That's Embarrassing

I've been busy tidying up my house, so that my cousin will be able to get to the bed in the guest room and reach the love seat in the living room and sit at the dinner table. When I thought we were going to Palm Desert, I'd bought a number of things for the house and piled them all in the guest room. And I'd been collecting cardboard boxes and bubble sheets and other packing material from all the stuff I'd bought, like new smaller clothes, in the living room. Fortunately for the sake of the house, I have to get rid off all this before my cousin arrives.

I have completely filled the recycle bin four or five times in the last two months. Once I even borrowed the recycle bin from the folks across the street and filled it up, too. Handling all this cardboard has been painful, as I've managed to give myself a number of paper cuts from it. Such cuts are more painful than dangerous, of course, but they're always on the hand, which means they hurt over and over again as I use my hands. The living room looks great now, although one end of the dining room has boxes stacked across it, to go down this fall.

I'm putting the family photos into bins to take to Palm Desert. My sole remaining uncle lives nearby and has promised to help me identify the people and estimate the dates of the photos of my maternal family. One of my cousins is a photographer (he was a newspaper photographer for years, before he drifted into management at a printing company) and he has been scanning family photos onto disk. His mother was my mom's sister; it appears that the women of the family were the custodians of the photos. We have plans to merge the two collections and distribute copies to all the cousins.

Pat and I gathered up all the books in the house and boxed them in categories. There's Knitting, Cooking, Nonfiction (mostly beading and paper crafts), Read, and Unread. The last is the embarrassing part. I've got nearly twelve cubic feet of unread books sitting in the hall. Actually, they're not all unread. Quite a number are books I really want to read again.

I also have hundreds of unread books on my Kindles. I downloaded a bunch of books when I first got the Kindle 2 in late February. My buying has really tapered off markedly. Now that I've organized my actual books, I'm probably not going to buy any more books until I've read a few cubic feet of the books I already have.

Unfortunately, I discovered that I could fill in the gaps of my silver flatware on eBay, at prices much lower than buying new. As a result I've gotten the iced tea spoons I needed but hadn't wanted to pay list price for, as well as a number of serving pieces. My pattern, Royal Danish by International Silver, came out in 1939 and is still in production. It's very popular and there are all sorts of fancy little serving pieces, like a sardine fork and a corn-on-the-cob butterer. I bought the former, purely out of curiosity, but passed on the latter. I figure any meal that includes corn on the cob is too informal to require any flatware more formal than plastic. I have now stopped looking at new flatware items on eBay. If I don't see it, I can't bid on it.

Gordo the Wonder Collie broke a Corelle bowl last night. It was sitting on the pull-out board of the microwave stand, perched on top of a box of snickerdoodles. He was after the cookies, of course, and knocked the whole pile on the floor. The bowl hit just right and shattered into hundreds of razor-sharp pieces. I was really worried that he'd step on one and cut his pads badly, but luckily he didn't. He spent the rest of the evening in his crate, first to keep him away while I cleaned up and then to make a point. He was quite chastened, but had returned to his normal ebullient self this morning.

I'd started out by first dropping a container of mushroom risotto that I was reheating for dinner. Then I knocked the tub of freeze-dried beef liver bits onto the floor and had to scramble to retrieve most of them before Gordo ate them. I don't know why we were both so clumsy last night. I remember once hearing a theory that news reporters' slips of the tongue were correlated with solar flare activity; there may be a similar astronomical influence on kitchen accidents.

I've got to finish the paper on in-flight simulation, as the deadline is looming over me. Since I'm no longer working at NASA, I have to do all the layout work that the Reports group used to do for me, like laying out and checking references. I always knew that they did a lot of hard work for authors and I'm really appreciating that again now. I've got to cut a bunch of photos out, which is really difficult, with renumbering references and captions.

Like Cool, Man

Well, it's taken two return trips by the techs and 20 ft of PVC pipe, but the ductless a/c seems to be working. The system startled us by suddenly dripping a lot of water on the floor. The water spread out to be quite a large puddle, although not very deep. Just proves they did a good job when they laid the slab.

It turned out that the way our ceiling is built, they couldn't get a good downhill slope the way they originally tried. So now the drain tube goes the other way, out over the double doors from the patio. It drains into an elbow on a run of PVC that goes across above the window over the sink, around the corner, over the other window, and then drops down to nearly ground level. I'd take a photo but my kitchen counters, which you can see through the windows, are an absolute mess and I'm not going to display that to the whole world. More spring cleaning to do, of course.

As for the other problems, the technician suggested checking the second remote (my policy is to buy a second remote at the time, not wait years until the replacement is no longer available) and all the other problems went away. We're not sure if the first remote was bad or if it was the wrong remote. The remote that came with our system had been robbed out of the box and they'd brought us a substitute. The second remote was dropped off the next day and we didn't even put the batteries in it, just put it into a drawer with the paperwork.

So now the system is working perfectly. We close the doors to the family room and use it during the day and it's cool and comfortable. Meanwhile, the rest of the house stays fairly cool because we've had the windows open all night. Here in the desert, the nights get very cool; a temperature drop of 40°F is common. We use that natural cooling to get the house cool enough so that we can ride it out until it starts cooling off the next evening. With the help of a few fans, that works pretty well.

