Home – Fascination Place

Maintenance Year

This year feels like it’s been a big maintenance year, which isn’t a bad thing, and I feel like we got a lot of stuff done in that space this year.

A maintenance year doesn’t sound very exciting, but the biggest piece of maintenance was in fact quite exciting: Finishing the almost-2-year-long renovation of our vacation home on the east coast. We were fortunate to have a fantastic contractor who worked closely with us from a continent away to get it done, and it turned out amazing. We made 3 trips back there this year. First, in May to get things ready. Second, our big trip in July with friends, which started off with a 2-day delay and then was a lot of fun but was ridiculously busy, especially for me. And then again in September, just the two of us, which started off with a hurricane but ended up being a nice and mostly-relaxing trip.

We’re very glad to have it done, and are looking at spending time there regularly over the next few years. The cross-country fight is a bit of an oof, but we’ll figure it out.

In late summer I wrote that August was all by itself a month of maintenance, replacing our dishwasher, getting a major service on my car, and deep-cleaning the bathrooms and doing a bunch of yard work.

Fall is when the yard work ramps up anyway, as the sycamore tree in front of our house keeps me busy raking for a couple of months. The December storms knocked down almost all of its leaves so I think I finished a little early this year.

Early in the year we had some sections of our fence fall over, and we had them repaired (which mainly involved replacing the rotting posts), and then this fall we had them out again to replace several other posts. I feel like we get this done more often than I’d like, so maybe we should investigate getting treated lumber which won’t rot in the ground at some point.

In November I had another car repair, as my car – a 2015 VW Eos convertible – had been leaking in the rain, and it turns out it needed some drainage holes cleaned out. It was a little cheaper than estimated, and the rains we’ve gotten in the past month have shown that it worked, as it hasn’t leaked again. I am a little concerned that my discontinued-model car will be more expensive and difficult to maintain as time goes on – for more than just its age – so it might not last too many more years. We’ll see. (Long-time readers may recall that my previous car lasted 16 years, and the car before that I had for 9 even though it was 3 years old when I got it.)

We also had people out to clean the gutters and windows, which they really needed. We should probably do the gutters at least every other year, if not more. Once again, the storms this month validated the decision to do this.

In December we had an electrician come in to fix a bunch of lights in the kitchen. We have recessed lights all over the house, but while most of them are screw-in halogen flood lights (which I’ve been replacing with LED floods as they burn out), the six in the kitchen we push-in fluorescent lights, and the last two that died had the bases of the bulbs disintegrate when I tried to replace them. Apparently this is a common problem, so we got the whole fixtures replaced with built-in LED lights which will last 50,000 hours, probably meaning 20 years or more, which seems pretty good. We also got a pendant light over the island fixed, as well as an under-cabinet light. (And we might replace the fluorescent under-cabinet lights with LEDs at some point, as I replace those bulbs more often than any others in the house.)

I spent part of the holiday break cleaning up stuff in our study, tossing quite a few things, and I also have a couple of boxes of books to try to sell to the one remaining used book store in the area. I even made enough space on the shelves to empty one of the two remaining boxes from our move 12 years ago.

This year I struggled with plantar fasciitis and a strained achilles tendon, resulting in my taking most of September off from running. The fasciitis was by far the most annoying of the two, but it seems to have gone away this winter, which suspects that I need to find better summer footwear. The strained achilles has been naggingly annoying but no more than that. It’s gotten better too, but isn’t 100%. All part of being overweight and getting older, I guess.

I read about a book every other week this year, which may not sound like much but I maxed out at a little more than a book a week back in the 90s, and these days I read a lot more stuff than novels and comics. I’m still plugging my way through Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos series as my before-bed reading, and will probably be ready to write a second entry about it soon. I decided to find alternate places to record my reading other than GoodReads (an Amazon site), so you can find me at The Storygraph and the SFBA Bookwyrm instance, if you care.

I’ve also continued to listen to lots of podcasts, at the rate of something like an hour and a half a day, mostly driving to and from work or going out walking or running. I keep up-to-date on many podcasts, but I have a large backlog where I am almost up to the end of 2020. Sheesh!

One thing that’s been receding in my life is Magic the Gathering. I mostly play limited Magic – draft and sealed – rather than constructed, and frankly this has been the worst year for limited Magic that I can recall. 4 of the 5 drafts formats were ridiculously fast, and the other was also pretty fast, which I find pretty tedious because it’s so easy to fall behind and so hard to catch up if you do. Moreover, I think fast formats reward people who are good at drafting and deckbuilding, and I think my strength is in playing the games, while my drafting is mediocre and my deckbuilding is weak. I lost games at a 75% clip during Wilds of Eldraine, and was miserable doing so; it’s my least-favorite draft format ever. So I think I’m going to step back from it for a while, and when new sets come out wait to see if the consensus is that the format is fast. If it is, then I’ll probably skip it.

