More Snow

It snowed over the weekend...and snowed...and snowed. I woke up yesterday to the pitter patter of tiny ice pellets hitting the window. I'd slept through the worst part of the storm, about a half inch or inch of freezing rain that coated everything. After that came almost nine inches of snow.

Snow is bad enough, but freezing rain is the absolute worst. It breaks branches off trees, brings down power lines and makes the roads really slippery. It clogs up my failing gutters. And if it really rains hard, it floods my basement.

We've gotten a lot of snow this year. I didn't realize how much until I saw an article in the local newspaper saying that we were officially in the third snowiest winter ever recorded for the area. And we are only three inches away from the all time record, set in in the winter of 1958-59.

I wish that the poor weather had held off one more year. The house is not in good shape to deal with it. We will be replacing the roof and the gutters next summer, and if the weather could have just held off one more year, the house would be in a much better position to deal with it. We've noticed some leaks in the attic and I'll be heading up there tonight with a flashlight to make sure that there are not torrents up there. We've become resigned to keeping buckets up there.

We also went out on Saturday and found a really cool store. We stopped into a place called The Olive Cellar. Generally I'm not a big olive fan. But there are a few kinds that I really do like, and it's not the crummy green ones with little red pimentos stuffed in them. So I was excited to see a store that might carry a wider selection of olives, maybe somebody who supplies the olive bars at the more upscale grocery stores.

I was extremely surprised when we walked in and there was not an olive to be seen anywhere in the place. Just lots and lots of two foot high, stainless steel urns. They looked a bit like coffee urns and there were probably around fifty of them. Each had a little spigot and small ounce or half ounce plastic sample cups, like the ones that liquor stores hand out with samples of wine. It turns out that the place sold olive oil and vinegar. That was their focus.

They had olive oils from all over the world, including Italy, Greece, Spain, and Australia. They had olive oils infused with basil or garlic or porcini mushrooms. They had spicy olive oils and mild olive oils. It boggled my mind. And then there were all the vinegars - pear vinegar, white vinegars, pomegranate vinegar, fig vinegar and so on.

And they encouraged you to taste the vinegars and the olive oils with little sample cups. We were there late in the day, so we couldn't stay long because the girls hadn't had a nap, so we cut or stay short and bought a bottle of their number one selling olive oil (garlic infused) and their number one vinegar (18 year balsamic vinegar). The vinegar is up there with fine scotches. It is unbelievable - tangy and sweet. Worth every penny. That night we went home and had homemade bread with olive oil, salt, pepper and balsamic vinegar. I'm smiling just thinking about it.

The Olive Cellar is the kind of place where Ms. Huis and I took sample sips of things, looked at each other and said, "This would be perfect with that strawberry orange desert." or "This would be perfect with the pasta dish that has those mushrooms." Absolutely divine.

I hope the place stays in business. It's a fabulous resource. Take a look if you get time.

Oh, and guess what the weather is doing right now? Yup, it's snowing. Today may be the day we break the record.

Angry? Try This

Sometimes when I've had a bad day and people are doing things that really make me angry, I find it useful to do the following exercise.

I imagine that I'm sitting in an interview room in a police station and a very angry detective is shouting at me. He asks me why I murdered the person I'm mad at. What possibly could have driven me over the edge?

And I reply,

"He told me my documentation was incomplete and I had to rewrite it."
or
"He won't use schema names in his database coding."
or
"She crashed the server."
or even
"She left the butter out, again."

The whole situation seems so ludicrous that I just have to smile. I also find that saying the word "monkey" in place of any swear words that come to mind adds some levity to the situation (and it keeps me from swearing).

Shocking

Saturday saw another inch or two of snow fall on the House of 42 Doors. We are getting a very proper winter this year, which is not at all what I expected. In an effort to continue my emphasis on productive exercise, I decided to slip outside first thing and shovel the driveway and sidewalk by hand. Good for me and good for the environment.

All of this led to a pleasant and amusing conversation with my neighbor Joe, who happened to be using a snowblower to blow out his driveway. I think the story highlights clearly what sort of things can happen in an old house.

The first owner of our house, William, had several children, including Edward and William, jr. Edward ended up inheriting the House of 42 Doors from his father, but William jr acquired the land next to our house and built a very cute brick house stylistically similar to ours. I'm dying to get inside and see it.

I'm not sure how old that house is, but I'd guess it's from the 20's or 30's. Joe and I got to talking about electrical wiring, since we're almost done with ours. Like our house, they have a brick fireplace in the house and they opted to put in a wood burning fireplace insert. This included putting in a steel liner down the entire length of the chimney to provide air intake and venting. If you are not familiar with these wood inserts, they fit inside of the fireplace opening, are fully enclosed and often have an electric blower to capture the heat and blow it out into the room. They are usually highly efficient, very good at heating a space and generally a good investment.

