You know what I find really annoying? When I am shopping online and I find a product that might be interesting but it has a tiny little photo that is so small that I can’t tell what the product is like……. and there is a button that says LARGER PHOTO…. and when I click on the button a new window is displayed with the same tiny little photo in it.
I never buy stuff from those places.
The landlord only gave us one key to the Fallapartment. He was supposed to make us another key last Summer, but he never got around to it. Too busy, I guess.
Now that we are out and he wants to show the place to possible renter$, he wanted us to hand over our key. We told him that he could not have our key because we are still paying rent on the place, and that he should use his spare key.
Guess what? He has no idea where his key is. All this time, the landlord’s “Emergency” key has been missing. Go figure.
So he finally came and took our key and had a copy made, and after he returned it, the key ring looked like this:
How can you screw up a split ring? What a talent! With a touch like that, is there any mystery that the Fallapartment is falling apart?
We have moved everything we own twice. Every bottle and sock, every book and paper, every paper clip, every shred of clothing, every pot and pan. And as we go through all of our possessions to unpack them from the two moves, we find stuff that we had forgotten that we even owned. For example, I found this:
That is an A.M. radio disguised as a toilet. I bought it years ago for listening to crappy music ( it is A.M. after all). The best part of this gem is this:
The speaker is under the lid. So if you want to stifle it, all you have to do is close the lid ( I have been trained). And it works. I turned it on and…. stuff….. came out. It sounds like sh….. um…. noise, but I like it. Awesome.
I plan on using it for listening to the news, because the news these days is you-know-what.
Unfortunately, my toy has been banished unceremoniously to the shop in the basement. I don’t get it.
We have the generator.
Finally.
But therein lies a tale.
We picked it up on Friday morning and managed to get it home, borrowing some ramps to put it in and out of the car. It weighs 248 pounds. Then we put in the oil and hooked up the battery and spark plug. Then one pull on the starter cord….. and…….
and the cord came out but would not rewind.
Broken.
On the first pull.
I said a few works like, “Darn” and “Shucks” and “Rats” and things like that. One good thing about a generator is that you can’t really throw it across the room like you can some appliances that break just as you get them out of the box. I tried, but I am 5′ 6″ tall and weigh 150 pounds soaking wet…. 100 pounds shy of The Beast.
So we called up Sears, and the kid on the other end of the phone said that it should still be under warranty. I said, “Ya think? I just picked it up this morning!”
The kid on the other end of the phone said we needed to bring it back for warranty work, so we borrowed their ramps again and we took it back and left it for the store manager to look at on Saturday.
Saturday, we went back to see what was up, and the manager told us that the recoil starter had obviously been damaged, repainted, and then installed in the generator again at the factory. We both wondered out loud why Briggs & Stratton would even consider doing something that stupid.
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But I guess stupid things get done sometimes.
The manager swapped the broken recoil starter for the one on the floor sample of the same generator and sent us home. With the new starter, we had the generator running after a few pulls on the cord. Here is the The Beast:
I think it was running when I took that photo. Listen. Pretty quiet, huh?
(Actually it is fairly loud, but if we ever really need it, that noise will alert the neighborhood to how brilliant we were way back in ’11 when we picked up a generator on a bright, sunny day.)
Question: When is the best time to shop for a backup generator for the new house?…. when it looks like photo A,
or when it looks like photo B ?
Answer: Photo B
There is less traffic at the backup generator store.
So that is what we did yesterday. I can’t show you a photo of it because we haven’t picked it up yet. But I can tell you that it weighs 248 pounds, so when we “pick it up”, we won’t be “picking it up” if you get my drift.
Glad we went yesterday, because today looked more like photo A than it did like photo B. Figure that one out.
This has been running through my head the last few days:
When I get older, losing my hair, Many years from now Will you still be sending me a valentine, Birthday greetings, bottle of wine? If I'd been out 'til quarter to three, Would you lock the door? Will you still need me, Will you still feed me When I'm sixty-four?
Sigh.
I have BLUMOTION sickness.
BLUMOTION is the soft close system on our new kitchen drawers. When you close the drawer, the BLUMOTION grabs it just before it closes and pulls the drawer in slowly.
Click here for BLUMOTION web page.