I had a panic with my Kindle the day before yesterday. It wouldn't wake up, although I did manage to turn it off completely, not just sleep it. I went to the Kindle help site and immediately found the answer. It booted up, very obligingly, and has been working just fine since. I was pretty upset, since I was in the middle of a great book. However, I have a number of regular books that I need to read, so it wouldn't have been a catastrophe if I'd had to send the Kindle for repairs. It would have been inconvenient, because my husband is a light sleeper and clicking the Kindle is much quieter than turning the page of a book. How quickly we adapt!

So all's well here, electronically and mechanically. At least for now.

My husband's little laptop is starting to act a little oddly, so I just bought him a replacement from eBay. These laptops were last manufactured about four years ago and he's not ready to change over to a newer model (he runs a dual boot, Linux and XP). I'm using an even older laptop and am on my third replacement. I'm still running W2K. I have a 1600x1200-pixel 16.1" display and I'm not ready to switch over to the letterbox-shaped displays that the newer laptops have. Fortunately, we still have a couple of replacements in reserve. We'll both have to give up eventually, I'm sure, but we'll probably manage to skip another generation before we do.

Gordo the Wonder Collie is doing well on his new medication schedule. We've reduced the doses and he's a great deal more lively. He got a floppy rhinoceros from Orvis for his birthday. He's very fond of it and takes it to bed with him at night, using it for a pillow. He also got a dog nest and an outdoor dog bed and he's using them both.

I've taken most of the photos I promised in the last posting and will be putting them up soon. I think I've found the right lace pattern for the beautiful silk and I'll be getting back to knitting. Now that it's so cool in the family room, I'm ready to knit again.

Mac the Knife

We're having some unseasonably hot weather right now. Although it's really not that unseasonable because we haven't hit the local record high temperature yet. It's probably going to be 100°F at the peak, although there's a slight breeze picking up, meaning that we may get the marine layer here early.

Updated to add that we did indeed set a new record for the local high for the day, by 4°, at 99°, so far. It may get another degree or two hotter.

Anyway, we put the ductless a/c unit in on Thursday, but it's not working. There's a problem with getting the remote to work and, of course, it only works with the remote. They're coming over on Monday with a new remote and an electrician to sort everything out.

Meanwhile I'm struggling with a constant problem that has kind of gotten out of hand. I do a lot of shopping on the Internet. It's mostly because of the dog; between his epilepsy and the weather, I don't like to go off and leave him for very long at all. Shopping is no fun if you're in a panic to get back home. So UPS and FedEx and USPS keep delivering cartons of shopping to my house. I've been buying a fair amount of clothing because nothing I had would fit and that really added the boxes. The two most recent deliveries were a new HP all-in-one from Amazon and a pair of utility knives from Overstock.

I needed the utility knives because I've used up all the snap-off blades on my U-Haul box cutters. Cutting up cardboard with a dull knife is dangerous and frustrating. All these cartons that keep showing up have to be cut up and put, along with most of the packing material, into the recycle bin. I'd gotten really behind and I had cardboard boxes everywhere. My housekeeper and I made a good start two weeks ago, clearing out the stuff in the guest room. We only stopped because we ran out of space in the recycle bin. So last week I borrowed my neighbor's recycle bin and filled up both bins, but that still didn't take care of all the boxes.

Yesterday afternoon I cut up another half a bin's worth. And the new utility knives really work well. The grip is very comfortable and it's easy to change blades. Plus they each came with fifty spare blades, which should last close to a lifetime. You should have seen me slashing through the carton they came in, with the razor-sharp blade making it effortless. Just call me Mac the Knife.

As soon as it cools off I'm going to go cut up enough to fill the recycle bin so it will go away on Tuesday. Then I'm going to polish off the rest, get it all out of my entry hall and living room, and never let myself get so far behind again. I don't have any real problem keeping up with the household recycling, mostly from the kitchen, just with the inundation of cartons.

Updated to add that I did get all the big cartons and the packing material into the recycle bin, with a little room left over for the kitchen stuff. The worst part was going out into the heat to transfer it from the large carton I'd put it into as I cut it up to the bin. It's not just hot, but more humid than normal. I just couldn't bear to wait until it got cooler. I've gotten a little compulsive about all this cardboard.

UPS bringeth,
USPS bringeth, and
FedEx bringeth,
But none of them taketh away.

It's Spring and my house needs attention and I'm restless. I've got another two 33-gallon bags to donate to the thrift store and I'm starting to be able to hang clothes in my closet without prying apart what already in there. I'm saving the guest room closet for when my cousin comes, in July. She'll help me be ruthless with the dressier work clothes that went in there when I outgrew them. I of course had hopes of losing weight and wearing them again, but I didn't know it wouldn't be until I'd been retired for six years and no longer had anywhere to wear them.