Instead, back in September I picked up Marvel Snap again. It’s a short-game format collectible card game on iOS which didn’t hold my interest for long when I tried it in late 2022, but has been just what I needed as I stepped back from Magic. It’s probably worthy of its own post at some point, but it’s been making me happy. It probably helps that I’ve won at a pretty good rate, and with a few decks I built myself (though I’m certainly not too proud to netdeck).

I’ve basically stepped back entirely from Twitter/X (often styled derogatorily as ‘Xitter’, which I like the pronounce with the ‘X’ as an ‘Sh’) and its legion of fascists and white supremacists, starting with the chief Muskrat. I mostly post on Mastodon, and sometimes on Bluesky, though Bluesky feels like Twitter of 2012 in its technology so it’s hard to get too excited about posting there. Hopefully 2024 will see it ramping up its development efforts significantly.

On the home front, we’ve been continuing to integrate Domino into our lives. Debbi got his DNA tested and he’s primarily a pit bull mix, which I could see once I looked at several styles of pit bulls. He’s particularly got the pit bull torso, but he has his own unique features such as his curly tail and his helicopter ears.

Domino and the cats still don’t get along, especially D and Jackson (who is starting to look like an older cat as he just turned 11). He’s doing better with Simon and Edison, but we still keep them separated. I sometimes joke that the circle in our household is that Debbi wants to hang out with the dog, the dog wants to hang out with me (because he thinks I play harder, I think), I want to hang out with the cats, and the cats want to hang out with not-the-dog (though I think if he were chill around them then they’d be okay with him, especially Simon). This means that Debbi and I spend more time in separate rooms than we used to, which isn’t great, but it’s working so far.

So it’s been a pretty busy year, and I feel like we accomplished a lot, even if it wasn’t the most exciting year ever. But with the 2024 elections coming up, I am definitely feeling like I don’t want to live in interesting times!

Farewell, Hobee’s Mountain View

Hobee’s is a NorCal breakfast institution. There are other good breakfast places around, but Hobee’s has the double threat of also having good lunches, and that’s before you get into their yummy coffee cake.

Hobee’s was founded in Mountain View in 1974 in a former Dairy Belle burger joint. And it turns out the first location is in walking distance of my house! I started going there when I moved to Mountain View in 2001, but before that I’d been to the Palo Alto and the now-defunct Cupertino locations. Hobee’s emphasized meals made from natural and often California-sourced ingredients, and I’m pretty sure they didn’t have a deep fryer.

In 2015 the original owners sold the chain to a pair of employees. For some chains this might have been the beginning of the end, but it seemed to breathe new life into the Mountain View location: New lights, new physical menus, and some nice changes to the menu contents, my favorite being the addition of buttermilk pancakes, as I’d never been a fan of the whole wheat ones. Late in the pandemic they set up tents and outdoor seating in the parking lot and they were the first restaurant we started going to regularly once we got vaccinated.

Sadly, all good things come to an end, and we learned a little over a week ago that yesterday would be the end for Hobee’s Mountain View. They wanted to make some upgrades to their space, but the landlords were unwilling to do what they wanted. The mall they’re in is old, decrepit, and half empty, so none of this really surprised me. (I’m more surprised that there’s a new massage parlor in it, as it seems the end is not far off. Then again, the Sunnyvale mall for my comics store used to be seemed to be in that state a decade ago, and it’s still shambling along. I guess there’s just enough demand for these aging and presumably low-rent retail spaces.)

We made two trips to the place last week, for breakfast on Monday (when the coffee cake was especially good), and for lunch on Wednesday. I took some indoor photos, but as they have people in them, I’m not going to share them here. They’ll make for some nice memories, though.

Hopefully they’ll be able to find a new space in Mountain View, though it’s very unlikely it will be as convenient to us as their old one was. Meanwhile, I guess we’ll be driving to the Palo Alto location in the future. And boy has it been a long time since I’ve been there.

The exterior of Hobee's restaurant Mountain View

Halloween 2023

Halloween seemed a little quieter this year. I didn’t write about last year (though I did write about the season in Boston a week earlier), but I thought that things were basically back to pre-pandemic levels for trick-or-treaters. Our street is pretty nuts when it comes to the flocks of kids, and even in 2020 we got about 50 kids, before the COVID vaccines were available.

We set up our usual little Halloween light display earlier in October. Walking around the neighborhood there were a lot fewer houses with lights up than in past years. I’m sure people were more motivated to put the effort in during lockdown, but really there were very few this year.

We usually buy at least 4 big bags of candy from Target or Costco each year, and this year Debbi bought a couple more than that. Then we set up our large folding table in the driveway to hand out candy. This way people aren’t constantly coming to the door, which is important because it would be constant at the peak of the evening, and neither the cats nor the dog get freaked out. (Domino spent the evening in the guest room, where I think he was mostly bored. The cats took turns looking out the front window.)

