cellio | Entries tagged with house

When choosing a floor tile, it's important to consider contrasts with key components:

light floor, dark cat

We replaced out beat-up laminate kitchen counters with quartz. When I mentioned plans to do this, someone said "pictures or it didn't happen", so...

( photos )

The result is very nice. The process of getting there started out ok but had some major aggravations in the middle, and I'm waiting to see how they resolve it before I file a review with the Better Business Bureau. The project was poorly managed, with key people not talking to each other at the right times and with some finger-pointing among the various folks involved, and it cost us extra money along with delays. Their ineptitude should not be our problem; this is why we hire a company and expect them to sort out the details. And I expected more transparency than we got; "they're on the way" seems to have really meant (multiple times) "we've sent them a text message that they might read eventually telling them to do your job next". Yeah, no.

Three of the five people who visited our house during installation (two installers and a plumber) did excellent jobs and went out of their way to clean up the mess caused by the first two installers and the inept managers.

We want to make some improvements in our kitchen. The immediate prompt is floor tiles that are coming loose and becoming trip hazards, and hey, I never liked that floor anyway. The (laminate? formica?) counters are also getting pretty beat up. And I want better lighting. In other words, the cabinets and appliances are fine and we want to replace the rest. That should be a one-stop job, right?

Yeah, no. We did get a bid for the whole thing from one contractor (who came recommended), but it was full of "install customer-supplied X" and we are not interested in getting caught between "this isn't the right thing" and "we bought the things you told us to buy" and meanwhile things are in limbo while you sort it out. Also, it's hard to estimate the full price that way. We wanted to hire someone, choose materials, get a real price, and have that contractor take care of it.

It ended up being three different jobs. The counters are supposed to be installed in two weeks (they came a couple weeks ago to do "templating", i.e. the detailed measurements). This will supposedly take a couple hours on the appointed day, which seems fast to me but they're the experts not me. Meanwhile, our flooring is on order and will supposedly be a one-day job once stuff comes in, maybe in a few weeks. We decided to get through this and then tackle the lighting (and then, finally, paint).

I'm looking forward to the changes, which will be revealed one at a time.

We lost power around 1 or 2 AM. (Having a UPS means never having to oversleep your no-longer-powered alarm clock...) We've just gotten our first snow of the season -- only an inch or so, but it came with a lot of ice, I'm told, causing downed tree limbs affecting power lines. We powered down our computers, turned off the chirping UPSs, and went back to sleep, expecting to be awakened by a blinking clock before morning.

That didn't happen. This morning after a quick shower (the water heater is gas-powered, but the decider-to-cue-heat is apparently electrical) I checked the freezer -- surprisingly warm but the meat was all still frozen. (Why did we lose fridge effectiveness more quickly in November, when the environment should help, than in July when we lost power for about 10 hours?) Duquesne Light had no estimates for restoration; they said 30,000 customers lost power and that's obviously going to take some time. Whee.

So I put the crock pot of stew for Shabbat on the back porch where it'll stay cooler than in the fridge, packed up all the frozen meat and fish, and headed to work -- where we have a fridge, the freezer of which only holds ice cubes. I think I get some brownie points for thinking of that before caffeine. :-) I'm glad we have that fridge at work; never expected to use it this way.

Our kitchen came with a wall oven, rather than a range (oven + cooktop together). And it's too small and some things don't work right, but every conversation that started with "we should replace that" ended with talk of remodeling the kitchen.

But we found a way to put in a bigger oven with minimal disruption of cabinetry. In fact, I might have gained more space than I lost, because it turns out there was nothing behind an expanse of wood below the oven. (I just assumed there were oven parts that descended way past the door. I'd never had a wall oven before.) So we now have a nice new wall oven, nominal 30" instead of actual 24", and it has space for more than two cookie sheets. Not that I bake cookies often, but it's a useful measure of space. The racks in my new oven can hold two cookie sheets each. More practically, this means I can cook a large meal (like for a gaming day, or a Pesach seder) without having to decide what can be held on a hot plate and what doesn't really need to be hot after all. And there's a new shelf where that wasted space used to be.