I will get back to knitting, I promise. I'll take photos of all the new yarn I've gotten (I have to put it away, now that it's out of its cartons) in the next couple of days and put some photos up here (and add all of them in Ravelry). I've even got two FOs to photograph and post. Plus two triangular shawls that just need blocking to be finished and a circular shawl ditto. I'm saving the circular shawl for when my cousin is here, since it's for her. After we get it blocked, we may have to shorten it. She's my height and this is supposed to be a circular shawl to keep her shoulders warm in over-cooled restaurants, not a mid-thigh-length cape. It's knit top-down in a modified fan and feather, so shortening it won't be difficult.

Long Day

We had a long day today. Poor Gordo was so worn out he skipped dinner entirely. We had a ductless air conditioner and heater installed in the family room and kitchen. The installation crews got here at 0900 and left at 1950, although they did go for a quick lunch.

Our house is H-shaped, with the family room and kitchen (really all one room) on the south leg of the H, the four bedrooms and two bathrooms on the north leg, and the living and dining rooms on the crossbar. There's a covered entry on the east side and a covered patio on the west side. The way our HVAC system works, combined with the orientation of the house, the trees in the back yard, the position of the sun, the three pilot lights in the built-in double oven, and the 22-cubic foot side-by-side refrigerator, leaves the family room and kitchen warm in the summer and cool in the winter.

The ductless unit is pretty much the same as the units you see in motel rooms, except that there's a separate compressor and the unit hangs from the wall, up by the ceiling, and is operated by a remote control. Its purpose is to augment the whole-house system and, coupled with the back-up electrical generator we installed eight years ago, keep this room cool in a power outage, even in the summer. We should have put it in long ago, if you ask me. What really tipped us over the edge was the way the summer monsoons have been sneaking into the Antelope Valley. We used to have them for maybe a week or two, if we had them at all, but recently we've had them for a month or more. That humidity just kills me.

The unit also has a heat pump, just in case we lose power in the winter. Our whole-house unit runs on 230 but the ductless unit runs on 110, which is what we set the back-up generator up to provide. We could have added 230, but to do it now would require a new cross-over switch and inspections by the city and Edison, which were big hassles when we installed it originally. So we decided to leave it alone.

Gordo had to watch everything, which is why he's so tired. He spent most of the day in a crate, either in the family room or back in our bedroom, and got no naps at all. Normally, he sleeps in until about noon, frolics around the back yard for a while and then sleeps all afternoon. Not today, through. I'm pretty tired, myself, but not nearly as tired as he is.

I got some beautiful silk lace yarn in gorgeous colors. I'll take a photo and get it posted here as soon as I get organized. I think I've fallen in love with it and will never be able to give it away.

Gordo's Mother's Day Gift to Me

Gordo is saving his allowance to give me the Amazon Kindle DX for Mother's Day, or so we joke. It's a good joke if you ignore that a) Gordo doesn't get an allowance, b) he has no idea what a Kindle is, c) I'm not his mother, and d) dogs really aren't that good at saving.

Wendy Johnson mentioned that Amazon was rumored to be coming out with a new Kindle this summer but that she wasn't going to wait and had bought a Kindle 2. She really likes it and says many of the same things that I did after I got mine.

The idea of an advanced model interested me greatly, so last night I surfed on over to Amazon on my Kindle 2 and discovered that they'd just made the formal announcement. I read the page, decided I really needed the larger screen, and put in a pre-order for the Kindle DX and the leather cover. It will be coming out in the summer, they say, and promise a definite delivery day as soon as they know it. Bigger screen, choice of portrait or landscape mode, more storage (3500 vs 1500 books), better graphics, native PDF display. The screen is 9.4" diagonally, compared to the Kindle 2's 6".

It looks to me as if it has one flaw, though. It doesn't have the page controls on the left side, just on the right side. I like to hold my book in my left hand and, on the Kindle, use my left thumb to change pages. This isn't a huge deal and I'll learn to live with it, but I'm sure I'll miss it sorely at first.

It's kind of funny. A few months ago, I might have looked at the Kindle DX page and thought something vague like "That's nice, I suppose" and now I'm criticizing the control layout based on the images. How I've changed since the end of February.

Update on the pressure cooker. I tried cooking potatoes for five minutes and one potato was just fine but the other one was overdone, although not as badly as the seven-minute batch had been. I had noticed a difference in the texture of the potatoes as I peeled them, so I wasn't totally surprised when they cooked up so differently. I ran over to the store about an hour ago and picked up more potatoes. These look very similar, at least on the outside, so they may cook more uniformly.

The navy bean soup turned out very well. I think it was better after sitting overnight and being reheated. I'm more than halfway through it and really enjoying it. When I bought the beans, the store had them on sale, three one-pound bags for five dollars, so I have more beans to practice with. In addition, it seems to be pretty much impossible to buy a single ham hock. I've got a recipe that uses bacon instead of ham and I picked up some thick-sliced applewood smoked bacon at the service butcher, so I may try that one next. The extra ham hocks will freeze nicely.

I really do like the pressure cooker, although I haven't cooked anything too challenging, just potatoes, beans, and rice. I've cooked a couple of boxed risottos. They're not really cooked like risottos, which requires adding the liquid gradually and stirring constantly for twenty minutes, but they're pretty tasty. They're really quick in the pressure cooker, pretty much requiring just that I react when it chirps.