The feature is a bit of fluff that we were not sure we wanted until we had it. Now, we just sort of fling the drawers closed and the BLUMOTION takes care of finishing the job. I have been known to hip-check a few drawers closed during the day.
So, what is BLUMOTION sickness? Well, not all drawers in this world have BLUMOTION on them. I find myself flinging desk drawers and filing cabinets closed at work causing a ruckus. Car doors get slammed. Our poor refrigerator door has been slammed a few times as well.
It is a terrible affliction. People think that I am just being rude, but it is an illness. Really, it is.
But I think I can live with it.
Spring has sprung. The grass is riz.
So, that’s where that old Christmas tree is!
Hmmm. It seems a bit flat. But then, it spent most of the Winter under mountains of snow.
Speaking of mountains of snow, we discovered an interesting phenomenon back in the woods.
On a bunch of the trees, just about where the top of the snow pack was located, the bark seems to have been gnawed off. Here is a closeup.
We suspect that it was hungry squirrels who could not dig down through the ice to find all those hidden acorns. I wonder if they got little, squirrel tummy aches.
And here is another new aspect of Spring for us. Look what is coming out of our sump.
No, not the log! The water. The log is there to keep the pipe from curling back up into it’s fetal position to hide in the bag it came out of.
So far the pump is handling the water, and the basement floor is dry, but you never know what is going to happen.
In spite of all that, inside the plant room we have a bucolic, peaceful jungle.
Got plants?
Well, OK it wasn’t really a celebration. I just took down the mailbox. Slow day.
The mailbox was our builder’s idea. Instead of changing our address at the post office (and dozens of places we do business with) he suggested that we just hang a mailbox on his sign and see if the Post Office would deliver to the mailbox instead of putting it through the mail slot in the front door (which would be gone!). Here is the mailbox.
Nice, huh? White. Matches the sign post. I picked it out myself. Cost me nine bucks, cash money. 🙂
The Post Office agreed to that, so we did it, and it saved us countless hours of stress and a lot of stamps. But now we have our front door mail slot back, so we don’t need the mailbox anymore.
We ran into the mail delivery guy and told him that we would like to start having our mail delivered through the mail slot in the door again, and he agreed. He even started doing that last week, even though the more convenient mailbox was still on the post.
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So, since we are not using the mailbox anymore, I took it down. I found my trusty socket wrench (finding stuff is still a challenge) and used it.
And here is the mailbox, toes-up.
RIP MBX
Here we are, stuck with yet another weekend of abysmal, snowy, rainy, windy, freezing, stormy, rotten, horrific weather. You can tell I am holding back on my real feelings about it because all of those words have more than four letters in them. Anyway, making lemonade, I took Saturday morning off and did my very first puttering project in my new basement shop. Here is the result:
The shelf is the project.
It is made out of “found materials” that I had stuffed into the POD instead of throwing them out as I should have. The plywood is old, and was used waaaay back as a tri-fold for a National History Day presentation when somebody was in high school….. mentioning no names…. no, it wasn’t me because when I was in high school there wasn’t any history yet, much less plywood.
The shelf is flimsy because it is made out of 1/2″ plywood instead of the more sturdy 3/4″ ply, which is what I should have used. But 1/2″ ply is what I had, so I used it.
And while I was doing this project I learned some things.
Did you know that 1/2″ plywood is only 7/16″ thick? Yeah. It is. I measured it when I was cutting the dadoes for the shelf. The dadoes have to be the same size as the thickness of the boards.
I think that maybe the government has taxed away some of the wood. For example, you can figure out that 1/16″ is 0.0625″, so from that you can calculate that 0.0625 / 0.5 = 0.125, which is a 12.5% wood tax. That number looks suspiciously like the Massachusetts tax on out-of-state bank accounts, doesn’t it? This wood was obviously made out-of-state. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
Or maybe it is simply like coffee, where a “pound” of coffee now has 11.5 ounces in it. There are so many possibilities for conspiracies that it is difficult to choose one.
Anyway, figuring that 7/16″ = 0.4375″, I cut the dadoes with a 12 mm iron, and 12 mm = 0.4724395″, which is a little large , but it left a bit of extra space (0.0349395″ to be exact, but who’s counting?) for warped boards and tearout etc. and the wood is junk anyway so who cares? “Measure it with a micrometer, mark it with chalk, and cut it with an axe“. The shelf is still standing a whole day later.
What’s that noise?
