Our water heater is apparently being replaced tomorrow.

It is a rental, as are most water heaters in this town, because the water's so hard people need to replace their heaters every 5-10 years. Or so I'm told. We've been here 8 years, never had a problem.

The puddle in the laundry-room couldn't be blamed on a rainstorm any longer... So I called the city after work tonight, and they sent someone around, who looked at the puddle, asked a few questions, and immediately shut off the gas and water to the heater.

He said, "the bottom's corroded. When the water is on, the pressure has a chance to blow out the bottom of the tank. I've seen it happen, and I recommend you keep it off until tomorrow morning. You have enough hot water for a couple of showers, and the contractors will bring you a replacement tomorrow."

So, right now we don't have a hot-water heater.

Our utility bill covers sewer, water, and gas. This week we've tested the city's response to the first two. I would like to leave the third one to 2nd and 3rd-hand stories, please? Thanks.

(The arrival of the guy who inspected our water heater was delayed by an hour for him to go across town and deal with a real gas leak; fortunately fixed with no explosions.)

Guess what!

The city misplaced our sewer pipe!

Apparently, their filing system involves relying on a stake that they drove into our yard last June, which seems foolproof to me.

Corollary: We're getting a big chunk of our lawn replaced, saving us the expense of doing it.

Second corollary: I am grateful that I could be home this morning, because they had to come inside to run another locate through the bowels under our house, after they had dug up a long trench from the road to where they thought the pipe was.

I think I'll just stay put, 'cause I've got a physio appointment down the street at lunch time.

As mentioned, our dining-room is haunted by the world's most trivial poltergeist. Only, now maybe I pissed it off by soldering the clock?

melted_snowball returned home to discover the clock face-down on the dining-room floor, shards of pottery scattered around.

True, this morning, I tweaked the clock's batteries because it had stopped overnight. (This time, the pendulum was running, and the clock had stopped. Why? No idea. Electrically, they are on the same circuit and every other time it's stopped, the hands kept going and the pendulum stopped.)

True, every time the Via Rail train comes through, the whole house shakes. And true, the nail on the wall is loose in the nail-hole, because it's plaster and I've re-hung the clock more times than I could count. But- I hung it on the nail, and it stayed there, like every other time I've hung it up. And then, some time in the day, it leaped to the floor, in the process landing on a single ceramic bowl on the shelves underneath, but not hitting anything else on the way, and remarkably not smashing into a pile of wooden and glass shards. Even though the d-cell batteries were flying around inside the case.

And dan came home to a clock in a pile of ceramic shards. And I came home to survey the damage (the poor bowl!), and the clock is fine, in fact it was still ticking. Even though the two D-cell batteries were sitting in the bottom of the case (*boggle*)

...And then I remembered the 3rd battery, a rechargeable, which I had stuck into the mechanism as a shim, but had stuck tape on the contacts so it wouldn't mess things up electrically. And the tape had worn through.

And now the clock is rehung, and I'm slightly on edge waiting for it to leap from the wall again.

Perhaps we should take the_infamous_j's advice and permanently attach it to the wall. Perhaps I should just countersink a sturdy screw into the wall. [Stop looking at me like that, dawn_guy...]

Perhaps we should declare the house haunted and move to Tahiti.

So, we had the owner of Bodhi Tree Landscaping come and consult on our yard, and frankly I'm underwhelmed. He suggested we might consider using roundup to wipe out the front yard, which goes completely counter to his website's claim of pesticide-free installations. All I can figure is that he pegged us as wanting the fast route. And the do-it-yourself route, even though we did say a few times we don't want to do it ourselves, we've been not-doing-it-ourselves for 7 years.

He didn't have any photos of some of the ground-cover he suggested we consider. He said we were at the very start of figuring this out, and we should talk it over amongst ourselves and get back to him when we had a course of action for him. Um, hello?

Perhaps if I had more assertively tried to put money into his hands, he might've tried harder, but I really thought he was gong to re-offer what he said on the phone, an hour consultation for $50 or so; he didn't, and I suggested it, and for whatever reason he didn't want to. Oh well.

So that's Bodhi Tree.

---

On Tuesday, the city came back and gave our house a colonoscopy. The pipe looks fine (except the city's portion has the remains of tree roots, almost certainly from the tree the city removed two years ago). And they put a stake in the lawn at our property line. The city will replace their pipe, possibly next summer, and they will pay for any sewer-line repairs between now and then. The two guys who came were mid-50s seen-it-all guys. The more assertive one said Hammonds Plumbing is owned by a crook, and he sees them in court almost every week. Hm. I'll pass it on to you all, but I'm not sure I wouldn't hire them again; they did show up on Saturday morning early and did call the city for me.

And now it's bedtime for Bonzo. And me, too.

After Saturday's sewer fun, I got a call from the city. Since the damage was caused by a city tree, they're taking responsibility for fixing it. They want to send a camera down the pipe to determine what's wrong. And they will pay for any further unclogging that needs to happen before they can replace the pipe (likely not until next year).

I didn't ask whether our house needs to fast before the procedure, or whether it requires general anesthetic.

I hope they're gentle.

For the curious:

Today I learned that if your house has an access-panel in the basement, with a grungy pipe head behind it, that is probably your house's main drain to the city sewer. And if that pipe starts gurgling, that means water is backing up from the street. And if the panel fills with water, that's another sign water is backing up. And if you're lucky, the plumber will get to it before things become really messy.

We were lucky- I called Hammond Plumbing at 11 last night, their rep (who sounded knowledgeable) booked someone for 8:45 this morning, who showed up with a power auger, and two hours later the problem was (temporarily) resolved.

I say temporarily because the problem is likely to recur, though it hadn't happened in the last seven years; his clearing the pipe brought up a lot of tree-root material, and his educated guess is that the pipe has a bad crack in it (we think from the big tree that the city replaced, three summers ago). And foreign material in the pipe will clog it eventually.

This extravaganza cost us $230, though at one point there were also two city sewer employees in our basement, being paid overtime by the city, because it seemed that the blockage might be beyond our property-line and therefore the city's problem. The two city guys took measurements, converted them to metric, reported them back to their supervisor, and eventually the city will probably turn that into a bill for $295 plus tax because in fact the blockages were under the old tree, which is on our property. However, they might not charge us, possibly due to the detail (also reported to headquarters) that the tree causing the blockage had been a city tree.

Whatever.

This wasn't the ickiest thing to happen in our house, but it was icky, at least until I bleach-mopped the basement floor, and it was all over by noon, thankfully.

...meanwhile, melted_snowball was off talking to a sales rep for a condo, which seems a bit funny in the juxtaposition, especially considering d's been saying he wants to move to a loft every time there's a maintenance problem in our house, though this time it was an appointment I had set up yesterday afternoon. The "eco-loft" condos going in on Bridgeport had some new openings we wanted to check out. In the end, they aren't right for us; probably the condos going in at the Barrelyards will be, in a few years.

And then d. made strawberry jam and I ran errands:

- picked up a hold at the library
- bought coffee beans
- bought shoes, shorts, pillows, and pillow-cases at the outlet mall
- got back and crashed.

...and the rest of the afternoon has been lazing about, eating leftovers, giving the dog a long walk, and watching more of Angels in America from HBO. How was your Saturday? :)

On the balance, this has been a good week, (and it still can end up a good week assuming the drain augering and fixing goes smoothly tomorrow morning, but I'm trying to not think about it).

A few high points in the last week:

- Work has been rewarding. This week I worked on: php, shell scripts, sql, perl, and WebObjects. I have challenging tasks, and more importantly, I have a plan; and the things I do will make my group's jobs easier. This is most excellent.

- Last Saturday afternoon, I participated in a community witness that went more smoothly than we deserved (given the weather forecast, number of participants, and the structure of the event). And the food at the reception was excellent. And it included home-made lemon meringue pie.

And we learned that our Quaker Meeting is going to have another wedding, next year. The couple met on Lavalife. He's 70, she's 50.

- Ye's sushi with my sweetie.

- semi-wild strawberries from the front yard. I've eaten a few, and they're delicious.

- In a week, I'm seeing a huge pile of Friends at FGC Gathering, in Johnstown PA this year. I'm fairly intentionally making the week a challenge for myself, as instead of taking a workshop, I'm doing service work. Which could be draining, and it could be extremely rewarding. The only thing I know would make the week better would be if melted_snowball were able to come, but I expect we'll both do OK. My car will have at least one rider, and possibly 1-2 others if they get their acts together. I don't know any of them, but that's fine. We'll talk about workshops and figure out who we know in common...

- And not one but two successful real-estate hunts among friends! chezmax & the_infamous_j bought a house locally that sounds well-suited to them, and sulle_stelle bought a stunning-sounding house in Tampa! Both were long shots, of a sort. Congrats, guys!

(Via a comment in sqrt_joy's journal)

What have I learned today? (By "today" I mean Saturday, technically from midnight to midnight).

* My 15+ year old Converse hightops are still in good shape and comfortable. I dug them out to go dancing to 80s music with thefateyouare, chezmax, and indigofire_net; and my feet didn't hurt after two hours- wow. Why did I ever stop wearing them?

* I still enjoy dancing. I'm less self-conscious a dancer than I was the last time I was in a club, whenever the hell that was. (2000? Underworld in Boston?) (Is that claim sensible, or is it wishful thinking? Well, I know that last night I was indeed dancing like nobody was watching... Yay self-confidence?)

* The navy jacket which my Mom bought me in 1990, and which has sat in my closet for 15+ years since it's not appropriate for dinner-wear or other semiformal purposes, by virtue of ill fit and ugly buttons, still fits well enough for dancing, looks fairly snappy, and as a bonus, the inside breast pocket fits a water-bottle.

* The local production of The Importance of Being Earnest is worth seeing (it also runs the 10th-12th).

* As much as I wish Home Hardware were open after 5:30pm on Saturday, it ain't.

* That my new boss bought me a nice new computer for when I start my new job at the end of the month. Mmmmmm, brand new iMac with 2g memory...

* That our lawn possibly still exists, and might be visible in another week of warm weather like this.

* And I learned that our new back-yard neighbours are German and have not one but two small humans in the house.

What did you learn today?

Our furnace died some time in the night. It's -18°C outside right now (0°F). melted_snowball has stayed home to intercept the repair people, who should arrive within the half-hour. Fortunate thing, that, since it's around 16°C in the house.

Meanwhile, I have a minor head-cold. But I'm at work, and feeling fairly OK.

1) Why do airplanes need a separate kind of headphone plug? If they didn't, people would be more inclined to use their own headphones, and the airline wouldn't have to hand out disposable headphones on the flight. (They are disposable; if you give them back, they go straight into the trash). This bugs me. Why does it make sense to them? Economically: say 300 pair x $0.50 cost to the airline = $150 could be saved on each long-haul flight. How much would it cost to retrofit the planes for regular 3.5mm stereo headphone jacks? Say a highball $100 a seat- it would pay for itself in 200 flights. I remember when the airlines used to sell the headphones, but now they just give them away. I'm sure it's not an image thing; it sure isn't glamorous to rip into a packet of headphone.

2) Why do washing machines have a separate dial for clothing colour when they already have a setting for temperature? If I set "hot/cold" and "colours" does it modulate the hot temperature downward? I don't tend to think it does, since the water feels just the same whether it's on "whites" or "colours."

To tie these two questions together, if I'm going to accidentally send a piece of electronics through the wash, I'm really happy it was my headphone airplane adapter.

This is partly a post for me to link to in my todo list for next spring, because I want to think about longer days (wah, it's so dark at 4:20...)

Via speedyima:

One Straw Revolution, written by a guy who's doing permaculture in his subdivision.  (He wisely got himself elected president of the neighborhood assn first!)  He also has a basic essay on "Ecological 'Yardening'", covering the basics of lawn maintenance/eradication, vegetable gardening, etc.

His tips on how to get started reducing grass lawn appear sound and reasonably simple.  Though I think the title "yardening" is too twee. Perhaps re-reading this in the spring will inspire me after I never did get started on replacing any of the yard with attractive perennials last year.  Though- I did encourage the ivy to come out from the house into the yard, with careful mowing.  And I'll revisit this in April.

Also: the Eat Well Guide is a database of local farms, stores, and restaurants, from Canada and the US. It's an interesting find, and I'm curious if their overall coverage is better than for our area- it completely lacks most of the local sources I know of; but it would be neat to see this grow up to be a proper international guide.  I'm going to point them at the "Eat Local Eat Fresh" "Buy Local Buy Fresh" database, which is slightly less user-friendly but much more complete for locals.  The Eat Well Guide is from the folks who did the "meatrix" movie(s), which means I have mixed feelings about it- the movies are histronic and a bit misleading, but... it's not like there needs to be a monopoly on media messages about organic cruelty-free meat farms.

This week I've bought art, a chair, and framing. And I'm looking forward to how my den's going to look in a few weeks.

catbear is making me a largeish print from a photo he took in Ottawa. I'm so looking forward to seeing it.

I have a large satellite photo of Lake Ontario. I love the photo- the blues and greens, the topography, the clouds. You can see where we live now, where my parents live, and Ithaca, from a 450-mile height. But it's been in an unflattering plastic frame for the last five years, because I was afraid to find out how much it would cost to do properly.

At catbear's suggestion, I'm having it laminated and plaque-mounted here at the University- for only $50. Gee, I should've done this years ago.

Finally, I bought a chair, which will be delivered in January; I've meant to have a second chair in that room for ages, and this one is super-comfy. And gold-coloured. And reclining.

It's... a bit weird to give myself permission to spend my own money. On myself. "Frivolously." But not, because it will bring me joy for a long time.

I was just in the Student Centre, and one of the groups that was tabling is giving out free compact florescent bulbs. The goal is giving one bulb to every Canadian household, and they say they have the sponsors to do that.

I took my bulb, looked at their website, and was impressed enough by it to go back and ask a few more questions and whether I could give some out to my non-student friends and colleagues. For my troubles, they handed me a teeshirt and a bag of 50. :)

If you see me face-to-face in the next month, ask for your free bulb.

I might just start carrying a few around and giving them to strangers- I see very little downside to that, other than a little bit of talking-to-strangers phobia, which I'm trying to counteract by talking to strangers (win!). The package has non-embarrassing marketing materials, and the form-factor of the bulbs is smaller than a regular incandescent, which is an improvement on most of the CF bulbs in our house. They also claim to be instant-on, which is also an improvement. [edit to add: not instant-on, but maybe half a second, which is acceptable.]

(Boy, they might have made a mistake by handing me 50... how many unconverted lights does our house have?... hm, OK, not many.)

The women I spoked to said roughly half the people who took bulbs were also putting their names down to be contacted about becoming a volunteer.

The good news: the world's most trivial poltergeist is no longer haunting our clock.

The bad news: it has lept to the garage-door opener.

When the door fails to go all the way down, it has an auto-reverse that opens the door back up and flashes the ceiling-light at about 3 times a second forever until we happen to go check on it. Which is oh so fun when we come home from an evening out and our garage is a disco inferno without the inferno (or the disco really, just the strobe).

This thing is supposed to be adjustable, and I think I even adjusted the tension once so it wouldn't *always* think it was hitting a small child / car when in fact it was hitting the ground. But, roughly a week and a half ago, it started frequently re-opening quite some time after the door was closed, and usually when we were out.

Which, if you think about it, is a superb neighbourhood announcement, "Hey! The house is open, just come on in! But knock first, and if anyone answers, say the garage is flashing, and they'll thank you for your trouble!" That is, if we don't remember to lock the garage door.

So, tomorrow's project is to remember where that tensioner is, but not right now, because d's sleeping the sleep of the recently-returned-from-Germany.

If it isn't the poltergeist, I also hope that the problem isn't that our driveway's gotten more buckled, since replacing the driveway sounds both expensive and a pain this time of the year.

So our house is being haunted by the world's most Trivial Poltergeist. Particularly, the very pretty wooden clock in the dining room is haunted (see the top-right of this photo from d's citizenship party). The pendulum is entirely for show; it's powered by a battery. The Trivial Poltergeist will stop and start the pendulum at random intervals. Recently, the pendulum has been mostly still, and it bugs both d. and me that it won't work. For d., mostly because it looks bad, and for me because it looks bad for my mechanical abilities that I can't figure out a fake clock pendulum.

On Saturday, bats22 jokingly wondered what would happen if I doubled the voltage. Ding! (actually, *clonk*): two batteries increases the electromagnet's pull, but it doesn't change the frequency. So it swings rreeeallly wiiiide now. Next I'm nudging down the voltage, now that it's kept itself going long enough for me to know this isn't a transient fix (like the last 8 or so have been). Poltergeist bug us not!

There is a punchline, which is that this morning I was going to simply post this entry as a haiku:


The pendulum swings
Under doubled batteries
Faster than we'd like


...I reconsidered, on grounds that cryptic poetry in livejournal may look more dramatic than I intended.

