Sheep Guarding Llama

Now that we no longer have the little hamster to worry about we are keeping the house dramatically colder than we used to. When Dominica is around I set the thermostat to 64F but when it is just me I drop it down to 62F. At night, sometimes, I knock it down a little further. We were never able to do that before because the hamster couldn’t handle temperatures like that and had no way to keep himself warm. So he was really making it cost a lot more in utility bills. It is really handy that this winter with heating fuel being so expensive that we are able to run the furnace as little as possible. We have been being very diligent about keeping the extraneous rooms of the house sealed off so as to act as insulators to the main part of the house. We are really fortunate that the house is designed in such a way that the main living areas and areas that we would like to keep warmer are generally away from outside walls. Because it is a townhouse and the living space’s largest border wall is against our neighbor we have a naturally insulated wall on that side that we don’t have to worry about. And almost all of the outside rooms we can close off and not heat and that is a pretty major insulator to the rest of the house. So I think that we have managed to turn this house into a very energy efficient place.

I slept in a little while this morning because the puppy was being really cuddly. Then we got up and got ready to go out. Dad came over just after noon and we took my car over to Lakeville to get it inspected for my new insurance. Only took a few minutes. We have to do the same with Dominica’s car on Monday. We took Oreo along since the sun was so bright that it would keep the car relatively warm even though it was really bitterly cold outside.

We drove up to the city and met with Eric and John at the Distillery on Mt. Hope near the hospital for a late lunch. We hung out there for several hours. We arrived a little after one and didn’t end up leaving until closer to five. John had to get to the airport as he was flying back down to Maryland. Dominica and I are going down there next weekend for the company Christmas party.

I had to get back down to Geneseo to get ready to go down to Castile as I was asked to speak at the PTA meeting this evening. I wanted a little time at home before leaving to get changed and think about what we were going to talk about.

I did manage to finally get the last of my computerized music files backed up today. It took six DVD’s to fit them all. That was quite a chore moving them all and them burning them all. I only have an old 1x DVD writer and that means that it takes about one hour per disc to burn and an additional hour per disc to verify and a little longer than that even to move the files over the network. So it was a really major effort to get all of them backed up.

I left for Castile at 6:30. I got down there a little early but that was good because it gave me a chance to find out what they wanted me to talk about. The meeting started at 7:30 and ran for about an hour and a half. Then there was another hour and a half or so of “meet and greet” where the parents could talk directly to teachers. So I managed to leave the school at about 10:00 which is the same time that Dominica was leaving work.

I tried stopping at a couple of places on the way home but every place had just closed as I was going by. So I got home and played with Oreo for a little bit who was very scared because no one was home with him. Dominica got home a few minutes after I did and we decided to go out to Denny’s to get some dinner since neither of us had eated anything since lunch.

We stopped by the hotel just five minutes before Mary got out of work and drove her over to Denny’s too. We hung out there for about two hours. It started to snow pretty badly and Mary needed to get back home to Silver Springs before the roads got to be too bad.

I got up just as Dominica was leaving for work. It is tough to pull yourself out of bed when the puppy is being really snuggly and he does that a lot. Today he decided to take over Dominica’s portion of the bed and was sleeping right in the spot that was still warm from her sleeping there and he even put his head on her pillow. It was really adorable.

It was a very uneventful day. I worked from home all day long. John Nicklin flew into town today but he is busy all day so I won’t get a chance to talk to him until tomorrow.

I called dad this afternoon and we decided to get some dinner together. It wasn’t until minutes before he was supposed to be arriving here that he realized that his car was in the shop. So I drove over there and picked him up for a change. The weather turned really bad on the way over and we decided just to drive down to Cooks down the hill and get subs down there. Oreo rode along and slept in the car while we were there. The roads were pretty bad so we decided not to drive anywhere extra.

Dominica came home and we just watched some Keeping Up Appearances before going to bed.

I had to get up this morning and take Min’s car into Jiffy Lube to get an oil change and a radiator coolent change.