Also, convection is new. That seems useful.

Inspired by our glorious new oven, on Friday, Consumer Reports buying guide in hand, we bought a new dishwasher to replace the falling-apart, not-so-great-at-washing one we have now. We replaced the 1960s-era fridge that came with the house about a decade ago, and the washer and dryer about a year ago, so in a week the only remaining appliance that predates our ownership will be the stove. Which actually works fine, surprisingly, so we're not rushing to replace that.

Woo!

Bad news: the furnace's pump is dead. Good news: it's under warranty. (Questionable news: it was that young and died anyway...) Bad news: the repair guy didn't have a replacement; try again tomorrow. Good news: we found this out now, so with luck it'll be fixed before the predicted lows in the lower 30s mid-week.

This afternoon the network hub in my office just up and died. I wasn't doing anything particularly taxing at the time -- not even streaming video. :-) There one moment, gone the next. For now I've moved the incoming network cable directly to my Mac; I rarely use the legacy PC anyway and no longer have a laptop that would benefit from being plugged in, but I'll probably get another small hub anyway just so I can use the PC if I need to. (The PC doesn't have a monitor and keyboard; when I use it I connect using VNC.)

While changing the cable on the Mac I knocked the video cable loose; it's one of those mini connectors that some Macs use, with an adapter to support a regular connector. When I plugged it back in, making sure everything was tight, the colors on my monitor were slightly off -- brighter and a little yellower. No amount of adjusting would fix it, but after a reboot it was fine. (I had a vague memory of that happening once before.) I do not have a mental model for this failure mode yet; why would anything software-side care about that cable being unplugged and replugged, and why would a reboot (with no further adjustment of the cable) make a difference?

A few days ago Dani told me that his company, for no particularly-obvious reason, was replacing all their office chairs, with the old ones to be hauled away...somewhere. Some of his coworkers, noting that their current chairs were in fine shape, asked if they could salvage them. The powers that be said ok, anything with a "reserved" sign on it wouldn't be hauled away.

A few minutes after telling me this he asked "do you want to have brunch Sunday at (a downtown restaurant)?". Sure, I said. A moment later I asked "are we fetching office furniture?" Why yes, he said.

So um, I said, if they were likely to have any spares... "I reserved two", he said. Nice.

So I have now upgraded my desk chair (not my computer chair, which is different), finally deprecating the desk chair I obtained from the Perq Systems fire sale for, I think, a dollar. Dani's company isn't dead, so I have hopes that this chair will do at least as well as its predecessor.

(I'm actually very particular about my computer chair(s), in contrast. When I started with my current employer I spent one day with my assigned chair and then went out and bought my own (which, to pass muster with the furniture police, had to match color). All our chairs have stickers on them with their designated locations (because sometimes people "borrow" chairs for meetings and aren't so good about returning them); mine has an additional sticker, "property of (me)", and has never been absconded with.)

Via

tangerinpenguin: List thirteen things that are going well for you this Friday the 13th:

1. The customer who sounded like he wanted Big Complicated Things (In A Hurry) thought my first draft was about 80% while I was assuming 25%.

2. Two significant projects (and some lesser ones) at work want me and my manager will support whatever I want to do. Cool!

3. I read a letter on the eye chart this week that I don't usually get.

4. Some more e-books that I want to read are available as free downloads.

5. Good conversation with my rabbi last night.

6. Bought gas for $3.09/gallon (loyalty card) and it should hold me for a month.

7. Cirque du Soleil is coming to Pittsburgh and this time their web site allowed us to buy tickets. (Totem -- not interested in the Michael Jackson thingy.)

8. Waking up to a cat on my feet every morning still, even though the weather has gotten warm.

9. Baldur is eating better.

10. Mesura et Arte del Danzare -- lovely recording!

11. Neighbors taking care of things along the property line that they might have been able to get away with not doing.

12. The rain seems to have ended before I have to leave for Shabbat.

13. Dani makes me happy. (Why yes, that is redacted. :-) )

We ran out of shelf space (and pile space) again, so, having long since filled all the good spaces in the house with bookcases, we started eyeing up the not-so-good spaces. This led us to re-evaluate the dining room.

