Homeowners No More

For those of you privy to the more mundane aspects of the day-to-day stresses and strains of my family, I would like to announce that the house that was on the market since last November 27th is now officially no longer ours.

It perhaps didn't happen in quite the way we'd like. The outcome wasn't perfect. It is, though, the outcome we have, and I am grateful that it is finally at an end. For all its faults, this end is a relief, and one we needed before we could ever, ever move on unfettered.

Now the barking dog next door is someone else's problem.

Oh, Realtors

You sit and listen to us and nod. You seem like normal people. Then you talk out loud, and the following becomes apparent:

a) You don't hear inconvenient details.
b) You willfully ignore anything you don't like.
c) You especially ignore anything that will reduce your commission, even if it's in the best interests of all (say, in getting a house bought or sold in the first place).

You're all very warm and huggy, signing off emails with "warmest regards", but you'd suggest conveying our kids along with the house to make the sale if you thought you could get away with it.

Screw You, Her Depot

Please observe this news on The Consumerist, that Home Depot is opening a series of stores for all of us poor, unfortunate females who lack the ability to comprehend things like nails or thermostats, or the ability to withstand a moment in front of something so unsightly as a bag of dirt or grass seed. They are calling these stores Her Depot, the store for the poor little ladies who are, of course, all scared by the big, scary hardware store.

Seriously, condescension just drips off of this little venture. Screw you if you think I don't know how to pick out a drill or a belt sander. Screw you if you think we don't possess the ability to pick up these skills if we need them. Home maintenance is something anyone who owns a home should be prepared to noodle their way through, unless you go the handyman route, which is fine too. But don't give me a dumbed-down, less "frightening" store where the little lady can pick out light bulbs without all that lumber in the corner scaring her.

Just screw you.

I Have the Power

So, the wind blew above 10 miles per hour during a thunderstorm last night, and 50,000 people in our area lost power. Including us.

It was a million degrees here last night, and has been surface-of-the-sun hot for over a week now. We also use a baby monitor without a battery backup, though we have a secondary monitor that does operate via battery.

However, at 1:00 a.m., do you really want to be in your kid's pitch black, completely silent room trying to sneak a fresh 9V battery into the nursery unit (I was pretty sure it was a fairly run-down battery in there) without waking up the baby? I decided just to wave the white flag and bring her in with us, something that ensured that none of us got a lot of sleep last night.

This morning, we still had no power, and the number of households in the blackout weren't getting lower very quickly. No ETA's from the power company, either, although they always seem to be working hard to restore power when this happens.

The real problem isn't the power company and how quickly they restore power. The real problem is that a rat's misplaced sigh seems to be enough to set off some sort of blackout chain reaction. The technicians seem to be hard working and well-intentioned, but I can only assume that some areas of our county have such woefully outdated or just plain busted power infrastructure that we'll have these issues over and over.

It always seems to be the same zip codes. It always seems to be the same damn houses in those zip codes. It makes me want to call the power company and beg them to raise everyone's rates some infinitesimal amount and upgrade the damn breakers or whatever is not toting its load. I am so sick of either freezing or roasting in this house without climate control.

The B, on not a lot of sleep and a crappy nap the afternoon before besides, did a wonderful job soldiering through this morning. I took her out to Target, Kohl's and then St. Louis Bread Company for an early lunch, and she was a trooper. She waved at people and stomped around, still in a good mood, but boy if she didn't just collapse when I put her down for her nap.

Best moment of the day was when I was leaving Bread Co. and called our answering machine one more time before giving up and taking the B to our BIL and SIL's for her nap (because they had power) and discovered that we got our power restored just in time for her room to cool down enough for her to nap in.

Seriously, though. I've never lived anywhere that had so many troubles with its infrastructure. The cable is iffy. The power is iffy in lots of areas. Property taxes per square foot are comparable to our last house, only the city doesn't pay for trash collection out of that kitty. It's just insane, but no one is interested in fixing it. The only things that are argued over in our elections are social issues that the candidates have no intention on following through with anyway, just interested in using the hot button issues to get elected.

Fix it! Fix it so those poor techs aren't out in the middle of the night, in the rain, trying to get our power back. Won't someone please think of the techs?

I Did It!

Our house, prior to this Monday night, had a thermostat that should probably have been on display in the Smithsonian instead of plugged in on our wall, desperately attempting to regulate our house's temperature.

Well, when you stay home most of the time, save for excursions outside to play with the baby or run an errand, having it way too hot...way too cold...way too hot...etc. all day long is extremely irritating, and I'd had enough.

I took some of the money I've made from my transcriptions and handed it to Amazon in exchange for the modern programmable unit you see pictured here. I was hoping it would switch between heating and cooling on its own, but I was wrong about that. It does, however, keep the house temperate (upstairs and downstairs) all day long, after I've spent a couple of days tweaking the programmable settings for each section of the day.

The big trick was getting it installed. After putting a couple of ceiling fans into the house, I know that we sometimes have the correctly-colored wires there, but we also sometimes just have a couple of black wires there, and it's anyone's guess which one is which. I was relieved, after prying the old, "my edge has been painted over at least 100 times" thermostat off the wall, to see that the wires were correctly sheathed in colored plastic wire covers that indicated their function.

We switched off the power and I removed the old unit, and as the house started to get hot (this was just on the edge of our current cold snap) I set about connecting the new unit. After a run-in with the slightly vague manual that was included with the new thermostat, I looked at an updated one on the manufacturer's website and got confirmation on where I should hook up my red wire.

Hooked it up, switched it on, made my first guess at a programming scheme based on the temperatures we'd been trying to select on the old unit, and it was on and humming away. This was when we discovered how far off the old thermostat had been. All the temps we'd been setting it on that got us the best results with the old unit were completely different on the new unit. The new unit really seems to keep the house comfortable for the whole day, and it does so using less operating time, which means it's using less of my moolah to do it.

I am extremely pleased with the switch and I really wish we'd done it a year ago. It makes me want to go on a tear through the house, seeing what else is old and inefficient, costing us more money to run and doing a poor job of it, to boot. Look out, old appliances. I'm comin' for you.