One of our neighbors came to sit with us to hand out his own candy, and a few other neighbors set up in their driveways, and sometimes we’d wander among each other to say hi.

The first couple of young kids came by between 5 and 6, and the numbers gradually ramped up until about 7:15 when it remained a pretty steady stream until 9 pm. In past years there would usually be one or two waves where there would be a crowd almost as far as the eye could see, but this year I think we maybe ended up with 10 or 12 people at once as its peak. We let people pick their own two pieces of candy off the table, which was funny because some kids would think very seriously about it, and some would pointedly take the not-chocolate ones. And then there was a girl who just said, “Whoppers are awesome!”

In the end we guess we had about 300 people pick up candy, and it turns out we overbought by maybe a third of that, so we have a bunch left over. New neighbors never believe us when we say how many people come through our street, so almost everyone else runs out before the night is over. But by 9:15 everyone’s just about done. We suspect that our street gets a lot of people because it ends at a major road and one of the houses on that corner puts up a huge Halloween display which attracts people from out of the neighborhood. Plus we have two elementary schools and a middle school nearby. But even just the next block over they get maybe half as many kids as we do.

Inflatable costumes seemed popular this year, including someone in an 8-foot-tall Garfield outfit. And while last year Wednesday Addams was the popular character (we saw a couple last night too), this year it was Spider-Man, presumably because of Across the Spider-Verse having been out over the summer.

We wound down with a late dinner and a little playtime for the dog. By bedtime there was no one walking the street that we could see. And this morning decorations were already coming down.

I’ll wrap up with one of the neighborhood houses which does put on a big display. It’s a little freaky to walk past it before 8 in the morning and have a spider jump out at you:

Halloween decorations at a house with two animatronic werewolves, a witch, spiders, and a 12-foot-tall pumpkinhead.

A Month of Maintenance

More like a month and a half of maintenance, to be frank.

Since we got back from Massachusetts in mid-July, I’ve spent sizable chunks of my weekends doing home maintenance and improvement.

The big thing we did was to buy a new dishwasher. Debbi never cared for our old GE dishwasher, and while I thought it was okay, I admit it was loud. And it didn’t always do the best job of cleaning things. Maybe it wasn’t so okay. But the forcing factor was that it started leaking: We’d occasionally find a bunch of water at the bottom of the machine, or worse, on the kitchen floor. And our cat sitter got to clean up a spill while we were away. So it was time. We replaced it with a Bosch SHP865ZP5N from Airport Home Appliance, which is where we bought our refrigerator two years ago. We’re pretty happy with the no-nonsense experience we’ve gotten there, as well as the ease of delivery and installation.

Installation did come with one little hiccup: The valve for the water at the wall was stuck and had to be replaced, which was not cheap. A little annoying since they basically had us as a captive audience for the installation. They said these valves break all the time because they’re all pretty cheap these days. Someone on Facebook suggested we should test them all every year, but it’s not like I want to replace them myself, or hire someone to come out and replace any ones which stick. Still, this valve lasted about 15 years, which doesn’t seem too bad.

Most of my other work has been in the yard. Our yard is pretty nice, but it’s about 15% larger than I have the time and energy to care for, so projects have built up over time. Consequently, I’ve spent a few hours each weekend cutting back the jasmine, trimming the rosemary, and pulling up tree seedlings and blackberry vines. The plum tree has suddenly decided to produce a whole bunch of plums this year, which caused many of its branches to start leaning to one side, so I gave it a good pruning, too. The plums are not great, and there was way more than we could eat even if they were great, so I’ve been raking them up occasionally, but they’re pretty messy. I’m also getting ready to start trimming back the fig tree which has been slowly growing over our fence since we moved in.

I also cleared out a space and bought six cubic feet of dirt to start a dirt pile for Domino to dig in. I probably need to buy another six-to-ten cubic feet to make it really satisfying, but it’s a start.

Then last weekend I give our bathrooms a good deep cleaning, mopped the floors, and scrubbed the floor of the master shower, which it really needed. So they’re just about as clean as they’ve been since we moved in. I also want to mop the kitchen floor.

Then I took my car in for its annual maintenance, where it needed its serpentine belt changed. It also has a leak which is likely around the seals for the convertible top (some might remember that I have a Volkswagen Eos), and is going to be expensive to fix. So I decided to defer that until we get closer to the rainy season.

Car ownership seems like it’s gotten a lot more expensive in the past decade! Or maybe it’s just the difference between Hondas and VWs.

