line to the house. Eventually we both got up and went to work.

When I got home at the end of the day the power was out. Well, mostly out; I discovered that the lights in the living room worked (but not in the hall or kitchen), and that the oven still had power (but not the microwave). We had a problem like that a couple years ago and it turned out to be related to work Duquesne Light was doing, so I decided to call and report it.

Every single time (before then) that I've reported a power outage, it has appeared to be mere data collection. No one has ever followed up. So I called them, and then the power came fully back before Shabbat started (yay), and I figured that was that.

Boy was I suprised when a worker from Duquesne Light rang the bell. I told him what had happened; the automated phone system didn't give me a way to describe the partial outage, so he probably just got told "out" (and then when he showed up our lights were on). I asked if the behavior we'd been seeing could be a problem with the line in, or if he thought it was internal. He said "well, let's take a look", and within a minute he was standing in the basement taking the breaker box apart to poke inside. He tested the connections on each breaker and tightened one that was a little loose, while I said that I didn't expect the power company to fix my internal wiring but I was grateful for the examination. Apparently if they make a service call they're required to do some minimal safety inspection, so this really was part of his job. He then went outside to look around, and reported that there's a tree branch that might be bumping a wire in high-enough winds, and maybe that's our problem. So we'll prune that back and see if it helps. He was very helpful and friendly. I regret that I didn't get his name so I could send a "your employee done good" note.

This far exceeded my expectations of customer support from a utility company.

It's 61 degrees in the house. That is not what the thermostat is set for.

I see no evidence of a pilot light on the furnace. I also can't tell exactly where one is supposed to put fire to relight it on our ancient and venerable furnace. There is a hum that suggests that something is happening -- presumably cold water is being propelled through the radiators. If there's a fuse involved, I can't find it. (I have more homeowner points than Dani, but my previous house had forced-air heat, so things are a little different. Also newer furnaces.)

I know that any not-incompetent homeowner is supposed to be able to relight a pilot light. But you know the canonical cartoon involving clouds of smoke and singed hair when people do that? That's got to be based on something, I figure.

So after a round of "do you feel safe to light it?", we decided to invoke the maintenance plan. If it's just the pilot, well, we get a slightly-expensive lesson in how to light it (we have to pay for after-hours calls); if it's more severe, we'd need the expert anyway.

Update 10:05PM: Kudos to Sullivan Service, who had someone here in 45 minutes. It was a minor member of the "take things apart" class of problems; clogged pilot assembly. (I would wonder how many decades' worth of soot that was, except that we had the furnace cleaned this fall.) We also got a lesson in lighting the pilot.

Last week, although the VCR made all the right noises and light-blinks, we did not get West Wing. It did its thing for an hour but the search backward for the beginning took seconds and produced only a brief bit of new material before cutting out. I borrowed a tape from a coworker and recorded the episode onto that tape, so the media itself did not seem to be at fault. Since then I recorded another show using that VCR (different tape), so the VCR is not exhibiting a general problem. The programming is just fine.

It happened again this week. WTF?

So I'll see if I can borrow a tape again (sigh), and I'll retire the current tape even though a VCR-to-VCR copy onto it worked fine. (Tape's cheap, but this spoils my sense of orderliness.) And I just had an idea and have programmed another VCR to also record the show, lest it happen a third time.

But I really don't understand the failure mode.

Grump. The DVD player seems to be relaying video but not audio. All connections are tight. And there are two audio connections anyway, and wouldn't they both have to be loose to produce a total failure? Sigh. The player worked fine a few days ago. (Yes, I confirmed that the TV has sound and that multiple DVDs failed.)

So we are now faced with the prospect that buying a new one might be cheaper than investigating and repairing the problem. That's just wrong, somehow. It's a region-free player and I don't remember if we bought it from overseas, so repair might not be trivial. But I don't like the disposable-goods consumer model and I feel bad every time I go that route. I can hear the landfills crying out for mercy.

It looks like replacements are slightly cheaper from Amazon UK than from Amazon US, but electronics is one of those areas where it might be worth buying from the guys in your own country. (And then there's shipping.)

I'll be reading torah at Friday-night services at the end of August. Nifty. (And Saturday morning too, but my congregation's main service is Friday night and we read then too.) Reading on Friday night has generally been limited to the rabbis.