The shorter, wider, not-very-deep cabinet on one wall (holding linens) was clearly not holding its weight. Table linens are important -- and, also, that cabinet was holding dice and other small gaming supplies -- so eliminating that function wouldn't do. What I really wanted was a taller, narrower chest of drawers. This turns out to be hard; everyone expects your dining-room storage to be low and wide so that you can put a lighted glass shelving unit on top of it to show off your fine china. But recently we prevailed -- the magic phrase turns out to be "lingerie cupboard" and you find it as part of a very few bedroom sets -- and the resulting chest of drawers, a glorious 52" or so high and about 22" wide, was delivered a few days ago. The original cabinet has been unloaded into it, leaving a stretch of wall that can hold two half-height bookcases. (Other features of the room prevent full-height bookcases.)

Now, the wall with this cabinet is about four feet wide before large windows kick in, so this leaves room for a 24" bookcase. That shouldn't be hard, right? Most bookcases are 30" or 36" wide; most 24" ones are also short. We found one that's 48" high online in a color that doesn't clash with the rest of the room (or, most importantly, the cupboard that will be right next to it), so tonight we ordered it. We'll have to assemble it ourselves, but bookcases aren't too bad for that. The vendor has a sense of humor: returns are permitted within 30 days in the original packaging.

In the end this project should net us roughly 24 shelf-feet of bookcase, which I'm sure we will fill up distressingly quickly. Such are the challenges faced by bibliophiles.

Monday: 80.
Tuesday: 85.
Wednesday: 80 and a fire warning (! I've never seen that before).
Thursday: snow flurries late.

Hmpf. A friend once said that Pittsburgh doesn't have spring and fall; it dithers summer and winter.

But in brighter news, we got our repaired leaded-glass window back today, and it looks good as new. (The installation people wanted to do this today rather than tomorrow; I don't blame them.) It was damaged after the storms in February by -- and I would not have believed this had I not been home when it happened -- a falling icicle, which hit a porch roof and bounced toward the house rather than away from it.

Sukkot started with rain, as in this thematic haiku from

richardf8. Saturday I noticed that the lights in the sukkah were out; Sunday we determined that power to the entire garage (from which that extension cord was run) was out. The garage outlet doesn't have a GFI and the breaker wasn't tripped; I had not previously known that a GFI might be elsewhere on the circuit. It turns out that the line from the basement to the garage goes through an outlet in the furnace room that has a GFI, and something -- presumably the rain and my lights -- tripped it. (Mind, I've been using that configuration of lights for ten years without prior problems...) There is now an annotation in the breaker box about this.

Last week Rabbi Symons and I completed our study of midrash on the Akeidah. (I still owe a couple write-ups.) Saying kaddish d'rabbanan at that point was quite satisfying. He asked me what's next, I said I picked last time, and he proposed something that sounds good to me. (I'll reveal it after he confirms that there is a sufficient body of interesting material.)

A new Dunkin' Donuts opened in Squirrel Hill last week. I knew they were getting kosher certification for the doughnuts; I hadn't realized that they were getting it for everything. So they sell breakfast sandwiches but that's not really bacon or sausage. (I haven't heard if it's turkey or soy.)

Two interesting links from

magid: the referendum (or mid-life re-evaluations) and watching whales watching us.

From

chaiya: Improve Everywhere does invisible dogs. Nicely done, including some of the community response. :-)

From a coworker: unfortunate domain names.

There is a class of junk mail that tries earnestly to appear to be something Official and Important. You know the type -- the security paper with the three perforated strips around the edges that says something like "important tax documents" on the outside. These usually pique my curiosity enough to see what the pitch is, on the way to the recycle bin.

Today's (emblazoned with "economic stimulus" on the outside) informed me that according to public records, the mortgage I got on $date_we_bought_the_house at $interest_rate is way too high and they're here to help with a 5.25% fixed-rate loan (terms unspecified).

