Category: FYI

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Mini-Reno-Project

But something of a PITA to do…

The light over the kitchen sink: we’ve been meaning to “get around to it” for, well, since forever (OK, only sixteen years now *heh*). It was a piece of contractor’s junk fixture complete with a pull chain. *yech* Worst single example of electrical junk wiring in the house.

Plain old inertia just kept me out of it. Well, that and KNOWING it was going to be wired stupidly, and with the wiring concealed behind a 1’x1′ chase at the top of the kitchen (IOW, just completely wasted space), it wasn’t going to be a fun reno. Oh, and where was I going to put the switch and how did I want to wire it and… yeh, I let laziness get in the way, too.

But a couple of weeks ago, we found a fixture at Lowe’s that my Wonder Woman seemed to like:

Continue reading “Mini-Reno-Project”

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A Kid Again

In 1959, we were a single income family, even though both of my parents were college graduates. My dad was making decent money working in a field not known for particularly good incomes. Still with five children, the budget was sometimes a tad tight. So, when my folks decided to buy a World Book Encyclopedia with all the trimmings, including ten years of “yearbooks” and a large (no, REALLY large, “library-sized”) two-volume dictionary set, our lil family library grew by almost 25% overnight, and I found my backup reading material for the next few years.

Yes, there was always at least one volume of the set under my bed, close enough for a night time “sneak read”. Sometimes, it was just one of the two dictionary volumes (yes, for reading), but most often it was just a volume chosen according to some topic that had caught my fancy, then kept for further reading as one article led to another and another and…

And that’s how I get to be a kid again. For the last 18 years the web has been my go-to reading material for times when I’ve exhausted my stash of new books. It’s also been my substitute for an encyclopedia, since I never run out of things to learn. And thanks to my *cough* encyclopedic reading habits over the years, I have a skill set and basic knowledge base that allows me to filter out most crap.

And the resources–good quality resources–are effectively limitless, now, and not confined to one book case. Heck, I find myself re-reading classics online that are in a book case that’s literally within the reach of my right hand as I type these words.

And on top of being a library with more than enough resources to keep me in learning material for life, the web’s a source of amusement (dumbasses a-plenty to poke fun at! Yipee! *heh*), entertainment (I have a full movie list at Crackle, for example), contemporary information (I’ll not say it’s “news”) and interpersonal interactions.

But most of all, it’s a resource just jam packed with information that’s either new to me or in a new format that makes sense in a different way or old information that’s fun to re-read, review and cogitate over.

Sweet. Kid. In a candy store. Unlimited candy budget.

*sigh* I’ve entered my second childhood.

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Yes, I’m Back… Sorta

Since our PDG (Pretty Darned Good :-)) deal on our fridge (38% off a price that was already nearly 12% lower than MSRP), we’ve decided to keep an eye on large appliance prices just for kicks, and we’ve noticed something interesting.

In an economy where inflation is a fact of life and the dollar is worth less and less every day, both because of price inflation in general and because of the Fed’s devaluation of the dollar via flooding the economy with paper money coming off the presses far faster than the economy justifies, we’ve noticed something interesting: in general, prices are falling at the retail end on many major appliances from most manufacturers.

Why? I can only surmise at this point that the fact that consumer purchasing is way down is seriously impacting cash flow at these companies. They apparently feel they cannot absorb the costs of warehousing excessive inventory.

Expect more fall-off in manufacturing, leading to more layoffs and lower consumer purchasing, leading to… etc.

Unless the grossly obese “feddle gummint” chimp riding the economy’s back is forcibly removed (and put on a stringent diet), this cycle will likely continue.

Get yours (whatever that is) while the getting’s good. Just sayin’.

Link 1

Link 2

Go ahead. Do your own searches for “Emergency Preparedness,” “Survival,” etc. Then, if you’ve not already taken steps to increase your chances of pulling through Obama’s Great Depression of 2012, get moving on it. Now.

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AWOL

Not that I need your leave to be absent, but for the rest of this week I will be anyway. What can you do about it, eh? 😉

Come back next week when my usual babbling curmudgeonry will be back.

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I Do Love It When a Plan Comes Together

So, this was to be the summer when we purchased a new fridge. The one we have has served us well, but it entered this house two owners back and has definitely reached the effective end of its service life.

The glass shelves are still good, though. *heh*

So, we looked around, doing our due diligence, researching options on the web, and selected one from a Big Box home improvement center, the same one where we bought our Whirlpool washer/dryer set and nice Bosch dishwasher last summer. Yes, we would like to have purchased a new fridge last year, but we prioritized things a bit, ran the numbers and decided not to spend the cash that way last year. Instead, we lump summed out of our mortgage.

Now, with more than enough cash on hand, we decided to purchase the fridge we’d selected in July. Then, two days ago, my Wonder Woman noticed that it had gone on sale “through June 27” for $300 off the price we’d decided was our sweet spot. So, we went in to make the purchase and arrange delivery, instead of ordering online (because I needed some plumbing and electrical supplies and because I like making sure the salespeople there get their commission. Makes ’em glad to see me coming *heh*. It was no surprise they had none in stock. No problem as they could order it in. But while we waited for the salesperson to finish up with another customer, we looked around a bit anyway.