Rob at UnSpace (unspace) wrote a good entry about blogs and plagarism today. I know that at some level "information wants to be free", and I've certainly snagged the occasional article from a free-but-registration-required site for my own archives or to share. And maybe I'm depriving the original site of hits, which I hadn't thought about much before. But more importantly to me, even if information wants to be free, it doesn't want to be incorrectly attributed. There's really no excuse for stealing a person's reputation by stealing his words -- especially on the web, where attribution and linking are so easy.

The installation of air conditioning for our second floor continues. Actually, the installation per se is done; we have cool air flowing. Yet to be done is some plaster work to make the holes go away, and a lot of clean-up. I'll be curious to see whether they put the bookcases they moved back in the right places (maintaining alphabetical order); the last contractor who needed to move them didn't get that right on the first try.

Today's mail brought another non-trivial trinket from a charity -- one I've already told to stop doing that. They lose points for two things this time: (1) sending me this stuff anyway (that's not why I sent them money -- and, in fact, it's been more than two years since I sent this one money precisely because of this sort of thing) and (2) sending me a personalized item with someone else's name on it. If the Goltz family is out there, act quickly to claim your piggy bank, 'cause it'll be going out with the trash in the next few days. (That's sad in a way -- if it didn't have a name on it, I might have been able to give it away.)

For those who follow Real Live Preacher (preachermanfeed): he moved his site and someone set up a new RSS feed at ~~rlpreacher_blog~~. I don't know if they're going to eventually edit the original feed with the new link, but you might want to pick up the new one just in case. Edit: They merged the feeds, so you don't need to do anything.

Tonight I found myself talking with friends about a house I used to own. When I sold it, things did not exactly go smoothly. Most of the interactions with the buyers were with a woman who was behaving pretty inappropriately; I was surprised when we got to the closing to find out that she was not actually a buyer; she was the buyer's girlfriend. Ok, whatever -- maybe her credit rating stinks, or maybe he's not sure how long-term the relationship is, or something. Not my problem so long as the check cleared, except that given that I shouldn't have had to put up with all the trouble she caused. (But at least one real-estate agent was falling down on the job there. Actually, I know that the buyer's agent was behaving inappropriately; I never found out whether my agent was too.)

Anyway, soon after the closing they began to repaint the exterior. They were doing the work themselves, and the process stalled partway through -- leaving a house that was half red (original) and half gold (yes gold, not yellow). And then it stayed that way for years. I wondered what had happened (spat?), but certainly wasn't going to ask. I've got to wonder about the neighbors, though; when I painted the house and it sat for a few months primed with a pink tint (not my idea), I got complaints.

After the conversation tonight I looked the house up on the county web site, and I was surprised to find that it was sold earlier this month. The new owner is a woman, but I find that for the life of me I cannot remember the name of the girlfriend so I have no idea if it's her or if they sold the parti-colored house to someone else. It'll be interesting to see if the paint job changes later this year.

I noticed that they also managed to sell it for $12k above the assessed value -- and before you Californians get the wrong idea and shrug, the price had five digits. I wonder how that happened. I assume there was a side deal where the seller paid off the buyers; realtors always try to drive up the transaction price so they get better commissions even if the sellers then end up paying off some inspection complaints.

The web has certainly made it easier to satisfy idle curiosity.

We are getting central AC installed on our second floor. (Doing both floors would have required two compressors, which made the cost prohibitive, but between cold air sinking, the big window unit in the living room, and the computers being on the second floor, that should be fine.) Biggest irony so far: when the salesman, and later he and the foreman, came to the house to answer questions, they made a point of putting on these little booties at the door because not dirtying up our house is important to them. I've seen the guys who are actually doing the work; I have yet to see a bootie. :-) Mind, I'm not particularly worried about it; the botties struck me as a little silly. But if they're going to try that gimmick, they should be more careful.

I thought the salesman and foreman said the job would take one week, but the workers said two. Whee. I wish they'd have given higher priority to the dehumidifier they're also installing in the basement. Oh well.

The workers are not being nearly as good about cleaning up after themselves as they should be. It's ok to save all the cleaning for the end when no one is living in the space, but that's not the situation here. The workers seem friendly, but I worry that they may be cutting other corners too.