Dudes, we've refinanced twice since then. We're currently at 4.5%, so your 5.25% offer (which sounds high, actually) isn't very appealing -- something you'd presumably know if you checked those public records you were going on about. :-) And by way of further review, your perforated edges were poorly implemented, causing me to tear your special message while opening it. The other two mortgage pitches I've received so far this month were of much higher physical quality.

Wednesday afternoon I walked upstairs to find a small (baby?) mouse, dead and intact, laid out in front of the bedroom door. One of the cats was presenting a trophy, it seems.

This morning I found a second small mouse, alive but dazed, scampering around in and around the linen closet. Baldur (!), the cat I thought would be least inclined, took interest. With a few false starts and some luck, I was able to get it into a paper bag so I could take it outside.

Once is happenstance; twice is coincidence. I sure hope we don't get to enemy action. (I did inspect the linen closet afterwards and didn't find any more, or any evidence of nesting. But they could be anywhere, right?)

We had something over a dozen guests yesterday for a day and evening of board games. I think this was our largest crowd yet; usually when we send out a mass invitation we get about 65-75% positive responses, but this time everyone said yes. (Two then did not come; one was sick and I'm not sure what happened to the other.)

( Read more... )

One of our guests was temporarily in a wheelchair due to a broken leg (sounded like a bad break from her description), which I didn't know in advance. (I knew about the disability, but thought she was on crutches.) Most of our first floor did not pose problems, and it's good to know that a wheelchair does fit through one doorway I thought questionable. I'm not sure how she managed the powder room; that might have required using structural features (like the sink) as supports (lean on this and hop over). I guess it's an improvement over my previous house, which had no first-floor restroom at all, but it reminded me that we still have accessibility barriers even setting aside the steps one must use to get into the house in the first place.

The power is currently out at my house, and I've discovered that Duquesne Light appears to have no online source of real-time information on outages. C'mon, I expect to see a map of affected areas and outage times! Or at least an RSS feed with status updates. The last thing I want to do is call the "report an outage" number and gum up the works just looking for information. Besides, I'd probably have to navigate a terrible automated system to end up on hold.

(What? I'm at work and may as well stay here if we're not going to have light, heat-distribution, or internet anyway...)

I used to occasionally have a problem with an overnight power outage killing the alarm clock and causing me to oversleep, but I've more recently realized that having a UPS or three means never having to fear that again. :-) (Fortunately, today's power outage came after we were up, not in the middle of the night, and only lasted about five minutes. I was just about ready to interrupt my morning grooming to shut down computers when the need went away.)

In the "interesting if true, and interesting anyway" department: earlier this week I learned that the folks who handle disposal of sensitive documents for my company are blind. (Well, not the truck driver.) If I understand correctly, the local blind association arranges this, as sort of an extra guarantee or something. Who'd'a thought?

Signal boost: it looks like someone's testing stolen credit-card numbers on a large scale. Check your statement for microtransactions; they're testing the cards with ~20-cent transactions to verify that they're good before hammering them. Link from

jducoeur.

A few days ago my copy of I Remember the Future by

mabfan arrived. Yay! I'll have some nice reading for Shabbat.

Oldest LOLcat? Link from

siderea.

My doctor confirmed that I should be taking calcium supplements now to (with luck) fend off problems later. Where can I find calcium tablets that are sized for, y'know, normal people and not horses? Most bottles in stores don't even include pictures on the label, so it's hit or miss. The oblong ones I have are scored for cutting widthwise, but I need them to be narrower, not necessarily shorter, and my attempts to do that have all ended badly. What do other women of a certain age do?

Usually mail addressed to "resident" is a write-off, but yesterday we got a letter in a small envelope with a handwritten address to "current resident", which is unusual. Inside was a postcard/photo of our house from circa 1930. The accompanying letter explained that the writer had found it in a scrapbook and since it actually had an address written on the back, she wanted to send it to us, whomever we were, assuming the house was still standing. Neat! So we're going to send back a current picture, along with one of its near-twin two houses up. (Ours and the other house are mirror images of each other.)