We’re also coming out of a long stretch of warm weather, after a stretch of what seemed like cooler-than-normal weather. Globally, July was the hottest month on record. Here in my hometown:

In May, we had highs in the high 60s (°F) in the first third of the month, highs between 70 and 85 in the second third, and in the low 70s in the last third.
In June highs were in the 70s almost every day until a spike at the end of the month – which I was back east. These are what I recall were typical summer temperatures when I first moved here.
I was gone for the first third of July, but highs were consistently in the 80s for the rest of the month.
And August was more of the same, with several spikes in the low 90s, and a few days with highs in the high 70s. And the overnight lows were stubbornly above 60 for about half of the month. It was also unusually humid, with dew points in the low 60s a number of times, which is nothing for places where it gets genuinely yucky, but it’s unusually moist for here.

So July and August were both hot. Yard work on some of those days was no fun, I’ll tell you. And our electric bill was not much fun either, thanks to the air conditioner. (Someday we’ll put in solar panels!)

(My data comes from Weather Underground.)

Out of curiosity I checked June-to-August for my first 2 years here, and my recollections match the data: Highs mostly in the 70s, with a few spikes along the way (though the data for 2000 looks untrustworthy).

Anyway, that’s enough of that; I’ll leave the deeper dives on historical temperatures to J.D. Roth.

We’ve also been having some challenges with Domino, in particular that he hasn’t wanted to sleep in his crate at night, panting and whining when we put him in there. We suspect he had some unpleasant event in there – maybe even just a bad dream – but it’s meant that Debbi has been sleeping with him in our guest room until we can figure it out. They’re going to see the vet soon to see if there’s anything physically wrong, though he’s been about the same in all other ways. Hopefully he’s okay, but it’s been frustrating.

Speaking of frustrating, I’ve also been dealing with both (self-diagnosed) plantar fasciitis and achilles tendinitis in my right foot. It’s been gradually getting better – the new running sneakers I bought have helped a lot – but not as fast as I’d like. I should probably look into some exercises to help with them, too. (Also: For some reason New Balance running sneakers run smaller than their walking sneakers. Shrug.)

So that’s been my summer, not counting work, since I rarely blog about that. I have spent most of the past week at work working on improving some long-neglected but still-useful code I’d been thinking about for a while. It’s been fun.

Hopefully we can continue to dodge COVID until we can get new boosters this fall, and otherwise enjoy some cooler weather this month, starting with this long weekend.

Rainbow over Mountain View, August 13, 2023
Rainfall was negligible
This photo doesn’t really do it justice

What a Week

It’s been a rough time around here at Château Whatever-We-Call-Our-House lately.

For me, the rough part actually started exactly two weeks ago, when I woke up to what turned out to be a pinched nerve in my right clavicle, with accompanying soreness there and down my left arm. Coincidentally this was just over 14 years since I had a pinched nerve in my neck on the right side with very similar symptoms. The difference is that last time I found a way to hold my head which could relieve the pressure temporarily, while this time I found one somewhat awkward position (holding my left arm up and bending it to touch the back of my neck) which provided a little relief, but not a lot. And it wasn’t conducive to, well, being able to do anything else. It was also worse when I was seated while driving. It was bad enough that it was disrupting my sleep.

Coincidentally I had a doctor’s appointment scheduled for Friday, where my doctor – who I’ve had for 20 years – prescribed the same thing he’d given me last time – methylprednisolone, a cortical steroid. I started the treatment on Saturday and slowly felt better over the next few days.

I also learned that I am probably developing tinnitis, which stands to be somewhat annoying, although my brain already seems to be rewiring itself to ignore it pretty effectively. It’s also been coming and going, so who knows. It beats the alternative, which apparently is that hearing sounds can be associated with cardiovascular problems. No, thanks.

Should I be feeling old now? Honestly I feel rather lucky: I could be dealing with much worse. I am so over this nerve pinch, though.

The next thing arrived on Tuesday, when a rain storm followed by an incredible wind storm knocked out power at home, and at work, and in large swaths of the South Bay. It also knocked over two sections of our fence. This has happened before, about 8 years ago, and we’ve had a number of posts replaced since then since the original builder did a poor job of putting them in cement. But it seems there’s yet more to do.

The power was projected to be out until Friday night. We picked up dinner both nights, and went to bed early. The animals were very confused. Debbi’s office had power, so she went to work on Wednesday while I walked to have breakfast at Hobee’s, and then cut back the jasmine on the fallen sections of fence so the repair guy could examine it.

A downed fence is not very compatible with a dog who spends a lot of time outdoors. Domino was actually really good about not going into the neighbor’s yard, though he was curious. (His yard is also fenced in, but not necessarily dog-proof.) So I took his 30-foot leash and attached it to our outdoor couch, which did a pretty good job to keeping him from wandering.

We charged our phones and watches from our laptops – since we weren’t really using them anyway. My comic shop guy even let me charge the laptops at his store when I went over on Wednesday.

Happily, the power came back on Thursday morning, a day and a half ahead of schedule, and I was able to go back to work, too. But we did throw away a lot of refrigerated and a little frozen food. (Our chest freezer in the garage did a good job of keeping everything solid, though.) I made a grocery store run to replace most of the food we’d tossed.

Friday the fence guy came by to give us an estimate, but also the bad news that they were scheduling out in May already. Boo! He said they were so busy they might start working Saturdays and might be able to fit us in that way. So this weekend we went to Home Despot and bought some temporary fencing. I mowed the lawn for the first time this year and then put it up. Domino was a little baffled but didn’t really test it. Debbi also bought a cable with a corkscrew anchor to attach him more firmly.

Finally, today while I was out for a post-lunch walk, the fence guy called Debbi and said they had an opening today. By the time I got back they were already setting up. So I grabbed some shears and cut away the rest of the jasmine blocking one of the posts they had to replace, and by the end of the afternoon our fence was back!

Amidst all this I’ve also been working on pulling together taxes, paying bills, and trying to have a little fun here and there as well.

My nerve is not entirely better, but it’s not significantly affecting my sleep (just annoying it a little). Hopefully it will clear up over the next month or so, and that it will be more than 14 years before I get another one.

Anyway, I think I’m ready to sleep for a week or two.

A Very Doggo Christmas

Debbi and I are both off work this week for the holidays. We haven’t really been feeling in the holiday spirit this year: It took us three weeks to put up most of our outdoor Christmas lights (in part because it rained two consecutive weekends), and we decided not to put up a tree. I’m not entirely sure why, but December has been a real slog for us.

I think the enduring memory of this holiday is going to be taking Domino to the park, which Debbi has been doing for a few weeks, and I started joining them in the afternoons the Friday before Christmas. We have a surprising number of dogs in the neighborhood, and many of their owners bring them over in the morning or late afternoon to let them off leash so they can run around. The park is completely fenced in (it’s a locked-gate school field during the school day), so it’s pretty safe for trained dogs to get off leash.

Training Domino to coexist for our three cats has been a big source of stress for us this year, and while he’s getting better, he and Jackson have some sort of antagonism going on, which has meant we’ve had to work to keep them segregated a lot of the time. He’s doing better with Simon and Edison, but not so we can leave them alone together.

The park is different. While he can be barky towards trucks, bikes, and joggers, at the park he goes around and says hi to every dog and human, and plays nice with pretty much everyone unless they’re a jerk to him. He enjoys chasing and being chased by other dogs, and while he sometimes wanders off a bit – sometimes even behind a building – he’s always come back so far. Debbi thinks he suddenly realizes he can’t see us and comes sprinting back.

Anyway, I’ve been enjoying these outings. We’re getting to know some neighbors – even if we only know them by their dogs’ names. I am still definitely more of a cat person, though.

Christmas Eve we went to Cascal for dinner, and then drove around looking at Christmas lights as we do every year. I noticed my car was struggling a bit to start at each place we stopped, and figured the battery might be nearing the end, and resolved to call on Monday to get it replaced.

We had a quiet Christmas Day. Debbi made very yummy cinnamon rolls for breakfast, and I made my traditional meatloaf and potatoes gratin for dinner. Last year I had a pretty stressful time making the meal, so this year I looked ahead to plan. Debbi suggested I could prepare the potatoes and hold them until I was ready to put them in the oven with the meatloaf, and it turned out that just starting the potatoes first made all the difference, because they had to boil for a while before baking, and I used that time to make the meatloaf. Anyway, it was all delicious as always, and I added the beet salad that I concocted for Thanksgiving dinner. We also called our families during the day.

Our gray-and-white tabby cat Jackson sitting in the middle of a pile of wrapping paper

Monday I made an appointment for my car for Wednesday, but it turned out my car didn’t start, so I figured I’d have to have AAA tow it in. Worse, late in the day we encountered a serious problem with our freezer: It had been having trouble closing at times, and now was both not opening all the way, nor closing all the way. I finally managed to close it after 15 minutes of tinkering, but we removed the important stuff to our chest freezer in the garage and decided to just leave the troubled freezer closed until it could be looked at.

Monday night Debbi ended up with what we think was food poisoning, maybe from one of the chicken pot pies we’d had for dinner after rescuing it from the freezer. It made her pretty miserable for a couple of days. We took COVID tests in case it was that, but they both came back negative.

On Tuesday Debbi made an appointment with a repair company for Friday – the fridge is still under manufacturer’s warranty, so we crossed our fingers that this would just be an inconvenience. Meanwhile I called AAA to tow my car, but the tow truck driver saw that I had a AAA-installed battery (from 2018) and that it would be a lot cheaper to do that than to go to the dealer. And indeed after a couple of phone calls (by him and me), we determined that it would be less than half as much, so I did that, and 30 minutes later the car was starting again. I cancelled the appointment for Wednesday.