Our Jiffy Lube isn’t able to get Mobil ONE regularly anymore. What a pain that is likely to turn out to be. We loved being able to go right over there and getting our Mobil ONE without having to make an appointment or anything. Now we are, most likely, going to have to switch to a normal garage for our oil changes which will be a lot more of a hassle. JL is going to try to get us the oil but apparently the local store is not allowed to do their own ordering and their corporate bosses are not willing to let them know whether or not they can have the oil that their customers want. So we will have to start calling down there and seeing if they have gotten it yet or we will just have to go elsewhere. I can’t believe that it is worth losing their highest paying customers over corporate versus store internal political issues.

There is snow on the ground and Oreo’s skin problems are going away again. We are totally convinced that he has a grass allergy and that that is what makes him itch so badly. He is going to really enjoy winter, I think.

I finally wrapped up getting all of the old SGL Podcast shows uploaded to the Internet Archive this morning and was able to clear the old ones off of Min’s desktop. That will help a lot. Her machine was filling up so quickly. It was out of control. Now I am working on backing up our one Linux desktop that we have in the basement so that I can get it removed from service and moved on to other things. Always some project or other going on.

Dominica went to class this morning and was very happy to be able to drive on her new Nokian tires. She is very relieved to have her car safe to drive again.

Dad came over around 4:00 and we took our Christmas pictures with the puppy. It was kind of sad because originally we had been hoping to have figured out a way that we could have had Mr. Humphries in the picture but he was gone by the time we actually got around to taking the picture. Overall, though, we think that the pictures turned out pretty well. I will post the ones that didn’t make the cut to Flickr once I get a chance.

After taking care of the pictures dad looked at what could be done to fix the dryer that has never really worked. We were all sitting around in the living room talking about problems with the dryer when Dominica decided that it was finally time, after over two years of having the dryer not work, to admit that when she hooked up the dryer that she had put an old pair of pantyhose over the vent thinking that it would keep lint out of the duct work because someone had told her that. Dad and my eyes got really big as we realized how blessed we had been to not have had the house burn down. We knew right away why the dryer wasn’t working properly. We decided to deal with it later but boy did we all have a laugh when we realized that all of this time, over two years in fact, that that was all that the problem was. Dominica was under the impression that I had been around when the dryer was hooked up but I wasn’t. Unfortunately it was hooked up right around the time of our wedding and SGL was a little lean at the time because of everything going on so we know when the units were delivered but we don’t know exactly when they were hooked up or who was with Dominica when she did it.

Everyone but me was tired of the Omega so we went down to the “Ames” plaza and got the buffet at the Shanghai. They really do have a great buffet. Nothing to blow your socks off but all of the food is good, the price is right, the service is really friendly and there is a decent selection. I have a hard time believing that they are making a profit down there. It is never crowded. Maybe I just always go at the wrong time.

We came home and Dominica and I set to taking the dryer out and seeing what the situation was like behind it. I have never been back there before so it was all new to me. Sure enough, the pantyhose that had been stretched over the dryer exhaust was completely filled with lint and had been forced about four or five inches down into the next pipe all packed full of lint. Then I had to pull out about eighteen more inches of lint that had built up in the pipe in front of it. There sure wasn’t any air at all getting down to the actual exhaust pipe. The pressure had built up behind the dryer enough to cause it to separate the duct that went into the wall so the dryer was venting, as much as it could, all over the floor. The floor was covered in a layer of lint that had obviously been in water as well. So we cleaned everything up and removed the pantyhose. It was all very funny since the house hadn’t actually burned down. We put the dryer back in place and decided to give it a test run.

The first load of laundry that Dominica did in the dryer took only fifty minutes to dry on the medium heat setting. Previously a load of laundry would take approximatly four hours on high heat to be able to get it dry. Yes, four hours. Boy is that going to make a difference in our house. I can’t believe that no one mentioned the pantyhose in the last two years. Dominica kept telling me that she was sure that she had hooked up the dryer incorrectly but I couldn’t figure out what could possibly have been done wrong as long as the dryer was connected to the pipe going out of the house.