The South Side, where I work, has been devoid of Indian food -- until now. Sree's, of CMU lunch-cart fame, has set up a satellite in a kiosk at the end of our block. Yay! An actual restaurant would be better, but I'll take "surprise vegetarian combo of the day" in steamer trays if necessary. It's still pretty good. Qdoba, let's just be friends, ok? :-) (I actually bring my lunch almost all the time, eating out maybe once every couple weeks, but when I do go out it's usually for the pseudo-Mexican salad.)

Quote of the day: "See, in Java, they force you to hack your way through the jungle with a machete. In perl they give you a flamethrower, and afterward you root around in the ashes for the data you wanted. The styles are somewhat different." -

dvarin, here.

You can get almost anything at Amazon (link from

merle_). Be sure to read the reviews.

The digitize-our-albums-and-tapes-before-they-rot project is still mainly in analysis mode (figuring out where to acquire what), though we're grabbing the low-hanging fruit as we see it. This will take some time. Meanwhile, we learned tonight that while you can nominally share your iTunes library with other machines on the local network, you can't actually do much with that -- you can't add non-local files to playlists or iPods, which sort of defeats the purpose, no? (And iTunes has to be running on both machines to even listen.) Just copying the files from one iTunes directory to another doesn't seem to do the trick, either. Sigh. Are we really going to have to import everything CD by CD and track by track (for the downloads) in order to share everything?

Dear Lazyweb,

1. Where, in Pittsburgh, am I likely to find a decent variety of recliners for sale? Much to my frustration it is more expensive to reupholster our current ones than buy new ones. Last time we looked we found an over-abundance of short, wide, voluminous chairs; we're looking for something more restrained and tall enough to provide head support. I can use the yellow pages (etc) as well as anyone else, but if any of the locals have favorite furniture stores, I'd love to hear about them.

2. Where, local or online, can I buy light-weight (chinos etc) casual pants in larger sizes that have decent pockets? I pretty much want the standard jeans layout -- two back, two front, though the watch pocket is strictly optional. Locally I can't find back pockets (and sometimes not front pockets); online I can't find descriptions that specify their pockets.

There's a parlor game going around that calls for the poster to list three things he has done that he doesn't think any of his readers have done. I think I must be too boring; I can't think of three (that would also be interesting enough to post).

I keep a log for Erik, recording anything unusual and all medication starts/stops. I started doing this because I thought there might be correlations between meds and appetite changes; none have emerged so far, but it's turned out to be useful in other ways. ("Any vomiting?" "June 2, in the morning". "You know that stuff?") So anyway... Erik's appetite had been low last week, so at my vet's direction I gave him fluids for a few days (also logged). Things got better so I stopped, but Monday he was back to not eating so I hit him again, this time with a bit more because I could (150ml). Tuesday's log entry: "oink". :-) Good to see that work sometimes... (The healthy appetite has continued today.)

I have a minor workplace mystery. Yesterday someone left me a post-it note containing a charge code and nothing else, and used my Sharpie to do so without recapping it (so it was dried out and useless). I asked the usual suspects, but no one recognized the code. Shrug. Today I came in to find my entire post-it pad and several pens missing. WTF? I have the back desk in a two-person enclosed space; it's unlikely that a passerby needed a pen or some paper and my desk was the most convenient source. I wonder what surprise will greet me tomorrow.

Language peeves: "council" is a body; "counsel" is what advisors give. "Populous" means there are lots of people; "populace" is the people. The "populous" should not be giving "council" to anyone, ok? (Both of these errors are common on SCA mailing lists.)

Language Log reproduces some careless spam from Barnes and Noble. I like the poster's method of thanking them.

Funny cat video via thnidu.

Something in our house is chirping intermittently. It sounds like a smoke detector, but we've changed all the relevant batteries and it hasn't stopped. It does not happen predictably (and when it does it chirps only once), so it's very hard to localize. Whee.