We're paying too much for phone service and want to reduce that, but -- as you would expect -- there is no one-stop source of information on the options. (Quick, someone set up phonesfordummies.com!) Part of the problem might be that we need to change the way we think about phone usage. So, I turn to the brain trust. :-)

( Read more... )

Hot. Hot hot hot hot hot. And muggy. And did I mention hot? I really hope the AC guys we're talking with next week can do something for us. Their pitch is, essentially, "if you've been told your house can't accommodate central AC, talk to us". Yup, that's our situation. And window units can only do so much.

I might see psu_jedi and caryabend tomorrow morning. Woot! They will, alas, be spending most of the weekend with the relatives they actually came here to visit, but with luck we should get to see each other briefly. It was so nice to finally meet them at estherchaya's and sethcohen's over Purim!

Sunday night is Shavuot. I'm looking forward to the late-night torah study. The evening service, which is confirmation, I can take or leave; I'll go if it and dinner plans don't bump into each other. And I will, of course, be there for services in the morning.

My week was full of demands on my time that aren't part of the project plan. The project manager will not be happy when we next meet. Some of it was important stuff that needs to be done; some of it was extra administrivia caused by the corporate buy-out. I've now spent about 6 hours on the VPN problem and it still doesn't work, for instance. Whee.

But I did accomplish one useful thing today: we've been asking for a little developer time for months to hook online help into our product, but the project and product managers keep saying that while this is important, other things are more important and they can't spare anybody, even for half a day. So I finally just did it -- forgiveness versus permission and all that. As soon as I have a real doc set to launch instead of Shakespeare's sonnets, I can check it in. The project manager was going to be a little grumpy anyway because of things beyond my control this week, so I may as well get something I wanted out of the deal. Waste not, want not.

This exercise did make me just a bit more aware that I would benefit from a structured learning experience on the subject of Java. I've been picking the API up by osmosis, and of course I already know general programming principles, but when I have to do something completely new I usually end up asking a coworker for a pointer. That's not good; I should be able to do more of this on my own. (Today it was resource access through ClassLoader.) I wonder if I should just take a course from Sun or something. If I do, I wonder if there's any benefit to then taking the certification exam.

This Shabbat was the first of four in a row where we have no bar or bat mitzvah. This means our rabbi gets to stay for the entire informal morning service -- yay! It's nice that we have lay people who can conduct the service and read torah, but this really is his minyan in many ways, and I feel bad when scheduling makes him miss some of it.

Torah readers are assigned through mid-March. This is the farthest ahead we've been scheduled for a while! I don't know when I'll next read there; I'm probably reading for a women's service in February, but that's a different group. (They asked for volunteers to read torah or lead parts of the service; I said I could do either but have Opinions about content of the latter that I'd like to discuss before committing. So it looks like I get torah reading, which is fine.)

( minor puzzles )

Saturday night was my company's holiday party. It was huge! We've been growing a lot, but when people are spread out it's not as obvious. Put us all in one room with significant others and... wow. We missed the party last year, and this was much bigger than two years ago.

The party was fun; the organizers did a good job with it. This year, unlike last year (I'm told), we did not run out of food. Dani found a wine that was sweet enough for him (a Riesling, but I failed to get specifics). Some people brought instruments and were jamming in the front room; I didn't bring any on the theory that it would be Christmas music, but it turns out that would have been ok (they were improvising, mostly). On the other hand, for expedience I would have brought drums, not the hammer dulcimer -- and one of my coworkers is really good on drums, so there wouldn't have been much I could contribute. But I enjoyed listening, so that was fine.

Today the washer and dryer rebelled. (What did we ever do to them?) The washer has decided that it doesn't like the rinse cycle, so it just stops there. We can drain the water and reset it to get it to fill and agitate again, hacking a rinse, but it won't spin. Bah. And then the dryer decided that heat was optional, though once we took the front panel off to look for a fuse (unsuccessfully) and took the vent stack apart looking for a lint clog (nope), it began to give us lackluster heat. I guess we just needed to speak sternly to it -- for now.

The appliances came with the house (five years ago) and weren't new then. I wonder what the usual life-expectancy is on these things. I guess we should find out what a service call costs, and whether he'll give us a break for two appliances in one visit.