Dad is still planning on working on the dryer venting system either Friday or Saturday. The plan is to take the vent from the dryer and instead of having it snake downward through the basement, across over half the length of the basement and then back up to go outside, we are going to have it go up from the dryer (hot air rises you know, as does water vapor) and go just a few feet forward and vent into the garage. It will make the garage a little dustier but that isn’t too big of a deal. One of the benefits is, though, that we will heat the garage a little bit which will help to reduce our heating costs in the tiniest way during the winter months by warming that one wall. Since that one wall is a major cold wall in the house it might actually help a little. During the warm months we keep the window in the garage open so it is no big deal because the air changes out in there pretty rapidly. We will never notice a difference.

I can’t decide what is wrong with our Chia herb garden. The marjoram is growing great and the chives seem to be okay. But the cilantro and the dill are just about dead. They have all been treated the same. Maybe they are more susceptilble to the cold.

After we took care of all of that we decided to go down to the theatre for a change and watch Bring It On which I haven’t seen in almost three years now. That used to be one of the most popular movies when we lived in Ithaca but I have never owned a copy of it until this week. We then watched an episode of Dark Angel Season One. That show is okay. Nothing special. It definitely has the feel of being a super low budget Canadian show made in Vancouver. There is just a feel you get from low budget shows from that town. I would put money on it being from there. It totally looks like a show from the 80’s or early 90’s like Silk Stalkings. And the credits are supoer low budget too like they were from a college student’s film project. The whole show is just cheap. But it isn’t bad. The storyline is marginally interesting. Min was really tired and has to work tomorrow so she went to bed after one episode. She has all ready watched them all so they don’t hold her interest that much. I haven’t seen them yet so it isn’t so bad for me. I stayed up and watched one more episode before going upstairs to work on the podcasts for the evening.

I had to get up this morning to meet dad at 8:45 so that we could take Dominica’s car over to Livonia to get her new snow tires put on. Dominica was going to go with us but she barely slept at all last night. She didn’t even try coming to bed until after three in the morning. She is taking Mr. Humphries’ passing quite hard. I took it hard but I have lost a lot of pets over the years. This is the first loss of a pet for her where the pet actually knew her (as opposed to say, fish, which only know that food falls from the sky.) So she and Oreo stayed in bed for a long time today. Dad and I went to the Omega and got breakfast. I am doing a lot better today. I am still very sad that my little friend is gone. The house seems a lot more empty now. There is no one waiting on my desk to say good morning to me. No one to check on at night when we turn in. Mr. Humphries was my pet when my mom died. He and I spent long hours sitting together in the dining room just being sad together. The Lord provided him to me when I really needed a little a pet to comfort me.

Eric finally got a laptop today. But it is totally useless. They got him a really overpriced laptop and took all of the features off of it. He isn’t allowed to use the Internet. They only allow him to use dial-up. He is not allowed to install a printer. He is not even allowed to have a current and supported Microsoft operating system. They took the Windows XP that came on his laptop off and installed old, outdated Windows 2000 instead. He only has Office 2000. Two versions old and just about to be another. They claim that they lock him out of the machine for his own protection. But they don’t allow him to patch his machines, to have a client side firewall or to run anything current and safe. The machine is both useless and dangerous. He doesn’t even have a way to backup his machine.

I almost forgot to renew my car insurance. What a week this has been. That would have been really bad. I am switching from Progressive to Traveller’s. I was really happy with the service from Progressive but Traveller’s is lowering my insurance by over $1,200 a year and that is just too much to pass up.

Min’s car was ready around 1:00 and she was up and out of the shower by 2:00. So I called dad and he came right over so that we could take care of all of the things that needed to be taken care of today. Today is a miscellaneous stuff kind of day.

We got the car and had lunch/dinner at the Omega Grill, as always. We didn’t end up taking the Christmas picture that dad had come over to take because Dominica was still so upset from losing Mr. Humphries that she didn’t feel that she would be able to smile for the picture. So we made it an early evening.

Dominica knit and I worked on the computer for a little while before we decided to move into the living room and watch Keeping Up Appearances which is light and funny and helped to take our minds off of things.