Tonight/tomorrow is Shavuot, which is one of my favorite holidays thematically. I understand that both of our rabbis will be at the tikkun leil shavuot, late-night torah study, this year, which should be loads of fun. Tonight's dinner will be blintzes, and tomorrow's lunch will be cheesy noodles (featured cheeses this time are havarti, cheddar, and swiss, with others too). Mmm, dairy. :-) Chag sameach to those who celebrate, and happy Monday to the rest of you.

I recently bought an amplified indoor TV antenna, and I gave it a spin today. With some fiddling, I can get very good reception on most channels I care about and acceptable reception on the rest. (Some channels with less-than-acceptable reception are ones I don't care about. WPCB, I'm looking at you.) I'm also picking up some channels not on the list of Pittsburgh stations at Wikipedia. (Don't know what they are yet. My local newspaper doesn't list them either.) Currently the antenna is hooked up to one VCR; when I cancel the cable service I'll plug it into the splitter currently fed by the cable instead, but that's harder to get to so not optimal for testing.

Yesterday we ended up in a spontaneous game of Runebound with three other people. The game nominally supports up to six players, but with five I felt we were too resource-constrained, both in stat-boost chits (which you get for accumulating experience) and lower-level encounters (which you must defeat to gain the experience). I dropped out of the game when all the green (1-point) and yellow (2-point) encounters were gone, I had no money with which to buy equipment, and I could not yet survive a purple (3-point) encounter. No bootstrapping was possible unless a rare event were to occur, and in the meantime I'd just be twiddling my thumbs. I've played this game two or three times before without that happening to any player, but I can't remember if I've played with this many players before. (Oh, and this was not the four-hour game promised by the box. After I dropped out near the four-hour mark, the others played for another hour, maybe more.)

The weather has been uncharacteristically (for June) sweltering for the last couple days. We have central air on the second floor; we caved and turned it on on Friday. We have a huge window unit in the living room that we sometimes use to supplement, particularly if people are coming over or we're generating lots of heat (e.g. from cooking). Yesterday Dani turned it on for the gamers and it started making that noise appliances make when they're unhappy and want you to know from anywhere in the house. It was blowing air, but the air wasn't cool. I'm unclear on whether this means it's hungry and needs a freon refill (I'm guessing there's freon involved), or if it's something else. This unit came with the house, so it's not exactly new, but the window might be too big for the deprecated AC we took out of our bedroom when we bought the central unit. (We still have the window unit in the attic.) Well, nothing I can do about it for the next couple days, so no sense worrying about it.

Found by Dani: mykleenextissue.com, for vanity Kleenex boxes. Err, yeah. At least it's not for vanity Kleenex. Even so, I'm not sure "let out your creative juices" was the best choice of a slogan. I also note that -- as often happens -- their FAQ does not address my most-frequent questions, which in this case include "do you have customers?". :-)

Bill Walsh posted this and I now share:

Recently (to investigate something), I added a third-party tracker to some of my posts in order to see where the hits are coming from. This was meant to be temporary, but I've found it interesting to see just how big the internet community is, so I've continued to use it at times. So, I don't know who any of y'all are (and publishing on the internet means I might never know, and that's cool), but I'd like to say hello to my regular readers in Italy, Moldova, Switzerland, and Cambodia (!).

We are having weird modem luck. I thought all DSL modems were basically the same, but apparently not. Our old (bought in 1999) modem has started dropping signal -- it's eratic, but when it happens it lasts for a few hours. My DSL provider mailed me a new one (a level of service I did not expect) and it's reliable but universally slow. So our current mode of operation is to use the old one until it drops and then switch to the new one for a few hours. Weird. So I think we need to buy a new modem that is both reliable and fast, but since I thought they were all the same I now don't know what to look for. (We have basic DSL. Someday I hope they well run FIOS to our neighborhood and we'll switch.)

Recent conversation:
Dani: We're out of (book)shelf space in the library again.
Me: Maybe we should assemble that last bookcase we bought.
Dani: We're out of shelf space in the library again.
Me: You built it and filled it already? So we need to buy more?
Dani: We're out of wall space to put bookcases...