After installation, Joe went to plug in the blower and as soon as he did so, he heard "Bang!" and he blew a fuse. He reset the fuse, tried again, and same result. After a few false starts with the fireplace installation guys, he finally called an electrician who found the problem.

Sometime in the past, a previous owner installed a bathroom fan in his house. This vented out a steel tube, which fed into the chimney and then out. Not happy with his heating bill, Joe asked a contractor "friend" to blow insulation into his attic. So this friend crawled up into the wooden rafters to blow insulation and saw an somewhat rickety, unsupported steel tube stretching from above the bathroom over to the chimney. Fortunately, there were bare wires in the attic that he was able to use to support the bathroom steel venting tube.

That's right. He used bare wires in the attic and wrapped them around the steel exhaust tube to support it. If you haven't guessed by now, those were live, knob and tube, electrical wires. It's only by the Grace of God and wood rafters that the "friend" wasn't electrocuted on the spot. So, not realizing what he'd done, he insulated the attic and went on his merry way.

As Joe said, they were very lucky. Nothing ever happened to them over the years while changing light bulbs, standing in water, showering, etc. This disaster wasn't found until the metal insert in the fireplace made contact with the metal bathroom venting and then the blower was plugged in. This caused the short, which blew the circuit.

It's a good lesson to learn. You need to watch all contractors carefully. They know their specialty, but that's it. And sometimes "friends", while meaning well, aren't necessarily the best option.

I certainly learned this lesson with our plumber. He did a great job with the plumbing, but that's it. He doesn't know anything about concrete work and next time I'd certainly do a better job of watching his excavator.

Who needs a treadmill?!

I know Mr. Kluges mentioned it before, but here's a photo of his exercise plan!

Go, honey! Build those biceps! :)

The Vagaries of Word Choice

Most people know that different English speaking countries use different words to represent the same thing. A lot of these we're familiar with, thanks to TV and radio, such as flat (apartment), boot (trunk), bonnet (hood) or lift (elevator). When visiting overseas, these are jarring initially and they stand out in everyday conversation. Then there are those that seem just plain wrong.

All my life, I've always envisioned things. Envision a better life, a better plan, a brighter tomorrow. And that word makes sense as it's based off of vision (to see). In Ireland, I thought I heard this too, but after time, by listening a little more carefully, I started to hear envisage, and then when I saw it in writing, I knew that this was indeed what they were using. Now this just didn't make sense to me, especially since the root word was visage (face). So the question is have you (as an American, Irish can't weigh in here) ever heard the heard envisage and seen it used interchangeable with envision? Are they synonyms?

Another one I'd never heard before was bespoke. I had to look that one up. And when did testing become vetting? The strange thing about vetting was that I started to hear it over here AFTER I'd left Ireland. Is the term invading?

(I know this posting has nothing to do with the house, but I had a lot of ideas rolling around in my head after my two week trip back to Ireland, and this blog is probably the best way to get them cleared out. Otherwise they rattle around up there and the noise it makes is embarrassing.)

Question #1

Why is it that the soundest sleep a person gets in a night is the 30 to 45 minutes after the alarm goes off? Or just as bad, the ten minutes before the alarm goes off? I'm starting to think that I should set my alarm for an hour before I really want to get up. That way, I can shut it off, go back to bed, get an hour of divine sleep, and wake up refreshed.

I'll let you know how I get on.

Back In Town

Well, it's been a long hiatus from the blog, and I've gotten out of the habit. There are a lot of ideas rolling around in my head, and not all of them are related to the house.

During my trip overseas, I found out that there are several people reading the blog who I didn't know about. Most of them mentioned that they couldn't wait to see what I really thought of Ireland and the people there. I'm sure they were disappointed to instead be treated to a blog about catching mice.

To that point, sometime between my last post and the time I got home, Ms. Huis caught mouse 43. I'm hoping that these guys are coming out either because it was so cold that they had to move around, or because they ran out of food and had to go looking. I've been all around the basement with Great Stuff foam, steel wool and insulation, trying to plug all the holes I can find, and there have been a lot of them. I'm hopeful that this and the mason next summer will finally close up the mouse highway into our house. I also think it's funny that there have been no more mice since I came back. Guess they know they are doomed. Hah!

We had our first clogged drain this week too. In our only bathroom. Not much of a story there, as a container of Drano seems to have fixed the problem. considering that almost everything in the house turns into a bit of fiasco, it cheers me up to report when something behaves as expected. The Drano did not melt through our pipes, nor did noxious fumes cause the paint to peel off, nor did the clog get worse. It just worked. Amazing.

Although I do feel duty bound to report that the paint in our bathroom is peeling off, just not due to the Drano. Long time readers of the blog will remember that our entire house has a base layer of calcimine paint and that as moisture is applied, the oil or latex paint on top of it often fails. I don't think there is a single room in the house more humid than a bathroom. We did opt to get a fan put in by the electrician, but we are still losing paint. To be honest, I'm not too bothered. we'll get to it, eventually. I'm still more worried about the roof and the gutters.