Oh. Wait. My Wonder Woman saw a fridge that had been on my own short list but t aprice point we didn’t want to (not couldn’t but didn’t want to) pay. The manufacturer was running a (apparently, “Gotta clear out our inventory!”) special: $610 off, placing it, with nearly 8 cubic feet more storage and a couple of other gewgaws and gimcracks, at juuuust under the one we’d come to purchase.

Got it. The four year extended warranty was also less. Got that. The plumbing kit for the icemaker (to replace the old, old line now semi-installed *heh*) was also less. Heck, with the savings on the bigger fridge with more doodads (features), etc., my additional plumbing and electrical supplies only brought us about even with what we’d been planning to pay for the fridge alone.

Not too shabby.

I love it when a plan comes together. I’m also thankful that “lucky” can still beat “planning” every now and then. 🙂

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I’m Not Complaining… Honest!

The Joplin tornado event took down our ISP for a couple of days. Seriously. Only a couple of days. A tornado plowed right through the infrastructure it uses (cable) and took out tons and tons of essential infrastructure, and it was back online in a couple of days’ time.

Not bad.

So when I post the access speeds below, I’m NOT complaining. Heck, they still beat the heck out of DSL “speeds” from our local baling wire and tin cup telco–and at lower cost–so I have nothing to complain about, but I still can hardly wait for stutterless video feeds, etc…

OK, I am going to bitch a bit about these “speeds”:

*sigh* Gag me.

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Hot-Cha-Cha!

Well, the (only) four habanero plants I put out this year are getting some great growth (all this rain, I suppose) but not yet flowering. OTOH, one (of the 28 *heh*) jalapeño plants has not only flowered but is bringing on peppers, already. Hot-cha-cha! (You really have to envision Jimmy Durante’s slightly different utterance for that to work properly. 🙂 OK, here…)

The tomato plants are just getting huge; no flowering or fruiting yet. But growing like gangbusters.

And my amaranth, sown from seed–the same seed I cook up for a “cereal”? REALLY growing, fast! Like it! We’ll just have to see how that stuff produces. I’ll likely have to thin the plants out quite a bit, but that just means greens and shoots (and stems to use sorta like rhubarb).

Not much of a garden, but it has things that please us. Oh, and mixed in are marigolds (also a lovely plant) and my Wonder Woman’s impatiens (and the morning glory she loves that I’m letting come back a little). Gone is almost all the mint and finally nearly all the Virginia Creeper. Sadly, our dandelion crop has been sparse this year. I don’t know why. Plenty of wild onion, though. Yum.

Now, how to make best use of all the “yard vine” in the back yard… hmmm… it’s said to make a nice topical analgesic, so…

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Weather Offlines TWC Central

Update: More rain last night and more expected over the next few days. The creek behind twc central hasn’t advanced over its banks, although downstream, due to other tributaries and some backing up from overfull, constricted areas downstream–as close as 1/4 mile–it’s still pretty hairy.

Still no internet connection @twc central, so updates are going to be sparse. Here’s a pic from yesterday,down by the bridge about 1/4 mile south of us. Do note that the date stamped by the camera is off by one day. The pic was taken on the 24th.

Note the rock and gravel washed up on the other side that’s completely blocking the street.

The tornado that struck (one of dozens in the area, according to reports) about 35-40 miles north of America’s Third World County took our ISP down for most of this area. I’m (in an undisclosed location *heh*) a mini-buncha miles south of twc central in a library parking lot leeching off its public WiFi, now.

No pics of the devastation north of us. Son&Heir drove up there yesterday, unaware of the destruction, since our cable–all of it,TV and internet–had been down since about the time the tornado hit, and we’re not really much of a radio family (for one thing, living in a “radio black hole” has kind of trained us away from listening, and for another, there’s not a lot ofselection around here anyway). Anywho, we got a direct report, but since he was trying NOT to rubberneck (and cause an accident) but just get out of the way quickly, no pics from him, either.

But, here are some pics from about 200′ behind twc central. Note that yesterday’s pic is on the right and this a.m.’s is on the left. What a difference a DAY MAKES, EH?

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Noah? Wherefore Art Thou, Noah?

From around Elk River, here in America’s Third World County:

About 6 miles south-southeast of twc central.

Now, I’ve canoed under that bridge with the river at normal levels, and the underside was ~20′ overhead. Water’s sure stacking up downstream as the water’s fed into the river upstream at a continuous pace of “pretty darned fast”.

BTW, there’s a pretty good drop off from where you can see that lil stand of electric poles and transformers on down to the usual river bed and a pretty good lil stretch of bottom land there. The pic was taken from a side road that MODOT has now listed as closed.

Luckily, our lil “crick” about 300′ back of twc central isn’t really rising nearly as fast or as much as the creek further downstream that it’s feeding (and which itself feeds,way on down, into Elk River), but if things keep going, we might just see some water approach our back door. Hope not. Be a mess to clean up.

Just barely south of where Lovely Daughter lives, in Benton County, AR, this roadside park just east of Highway 71:

You can’t tell from the pic, but the water’s flowing pretty strongly through there.

Here’re some shots from a town about 12 miles south-southwest of twc central. The first features a two-story building on a campground on a slight rise from Elk River. The second is a little later and of the highway from which the roof of the building in the first photo can be looked directly across to: