Apartment Update
Remember the dead dishwasher? Then the replacement with the bad valve?
When the landlord found the valve would cost $60 rather than, say, a trivial $20, he decided to take it up under warranty, since it was a brand new purchase from Home Dopes.
His son brought back the bad valve to put it back, gave it a sanity check (still bad), and they lined up GE to come here Tuesday between 8:00 and 5:00 to replace it. So yay, dishwasher Tuesday, I hope. Not that hand washing is that bad; I often find it relaxing and contemplative. But why not smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em?
Speaking of smoke, that subsided a lot when I closed almost all the storm windows for the winter. A couple of them in the kitchen don’t have glass, so can never be sealed fully. Naturally it got warm again after that and we had to start opening windows again. The air purifiers also help when it gets bad.
Without looking hard for exact sources of leaks, I found it comes in the cabinet to the left of the stove. Apparently that one is somehow open to a draft from below, but is completely sealed off from the cabinet beside it. Naturally the leaky one doesn’t look like there are any holes, at a glance. I have to check it out further. We also believe smoke may come through the stove vent, as it appears frying onion fumes sometimes do. They make covers for them to wear when not in use.
More important is the freezing master bedroom. If the door is closed and it’s, say, 32° outside, the bedroom is maybe in the fifties. Which means if the door is open, it’s making the heat work hard to keep it within, say, ten degrees of the rest of the apartment. The big closet is the worst, like a spare refrigerator, but even with its door closed, the bedroom is bad. Solving this needs to be a priority, so we won’t have to turn it into a computer and book room, and move our bedroom into my office.
We haven’t hooked up Deb’s big computer yet, but I brought home a small rolling desk a server was on at the office and that’s in the living room with the laptop and a network cable across the floor into the office. Sadie has left it completely alone and is content to have her mother at the computer because she’s in that room. Woohoo! We might end up with the big computer in the bedroom and the laptop remaining in the living room as a matter of convenience. Meanwhile, it makes a computer desk a low priority, even if it is only $40 to a max of $99 for one that’s comfortable to type at, designed for the purpose, and fits in the space.
I did get a phone, finally. You can get a cordless with caller ID for $14 and change at Wal-Mart. Cost me almost that for wire and a jack to wire the place properly and not have cords strung about. At least I already had the cable to wire the place for networking as needed.
It’s amazing the stuff you find you need upon moving to a new place. And that’s if no appliances die like the washer did. The microwave tried to die. The LED display no longer works properly. I’d hate to have to replace it, as it’s been so good. I still haven’t gotten the new shower head, which will save the bathroom from getting as wet, and save hot water and money too. Not to mention making some things easier, like rinsing Sadie’s increasingly thick hair in the bath.
We recently met the older gentleman downstairs. Turns out he is the nicest guy! He loves hearing Sadie pattering across the floor up here. He was coming down the steps outside, which is a good bit of work as he walks hunched over with two arm brace/crutch things. Sadie gave him her patented suspicious look she gives most people at first. He said he didn’t blame her; he’s scary looking. Heh.
It’s much easier to tolerate something like the cigarette smoke from people you like. Not that it does any good if I get sick from it. I was suspicious that might be the problem when they found my blood pressure elevated this week.
Anyway, enough babbling. I need to go to the office and play with servers. If I weren’t doing that, I’d want to work on the new Carnival of the Capitalists site. It has a domain and a default blog template deployed so far, but that is all.
we created the carnival of marketing, http://okdork.com/index.php/2005/11/13/carnival-of-marketing-1/
thought you might want to check it out.
noah
Posted by noah on 11/14 at 12:07 PM
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