So, hours after I expected to be done, my shirts are slowly drying, jeans are queued up behind them, and Dani has a load queued up behind that. Whee.

Our garage-door opener has been flaky for years and finally gave up the ghost this week. This morning I called Sears in search of a replacement. So I got out the phone book to look up their number.

They listed direct-dial numbers for a bazillion departments, none of which obviously said "garage-door openers go here" to me, and a general number. I called the latter. There was no "talk to a human" option, but there was an exciting automated system that was ready to serve me. Or something.

( Read more... )

Short takes:

Real Live Preacher recommended the "Velveteen Rabbi" weblog, so I took a look. I found this post about the liberal/conservative divide in Judaism to be interesting. The weblog is syndicated on LJ as velveteenrabbi.

While I'm not comfortable with Bush's nominee for attorney general, my opinion of the guy just went up a notch. Some folks are mad at him because he didn't elevate his own opinions over the law. Gonzale s said in a 2001 interview: "The question is, what is the law, what is the precedent, what is binding in rendering your decision. Sometimes, interpreting a statute, you may have to uphold a statute that you may find personally offensive. But as a judge, that's your job." Wow, someone in a position of authority who gets it! Now, if I could just be more confident that his ears hear what his mouth is saying...

In an unrelated thread,

lemonmerchant offered a response to my newspaper problem. I just have to share this:

Thanks, Lemon!

Oh my -- appealing and terrifying at the same time (link from xiphias, who goes on to ask: Could you, in effect, use cake batter AS a heat sink?). Pity it appears to be a hoax; I wanted to know more about "Caffeinated Meatloaf".

It's been raining today. A lot. The good news is that it's not raining in my house. The bad news is that we have lake-top property. Not too bad yet (streams, not inches-deep puddles), but there's definitely a basement-cleaning job ahead of us when it's over. (I'd like to hire someone. Recommendations from the locals welcome.) The last time this happened it was supposed to be a decadely phenomenon (on average). We haven't been here a decade; I feel cheated. :-) And last time was on erev Shabbat too, when dealing with it is more of a challenge. Whee.

Edit: No, we don't live on low ground. But there's a lot of ground-water seepage right now, so high ground doesn't matter.

If Coronation is cancelled tomorrow, would someone do us a favor and call? I'm going to services first, so we'll be leaving later than most.

A couple years ago we bought a large TV from Circuit City and had it delivered (because it weighed 200 pounds and anyway, it wouldn't fit in either of our cars). They were very annoying to deal with: they wouldn't give a window smaller than four hours, would not make a phone call with 20 minutes' warning (forcing one of us to stay home and wait), and then they didn't show up when they were supposed to. And the store manager and national office never responded to letters of complaint.

So when we needed to buy a new refrigerator this week, I told Dani I wanted to go to Best Buy. They gave us a two-hour window and were willing to make a phone call with enough time for one of us to get home from work, so I accepted 12:30-2:30 today.

They called at 12:40 saying they'd be there in 20 minutes. I ran home. They showed up at 1:05 (which is just fine; they arrived two minutes after I finished dumping the remaining food onto the counter). They were efficient and friendly, navigated the narrow doorway into the kitchen without scraping anything, and were out of there about 20 minutes later. I dumped the food back in and returned to work. Elapsed time: 1:20.

Best Buy has earned my future business.

On Sunday Dani and I had approximately the following conversation:

Me: I think we should start paying attention to fridge ads, and when we see something reasonable at an acceptable price we should buy it.

Dani: Why?

Me: Well, our current fridge has already died once and been fixed, and it's 40 years old, and that can't be a good sign.

Dani: But it could last another five or ten years if it's lasted 40.

Me: Or five or ten days. We don't know, and fridges aren't that expensive.

That's where the conversation ended.

I would not be making this entry if that's where things really ended :-( (Hello. I wasn't trying to be prophetic, ok?!)

Unfortunately, since I really do need to be involved in a choice of replacement, there's not much we can do before I return from out of town. (No time to shop before I leave.) Maybe the putzing around I did tonight will fix it, much like the repairman's putzing around fixed it last time. Or maybe not. The fridge part seems to be ok; it's the freezer that's, shall we say, tending toward the soft and squishy.

I predict a meat dinner tomorrow night...

I don't think I had previously noticed that in the torah scroll the entire story of Bilaam, from the first solicition for his services through the talking-donkey episode through the curse attempts, is one long paragraph -- no breaks. It spans several columns. It's usually my job to roll the scroll to the correct place before the service, and I usually navigate by the whitespace (not being particularly fluent in Hebrew).

Saturday's mail brought an anticipated wedding invitation. I was surprised by a Saturday-morning ceremony; I thought they were doing afternoon or evening. And I will have to decide how I feel about a reception on Shabbat that's being held in a restaurant, rather than a privately-rented hall where there are fewer issues. Hmm. They're friends and I really want to be there for them.

Saturday night we held a party for tangerinpenguin, who will soon be leaving town. While there were several people who couldn't make it due to holiday-weekend plans, we still got a bunch of people and, as far as I could tell, everyone had a good time. Someone made a nifty cake, in the form of an open book with a jungle motif, in honor of his new employer. Saturday was a hot day and we don't have central AC, only window units; we did the best we could to keep the place habitable but found myself thinking "the engines canna take more of this, captain!" a few times. :-) Realizing that we couldn't possibly know all of Chris' friends, we made it open-invitation -- and still only got one person I didn't know. Also got a few people I hadn't thought to directly invite, so I'm glad we took that approach.

It's been a very hot and muggy weekend. I emptied the dehumidifier three times yesterday, which is a record. (It's rated for 40 gallons/week and the tank is about a gallon and a half, so we're still nowhere near capacity. There's a scary thought!) I was rather insistent that we were going to run the AC in the bedroom last night. Dani objects to open bedroom windows and ACs/fans, saying they're too noisy, but that resulted in unacceptable conditions Saturday night. And, y'know, sometimes I should get a turn at comfort.

Sunday we joined ralphmelton, lorimelton and her parents, mrpeck, and two others who I think are not LJ-enabled for an early dinner before some of them headed off for fireworks. Someone referred to Ralph as the grill-meister, and I have to concur. I do not have the grilled-meat clue, and I am envious. :-)

(We didn't go to the fireworks, not being big on crowds and noise. We watched two more episodes of B5 instead, but they were ones without fight scenes, so we can't say we watched a different kind of fireworks.)

Wednesday night is the next meeting of the worship committee. The rabbi can't actually make it (double-booked), but in this case that's ok. The single agenda item is to teach the committee about the structure of the Friday service in some detail and then assign parts for the service we'll be jointly leading at the end of the month. In my opinion members of this committee should be fully conversant with the service and able to lead it from the siddur without lots of extra annotations like "tell them to stand here", and some people couldn't do that when we led a service last year. So I'll try to teach them, and we'll see how it goes. This is certainly material I can teach on my own, so if the rabbi were going to be there I'd defer to him but there's no need for him to come.

Lately the humidifier in the basement has been pulling 2.5 to 3 gallons of water a day out of the air. (It would probably do more, but it doesn't do its thing when the tank is full and awaiting emptying.) I realize that's only about 1.5 toilet flushes or a quarter of a shower or something, but I still find myself wishing for an easy way to feed the collection back into our water system. (Not for drinking or cooking, though.)

The National Council of Churches is unwisely spamming people on a roughly-weekly basis. (I report 'em to SpamCop each time it happens, but it hasn't stopped the messages yet.) They should work harder on demonstrating values consistent with their presumed beliefs (like the golden rule).

Speaking of losing points by spamming, an anti-Bush group calling itself BushFIlter has been spamming me every few days. SpamCop reports have been more effective there; it's been a week or two since they've successfully gotten through. But I imagine that there are people out there who haven't thought about the election much, aren't going to, and are annoyed enough by spam to let it sway their vote; the spammers are making a mistake by discounting that effect. It's really only different in degree, not form, from sending out lots of spam advertising your competitor's URL. (Hmm... nah, I don't think the Kerry folks are that weasely.)

What is the derivation of the word "asshat", which I have been seeing increasingly in the last year or two? It seems to be a synonym for "asshole", but I'd always assumed that if you had to make that word more "gentle" or "polite", it'd be the first syllable you'd have to modify. What gives?