(I assert that he is incorrect on that last point, but it hinges on a dispute between practicality and purity. Or something like that.)

We bought some CFLs (in two different color-tones) to try again, and installed some in the ceiling fixture in the living room (the packaging contained no dire warnings about that, unlike the last one). Freaky white and bright, so some tuning is called for, but there might be a bigger problem: flicker. The switch is a dimmer, but we know CFLs don't dim so the switch is at max. (Truth to tell, we don't dim regular bulbs in that fixture, either.) Does the mere presence of a dimmer switch doom CFLs? That would be annoying.

A couple links:

A few nights ago I made these lamb chops, which I've made before and which are amazingly good.

The ten plagues, done in peeps (from someone on my subscription list, but I've lost track of who). Twisted! Funny!

Last week Dani got email from someone he knew in Toronto lo these many years ago. She and her family were driving to DC; did he want to visit with them on their way down? We said sure, and invited them for dinner Sunday. She and her husband are friendly people; their teenage sons were shy but pleasant, and they appreciated access to graphic novels and an internet connection while the rest of us were talking. :-) (One of them was excited to find Diablo installed on one of Dani's computers...)

The adults had obviously done some research. During dinner they said "please tell us about the SCA" and "so what about the house on the flatbed?". I googled both of us later and the page for the little house on the flatbed does not come up in the first half-dozen pages of results, so I'm not sure how they got there. (Of course, my home page does, from there you can get to my page of SCA links, and from there...) I, lacking information beyond her first name, had done no such research; I hope I was not socially deficient in these modern times.

Both Dani's and my desktop computers have been gradually getting sluggish over time. Dani went shopping and found that we could each triple our memory for $50. Ah, much better! Dani was kind enough to install mine for me. (We have a clean division of labor when it comes to household IT: he does hardware and I do system administration. Things go more smoothly when we do not try to switch.)

Dani did another hardware installation this weekend: late last week the water flow to the shower head was, suddenly, extremely diminished. Advice found on the internet suggested banging on the head and/or pipes to shake loose any gunk that might be in there; we decided not to do that without replacement hardware on hand, 'cause some water is better than none at all. (I should mention, in passing, that it took me a couple tries to find any useful information here. Who knew that some people try to deliberately reduce flow to their shower heads? Err, isn't that what the tub knobs are for? But I digress.) In the end, Dani bought a $5 head and simply replaced it; the new one is actually better than the old one. (Another in the "who knew?" department: you can spend $100 on a showerhead. It had better be gold-plated, water-softening, temperature-regulating, and massaging, for that price!)

A week ago Monday I took all the cats in for checkups, and two got blood drawn for tests. Tuesday night I got a message: um, err, we lost some of it. I had the last appointments of the night, and apparently one vial got left in the centrefuge... so I had to take Erik (I'm glad it was Erik! He's easy!) back to be stuck again on Wednesday. They were apologetic, but sigh. (Everyone's basically normal, locally scoped.)

Shabbat morning was a little more rabbi-heavy than usual. Both of our rabbis were there (until it was time to leave for the later service, anyway). We also had our incipient third rabbi (yes, now it can be told... we were looking for an educator and got one who's also a rabbi; mabfan, you know him). And our associate rabbi's aunt, who is also a rabbi, was visiting. I'm glad that day's lay torah reader isn't one to get spooked easily. :-) (Though he might not have known about the last; I was introduced to her Friday night, but I don't think she mentioned her background Saturday morning.)

The third rabbi will be focusing mostly on education (including adults). He's an excellent teacher, and I'm looking forward to having more chances to learn with him. I presume that our adult-ed program is going to get a boost; yay!

We got a new furnace this year, but I don't yet know how to assess its performance. Just comparing gas bills to last year doesn't help; I can look up the rate difference, but I don't know how to account for the differences in weather. (This winter has been warmer than last so far.) I guess I need to find control data -- local people with the same gas company who haven't changed their usage patterns.