Thursday we had our friends Chad and his son D over in the afternoon and evening for several hours of playing Magic together. Their family has also had a month, so I think they appreciated some downtime away from home. I gave D a playmat and some packs from The Brothers’ War as a late Christmas gift. We also picked up pizzas and subs for dinner from our nearby hole-in-the-wall place, which went over well. They were also Domino’s foster family and I think Domino really liked seeing them, even though I think he was confused that they were at our house and their dogs weren’t.

Friday we waited around for the repair guy, who arrived 3 hours into his 4 hour window. Fortunately it turned out to be an easy fix. The freezer had a number of cables inside which were getting twisted and blocking the track. I wondered why they’d have cables like that rather than just having the drawer be on the track, and it turns out – they didn’t. The cables were there to keep things from shifting around during transit, and they weren’t removed when the fridge was delivered like they were supposed to be. I don’t know why we were able to open the freezer at all, but the repair guy removed them all and it’s working fine now. The stupidity of the problem aside, it’s a relief that it wasn’t a problem with the freezer that could break again in another year.

Over the week I also watched the Watchmen TV series from 2019, which overall was excellent. I suspect people who aren’t pretty familiar with the graphic novel wouldn’t get as much out of it as people who are, but it’s well worth watching anyway. I’m not surprised the show runner decided not to do a second series, because it comes to a pretty definitive conclusion.

Finally, we’ve had a quiet day today. Domino has been going a bit stir crazy because it’s raining out and he doesn’t want to be out in the rain, but he doesn’t want to be inside all the time either. Debbi took him for a couple of walks, and then gave him a bath. I’ve mostly been hanging out on the couch. Tonight we’re playing games remotely with family and friends (probably Jackbox), and I’ll likely go for a walk after the rain ends since I haven’t gotten any exercise today.

2022 has been a pretty bumpy year, with a lot of ups and downs, and I suspect 2023 will be similar. But I’m hoping we don’t have to get as many things repaired.

So Much Adulting

The last four days have been a whirlwind of adulting. It’s been kinda exhausting.

Friday we had someone from AAA Furnace over to service our HVAC. Everything seems to be in good shape. I hung out to do anything needed inside (mostly adjusting the thermostat while he did his tests), partly because COVID, and partly because kittens.

Saturday was the big day, though.

After working out in the morning we went to Airport Appliance to buy a new refrigerator (per previous entries). We decided to go with this French door model by Beko, a Turkish company which is apparently huge in Europe and has been in the U.S. for about five years. It’s devilishly hard to find out how reliable fridges are – even if you find that one has been great, it was probably made 5 or more years ago, been discontinued, and who knows if the current models are as good. Internet reviews are generally useless, partly because a lot of them are just complaining, and partly because a review from someone who’s had their fridge for 6 months or less isn’t that helpful for reliability.

We had an additional wrinkle in that the space for our fridge is only 70″ tall, and many fridges are a bit taller than that. It turns out we actually have more space if we remove or trim the bracket immediately above the fridge, but we’d already made a decision when I realized that. Good to know for next time.

Anyway, we’re replacing a 13-year-old GE fridge, and not many companies make counter-depth fridges fridges that are 69″ high. GE makes several, but I’ve heard bad things about their newer models, and frankly we were not very impressed with the apparent build quality or the styling of those models. Whereas the Beko seemed generally more solid and we really liked the look of it.

We did buy the extended warranty, which means it should work for at least that long, right? Right??

Afterwards we had lunch at Yiassoo (a longtime favorite which has substantially improved their patio seating during the pandemic), and then came home and took Jackson and Sadie to the vet for their annual checkup. This was the first time Sadie rode in a carrier by herself, since we’d always brought her with Roulette. And she yowled the whole way there and back. Jackson was also unhappy, and even peed in the carrier on the way home. But, both of them are healthy and that’s what matters.

(Simon and Edison seemed to barely notice that we were all gone.)

After all that I went down to pick up some books I’d ordered from Books Inc., and did a grocery run.

In the evening I managed to find COVID vaccinations for Monday, about which more later.

Sunday was finally a quieter day. We went to the farmer’s market in the morning, and in the afternoon I wrapped up our taxes, which will be filed this week. I also did a Magic draft which I am playing out this week before Strixhaven comes out, and the first game was totally bonkers, lasting well over half an hour. (I won with 6 cards left in my deck!)

This morning we found that our fridge has gone out again, so we moved stuff into our chest freezer (which has plenty of space even with the stuff we’ve already put in it) and mini-fridge (which is pretty packed now). The new fridge will be delivered on Thursday, and what a relief that will be.