I don't know what this bush is, but it's a nice addition to our back yard. ( large images behind the cut )

Earlier this afternoon, Dani came up from the laundry room and told me there was a dead cat toy. We have assorted cat toys all over the place (you know, ones made out of cloth and stuffing and the like), and every now and then one will be so chewed/ripped up that it's time to toss it, so I figured that's what he meant.

Not so.

That was the largest mouse I have ever seen -- which means it probably wasn't a mouse, but I am steadfastly refusing to consider that option. (I mean, our house is clean, we live in a good neighborhood, we take the trash out... what have we done to earn critters?) It was all self-contained -- no insides on the outside and so on -- which is some comfort. But... ew. I've cleaned up mouse-sized mice before and only been a little squeamish, but this was different.

So at least one of my cats is still a hunter, though I don't know which one(s). Fortunately, whoever it was enjoys the hunt more than the idea of dining on the results. Thanks for small miracles.

I just hope this was a singleton.

We had an infusion of gamers Saturday. It was a fun day. We had some people who could come early but couldn't stay, and others who could come late, and some who could come for the whole day, so we did some juggling to make it work out. We ended up playing Settlers of Katan in the afternoon and then switching over to two longer games, with dinner in there somewhere. Dani really wanted to play Republic of Rome (and I didn't -- but we had eight people anyway), so four of them played RoR and the rest of us played McMulty. RoR is a longer game, so our group ended up with a fair bit of socializing before the other group finished and joined us. Long day, but fun. (It's just as well that we bailed on the group brunch the next day, though, even though that would have been fun.)

Sunday evening we had dinner with friends from my synagogue (the same folks whose seder I went to last year when Dani got sick; they've also invited us to other parties). It was a fun evening. Another couple (also from the synagogue) was there too. I worried a bit that Dani would feel left out even though he's met all these people on many occasions, but it wasn't a problem. There was enough of a geek density to work. :-)

I think it may be time to give up on Andromeda. It's been a while since the show was actually good; Sunday night I fell asleep during this week's show and found that this didn't really affect my enjoyment of it. Um, yeah. There was a change in creative control about a year ago (I think) and things went downhill then, but I held on in case it was just transition pains. But now, two of the most interesting characters are gone (for all practical purposes, in the case of Rev Bem -- the character as shown this week is not the one we know), and the stories have been more and more about action at the expense of plot. Yawn.

A few months ago the Contractor Who Rarely Returns promised to find the source of the water damage to the ceiling in the front hall and deal with it. (This damage is almost directly below a spot in the bathroom that is, in turn, damaged from an apparent roof leak, but he thinks that's a coincidence. We have been hypothesizing a bathtub-related plumbing problem, though a plumber we had in a while ago hadn't found anything suspicious.) In both cases, we were probably snookered by the sellers; the CWRR pointed out places where problems had been covered up rather than fixed.

So anyway, the contractor hasn't done anything yet, though some supplies have moved around so we know he's been here. We still have the crack in the ceiling.

Sunday the toilet overflowed (sigh), and we heard the unmistakable sound of running water coming from downstairs. (New experience for us.) Oh joy. The good news is that we didn't lose a chunk of ceiling; the bad news (on reflection) is that the water stopped after several minutes and did not return on subsequent flushes. Why is that bad news? Because plumbing problems are probably easier to fix; it sounds to me like our bathroom floor is suspect (which may, of course, be caused by a plumbing problem too). I was hoping for, say, a cracked supply pipe, or even a broken seal on the toilet, that we could fix and be done with. So I guess it's now time to (1) poke the CWRR and (2) call someone else because we'd like the work to be done sooner rather than later. Not that this is a sure bet, of course; we wouldn't still be depending on the CWRR if contractors in general showed up when they said they would and did the work they said they'd do.

(In case you're wondering, the CWRR replaced the Conractor Who Never Returned, who disappeared off the face of the planet mid-job about half a year after we bought the house. Fortunately, while he owed us work, he had about the right amount of money from us when he vanished, so we eventually decided to call it even.)

This has been a pleasant weekend, for the most part. We've been learning some fun new music at Shabbat evening services lately. Next week's celebration of Shabbat Shira is going to be a big deal musically; this is the parsha where we read about the song at the sea, and we're going to have a more music-focused service than usual. It's also starting an hour earlier so that families with young children can come without hassle. Should be fun.