...Not connected to the previous, a note to myself: If you find yourself saying, "I am a river of peace, water washes over me goddammit." You're Doing It Wrong.

...I was going to make this "local" filter, but I figure I might amuse the Usaian audience trying to figure out from context.

Eavestroughs. Cleaning. 20-foot ladder required, which we do not have nor want to borrow. Hire someone? Yes, but who? Any recommendations?

Before I started working at the University, we had them done by a guy who came door to door in April, who carted away half a dozen icky bags of sodden gunk. It's been a few years since they've been done now. We've got drippy eaves. Connected? I 'spect so.

I'll be darned if I'll call the company that spams on light-poles.

Today I:

slept in,
went to Quaker Meeting and Business Meeting, which was generally pretty good,
was formally asked to speak at the upcoming Non-Violence Festival in four weeks,
failed to return library books /or/ get good coffee, due to closedness downtown,
did yard-work,
finally met the lesbians from next door,
failed to get to the nursary to buy a few Clematises, though they're open tomorrow,
talked to melted_snowball and we were in agreement that we wish he were coming home tomorrow instead of Tuesday,
treated myself to mango chicken from the around-the-corner chinese restaurant,
talked to my mother, and
had company till 11.

Hm, I think I'll go to bed now. Tomorrow, I'm planning to go in to work, to get stuff done where it's quiet, and because I'd like a vacation-day when dan's here.

Apologies for the flat delivery of this post. I'm sure I'd have more interesting things to say about the day if I were more awake. Speaking of which, I was going to bed... 'night!

Oh, and thanks for the birthday wishes. :)

( The Victorious Hunters^W Gatherers Return from the Field... )

I had help testing out the Lee Valley high-pressure weed puller! It's quite a bit more fun than digging or levering out the dandelions, and I can safely say that the yard's watered now. In fact, I hope it isn't a muddy soup. It is creepy the number of feet underground that a stubby little one-flower dandelion will reach.
And unfortunately, there are still a LOT of dandelions in our yard. I think I did... 3/4ths of the back yard? Four hours work?

I was going to plant morning glories for the front trellis, but every single person who knows plants has said, "watch out, they will take over."

This evening, I talked to a gardener who repeated the line about taking over. They're annual, but unless I'm strict about picking up the flowers all spring (summer?), the seeds will germinate everywhere they can reach, the following spring.

"Oh oh," says I. The trellis is just on the edge of our lot, and the flowers would be planted in our neighbour's grass, and she's a bit particular about her grass. I know this because she was worried when I asked her if she minded me planting morning glories just at the edge. I promised her I'd investigate further before planting.

Jeanette, this evening, recommended Clematis. It's perennial and has pretty blue flowers. And doesn't muscle out the grass or require daily flower/seed cleanup.

...The tulips finally sprouted, but they seem to be a week or so behind everybody else's. Either we have worse soil, late bloomers, or everyone else is more gourmet with their plants' feedings and waterings and little Plant Waldorf School. I wonder if we can send ours for tutoring.

Cleaning out a water-softener brine tank. If you don't own a house somewhere with hard water, you'll probably never have to worry about it. But I was looking in the tank (to see if it needed more salt) and realized there was some kind of gunk on the inside walls. And it hadn't been cleaned in six years at least. Hm.

So, yeah, the water in the brine tank doesn't circulate up into the rest of your house, it just flushes out the calcium and magnesium that collect on the polystyrene beads in the resin tank (which turn hard water into soft water). It's a nice closed system, it cleans itself (using the brine) every two weeks. But if there's crap in the brine tank, I'm thinking it's kind of gross.

The Book of Fixing Household Stuff said it should be cleaned regularly, but it didn't say how- and there were some fiddly pieces in the tank I didn't want to break. Googling pointed me at this advice on LJ, and I followed her lead, using a scrubber sponge and dish soap. And a LOT of rinsing, which is about as annoying as rinsing out a garbage can. But less icky.

The only icky part was at the beginning, when I discovered that (I think) the previous² owners had added a nifty little riser into the brine tank, to separate the salt from the brine goo at the bottom. Lifting up this riser revealed... grey goo, mostly salt, and I decided the rest was minerals. For no real reason other than it would be too icky otherwise.

But everything washed off with no real problems, and I just ran the softener through a regeneration cycle and it didn't start making horrible noises or give any indication I broke it.