And finally today we went to Levi’s Stadium to get vaccinated. Despite having a little trouble finding the entrance, everything otherwise was smooth and easy. It took about an hour and a half including driving time. We joined House Pfizer, and six hours later neither of us has had any reactions, though apparently they could show up tomorrow. It’s great to finally be on our way! We rewarded ourselves with treats from McDonald’s on the way home. And I’ve been telling cow-orkers about our experience so they have some idea what to expect when signing up.

And today there was the police shooting of Daunte Wright in Minneapolis. I’m sure smarter and more informed people than me (probably none of them Republicans) will have a lot useful to say about this, but one thought I have is that if we’re not going to take guns away from the cops, let’s take tasers away from them. Tasers aren’t particularly safe either, and cops mistaking their tasers for guns is bad news. If all they have to fire is a gun, then at least they know what they’re signing up for when they draw their weapon.

In any event, there’s nothing I’ve read that says to me that Wright’s actions even merited tasing. What the hell was the cop thinking? Were they even thinking?

So, that’s been a lot of stuff, even just considering our stuff. I’m looking forward to the fridge being delivered, and dealing with much less stuff for a couple of weeks.

Lukewarm

This week’s unwanted excitement is that our freezer crapped out again. Worse, it did so on Monday, which was the last day of a 4-day weekend I’d taken off from work. So instead of a relaxing day reading and watching television, it was instead a day of stress and anxiety.

Last time we unloaded the freezer into a cooler and that night it started working again. This time we didn’t do that, and by Tuesday afternoon both the refrigerator and freezer were up around 54Â°F – not good for either one. We lost all of the food in the freezer except for a few things that we’d just been storing for long term, like some Girl Scout thin mints. There wasn’t anything in there that was a big loss – it’s all easily replaced – but it was a bummer.

But we did put some backup plans in motion. First we went to Home Despot and bought a mini-fridge, so that we can have, you know, cream for our morning coffee. And also butter. And eggs. Essentials. We also ordered a chest freezer, which is a bit less of an extravagance since we’ve been thinking for a while of getting one, as we always feel like we need more freezer space. Whether we need this much more freezer space, I don’t know, but it is just about the smallest model. It should be fine. Load it up with ice cream!

Of course, after we emptied the freezer of the spoiled food, the thing started working again. It lasted a couple of months after the last incident, and I suspect each time the problem was blocked air flow, possibly some vent getting iced over. So it might be fine for a few more months or longer. But, the fridge is about 13 years old and that’s near the lifespan of such appliances, so we’re going to replace it.

Figuring out what to replace it with, and from where, is the next trick. All of our kitchen appliances are GE, probably because our builder bought a package when he furnished the kitchen. But GE fridges don’t seem very reliable these days from what I’ve read (and from comments from friends). A few other brands also get low marks by word-of-mouth. So we’re leaning towards Whirlpool, Maytag, or maybe Frigidaire. A friend also said they had a good experience with Fisher Paykel, about which I know nothing. Debbi is intrigued by this Whirlpool model. But mainly we know we need a counter-depth model, and we’d like a french door design with a bottom freezer. That cuts out a lot of the options, so we’ll get what we get. And hopefully get another year out of it.

(How soon we get it is yet another question, as apparently there are some long delays in appliance delivery due to disruptions in the global supply chains.)

I’m kind of kicking myself for not having moved on this two months ago, but, it’s water under the bridge at this point.

So, it’s been kind of a lousy week because of all this. The fridge and the oven are the two appliances we really can’t do without during a global pandemic. But hopefully we’ll have it worked out soon.

Home Maintenance

Our house is now 11 years old (we’ve been in it for 8), which means – of course – that it’s time for little things to start failing.

Well, there’s a big thing which has been failing too, that being our lawn. But that one gets a bit of a pass since it got hammered pretty hard by California’s drought several years ago. I’ve been doing my best to keep it going and fix it up, but I’m about at the point of declaring bankruptcy on that and having someone in to re-sod it. The advantage to re-sodding is that maybe that will smooth out the very bumpy soil of the back yard. (Our soil is clay-like which is pretty annoying in several ways.) I wonder when the best time of year to do that work would be? Before the rainy season, which starts in a couple of months? Or after?

A slightly smaller thing is that we need to have several windows repaired. Some of them appear to have compromised seals, which the window cleaner last year told us is why they’re dirty between the two panes. But we also have a window which no longer opens, and another in which the outer pane broke mysteriously a few years ago (I suspect a bird flew into it or dropped something against it). Some of that might be covered by warranty, assuming the builder’s warranty transferred to us.