Saturday morning went well. My rabbi had just come back from a retreat where, among things, they apparently focused on doing more with less. So we skipped some songs and some of the English repetitions and stuff and tried to really focus on the parts we did do. I liked it. I don't like rushing, especially if the rushing is in pursuit of something arguably pointless. (If you've just said the prayer in Hebrew, repeating it in English is pointless to me. If the point is to be friendly to those who can't read Hebrew even with transliteration, then the answer IMO is to sometimes skip the Hebrew. But don't do things twice.)

lefkowitzga joined us for Shabbat lunch, which was very nice. And she found fresh, tasty strawberries in Giant Eagle! I didn't know that was possible this time of year. We had no leftovers. :-)

Gail and I spent some time looking through the collection of Salamone Rossi's liturgical music to choose candidates for the choir. We both like his kedusha (for four voices), so we're going to suggest that. It took me a little while to figure out where the text came from, as I didn't recognize parts of it; it's from Shabbat Musaf, which Reform doesn't do. (Artscroll to the rescue.) Ah, ok. I knew there were differences, but I didn't know they were as significant as they are.

The edition of the Rossi music I have is bad in a couple ways. Some of the transliterations are just plain wrong; the text is also difficult to read in places. This is also someone's attempt to transliterate for French speakers, so it's not the usual mappings. For the last two pieces I retypeset the whole thing, but both times, despite serious proofreading, I managed to make some mistakes. I'm wondering if I should just hand it out as-is this time, hand everyone a pencil, and start reading off the text the way it's supposed to be. Or maybe someone else in the choir is better at transcription than I apparently am. We'll see, I guess. The first step is to get approval for the piece.

Saturday night was our long-awaited D&D game (it's been several weeks), where we rescued the two party members who had been captured by the vampires. It went very well, I thought, and Ralph was able to give us an adventure hook that got us some money and a specific task to pursue. The fight with the vampires, and subsequent rescue, cost a lot of money, so this is a welcome development. (Side note: the character who is largely responsible for this mess in the first place, the wizard, was both ungrateful for the rescue (we didn't get his spellbooks) and presumptuous about the spending of the money. (He got a lot of it for restarting his spellbooks.) He's a pretty ornery character, and in-game we probably would have dumped him long ago. But the player-level dynamics make that hard. I have no idea how much of this the player realizes.)

Sunday dinner was pleasant, except that Dani's been fighting a persistent cough for a couple days and it got worse tonight so we had to bail early. We stopped at a store on the way home to explore alternatives in cough syrup. I hope that whatever he picked out is more effective than what he was using.

Two mechanical annoyances struck this weekend. The first involves the washing machine; I went downstairs to move the laundry to the dryer only to find sudsy water on the floor and (I would later discover) still in the machine. The tub into which the machine drains was almost but not entirely full (and not draining), but I couldn't tell if the water on the floor was overflow or a separate problem. (What would cause the machine to stop, after all? It doesn't know that the tub is full...) So I applied a plunger to the tub and eventually picked out a lot of gunk from the drain; I could tell there was more that I couldn't reach. (What the heck is that and what's it doing in our drain? Eww...) This looked like a job for Liquid Plumber. :-) I rinsed off the clothes from the washer by hand so I could move them to the dryer and started the next load with some trepidation. Nothing went wrong there, so I still don't know what stopped the washer. I do not like this kind of mystery.

The other problem is that either my monitor (CRT) or my graphics card is failing, but I haven't shlepped heavy monitors around yet to test which. (Well, I suppose it could also be a cable. Hmm.) Every now and then my screen flickers and takes on rather more yellow than is normal. My computer has jaundice. Whee. Maybe tomorrow I will investigate further.

Monica

home maintenance

assorted updates

sigh

repairs

electrical problems

fun with electricity

brr.

VCR grumble

electronics annoyance

random bits

my old house

AC

phone service

random bits

weekend stuff

garage-door opener (and some short takes)

quickies

Best Buy knows how to treat customers

rebellious appliances

last few days

short takes

a few garden pictures

the mighty hunter

weekend

weekend

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