From a FAQ for a new appliance: "What does it mean that this is UL-certified and how do I know it is?". I really doubt that's a FAQ. If people ask anything like that, it's probably "how do I know this is safe to use?". I have no objection to them including this information; I merely object to the misuse of that "F" in "FAQ". :-)

You've probably seen the "rules for being an evil overlord" -- things like "when I'm an evil overlord, I won't reveal my secret plans before killing the hero". Here's an IT spin: security lessons of evil overlords.

Shopping penguin, from gnomi. Bizarre but cute.

In Germany, if you can't muster your party faithful for a protest, you can now rent a protester (link from jducoeur). At those rates, though, I have trouble seeing how it could be cost-effective.

(The web interface is being wacky. If you saw a mis-formmatted post from me -- I didn't do it. Let's try again.)

Domain names to avoid, from dagonell.

This conversation is funny in that oddly-familiar way (from xiphias).

Quote of the day from dglenn: "The country is run by extremists, because moderates have shit to do." --John Stewart, on The Daily Show. (Meta: I tried to email this to myself and the filter at work blocked due to profanity.)

Last night Dani was explaining the cult of Eye of Argon, an astonishingly-bad SF story, to a friend. Naturally there is a Wikipedia entry. Dani called my attention to the following comment about the author from there: "a malaprop genius, a McGonagall of prose with an eerie gift for choosing the wrong word and then misapplying it".

The new furnace has a display with buttons and a numeric read-out... and no user documentation (but lots of installation documentation). How odd. Fortunately, furnaces usually don't require a lot of user intervention: turn on in October and off in April (or whenever, adjusted for your locale).

Well, we had a few good sukkah nights before rain and cold ended that. And note to future self: the week of Sukkot has the longest morning (weekday) services of the year; anything you can do to expedite (without rushing) will be looked upon with favor by the congregation.

I heard a great comeback the other day. Someone had moved in with an SO before marriage, and a holier-than-thou relative was giving her grief. The relative reported that she'd learned about this sinful situation from some mutual acquaintance who also disapproves, and what did she have to say for herself? Her response: "Were you... gossiping?"

Sukkot morning there was a bar mitzvah. I wasn't thrilled to hear that; usually that means the bar-mitzvah family takes over and the regular congregation feels pushed off to the side. So that's not a nice thing to do at a service that is the only option for the greater congregation. (On most Shabbatot we have two services, the one the regulars go to and the bar-mitzvah service that the family pretty much owns. I wish it weren't that way, but it is. On holidays we don't do that, though; there's one service.) However, it worked out; the bar mitzvah was very good and gave one of the best talks I've heard from a kid so far. I hope that was intentional -- that a particularly promising student was given the honor of having his bar mitzvah at a holiday service -- but I don't know if it was. They schedule those pretty far in advance, so he would have had to have been particularly promising two years ago.

Today Dani and I went to the Shadyside home tour. We've never been to one of these before. Other neighborhoods have them too (though I've never heard of one in Squirrel Hill). The tour consisted of seven homes, all of which are clearly objects of obsession for their owners. I had assumed the tour would consist of big impressive mansions (there are several in Shadyside), but it was a mix of mostly "normal-person" homes, though with often-impressive restoration work. One small house was obviously a bachelor pad; the "bedroom" was in a loft visible from everyplace except directly below it, with no curtains or the like. Not the sort of place you live with a non-romantic roommate, or your kids. :-)

Tomorrow we are getting a new furnace. It's the sort of thing you shold do every half-century whether you need it or not. :-) Seriously, we think our current furnace is running at about 50% efficiency, and the new one will be abut 95%, so that should bring some relief on the winter gas bills.

( Hebrew minutiae )

Monica

considerations in remodeling

kitchen changes part 1

houses are complicated :-)

power and privilege, of a sort

domesticity, hardware edition

gremlins

salvage

triskaidekaphilia

the books are ganging up on us again

one of these doesn't belong

random bits

junk mail: a reply (snark)

invasion

games day

how 20th-century (or, first-world problems)

random bits

random bits

two queries

random bits

random bits

random bits

last few days

random bits

short takes

weekend bits

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