We also have a couple of faucets which have issues, and I suspect the issue is in the wall for both of them. One of them is the hot water for one bathtub (but not shower), so it’s not urgent; the other is the cold water for one of the sinks in the master bathroom, so it’s a little more important. We had a plumber in a few years ago for a different issue and he didn’t want to look at the sinks, so I suspect it will be a bigger job. (Or maybe he just wasn’t a very good plumber, or not rated to do that kind of work.)

More recently, we had a couple of light fixtures go out. One is one of the three pendant lights which hangs over our island. Of course the one over “my” spot at the island. Another is an under-counter light next to the stove. I might be able to fix the first one myself, but probably we’ll get an electrician to handle both.

The other outage is more amusing: The electrical outlets in the living room stopped working one evening. Not a huge deal because the overhead recessed lighting worked fine, but certainly annoying. We spent some time checking the three breaker panels around the house (upstairs, downstairs, outside) and flipping breakers, but nothing had been tripped, and no flipping fixed the issue. (We did find out that we need to evaluate and re-label some of the circuit breakers, though.) I was dreading having an electrician in for that and having it turn into a big thing. But a few days later I did some vacuuming and then plugged the hand vacuum into the one outlet in the laundry room to recharge – and its charging light didn’t come on! “Hmmm”, I said, and remembered that that outlet is one with a GFCI (since it’s near a utility sink), so I pressed its reset button, the charging light came on on the vacuum, and I checked the living room lights and they worked!

It is a little weird that the living room outlets are on the same circuit as the laundry room outlet, but to be fair there are no other outlets in the other small spaces around the laundry room, so putting it on a circuit with a larger room makes some sense. We’ll just have to remember that. It’s a relief to have it fixed.

I also did exciting things like changed a light bulb and fixed a latch on the sliding screen doors to our deck. I need to figure out why one of our drip sprinklers seems to be mostly-clogged, and replace an accent light in the back yard. And then see about getting our Internet service upgraded (which I’ve been dragging my feet on all year, on a probably-misplaced fear that they’ll do the upgrade and it will stop working for several days). And we want to get our bar stools reupholstered, as the faux-leather covering is flaking away faster and faster.

And fall means yard work. I’ve been trimming the jasmine on the back yard fences, and cutting back the bushes in front between our house and a neighbor’s. And fall also means endless raking until probably New Year’s as the sycamore tree over the front yard gradually drops thousands of leaves, mostly on our lawn.

My dad visited last week so some of this stuff has on hold for that and other reasons, but it should give us some stuff to do for the fall. Like we need things to do!

Open House 2018

Saturday we held our eighth annual open house – eighth even though we skipped the seventh, as we didn’t get our act together last summer with everything we had going on. Last week in additional to prepping we were watching the weather hoping it would cool off by Saturday from the highs in the mid-80s, and it did cool down some, with highs in the low 80s. Still, better than our 2013 open house when it was well up in the 90s, which made us close the doors and turn on the A/C! (And a good thing we didn’t hold it in late June like we usually do, since our home weather station claims it got up over 100° around then!)

So we closed the cats in the guest bedroom, bought and made food and drinks, scattered balls and bubble wands around the porch and back yard, and opened the doors around 2 pm.

In the last two years I’ve acquired several new cow-orkers, and Debbi got a new job this spring at EPRI, so we had a lot of new people to invite – and lots of them showed up! A few of our regulars weren’t able to make it – lots of people are busy in mid-August with weddings, vacations and family events – so it was a different mix of people, but with all the new people it might have been our largest party since the first one. We both gave a bunch of tours of the house to people who hadn’t been over before (we’re more than a little proud of our house, I’ll admit), and tried to spend at least a few minutes with everyone who came in.

I was glad to see that the kids had a good time playing in the yard, as we had a different mix of kids than usual, including a lot of first-timers. I think the only mishap (that I heard of, anyway) was that I went to clean bubble fluid off the face and hair of one girl, but that’s not so bad.

We learned that our friend Emma – who I met through Madison fandom in the 90s and who had moved to California before I did – had worked at EPRI as her first job out here, and knew a couple of Debbi’s cow-orkers who came to the party. Maybe I’d known that at some point, but she’d moved to another job by the time I came out here, so maybe not.

I was happy to have my previous admin, Cyndie – who retired last year – and my current admin, Debra, came to the party. And that my cow-orker Anders and his teenaged daughter came, as they have a very busy schedule and this year’s party happened to fall on a day they had some time available. Also, my cow-orker Jake, who started earlier this year, came with his wife, and gave us a (I think) pen-and-watercolor drawing she’d done of our house, which looks awesome!

Things wrapped up around 8 pm, and our friends Lisa and Michel and their kids hung out for a little longer and helped us clean up a bit (such as taking down the canopy they loaned us). Once they left we vegged out for a bit, and called it a night.

Sunday we alternated between cleaning up and lying on the couch, but mainly being really happy with how the party turned out. I hope everyone who came had as much fun as we did!