Experiments in Life

Well, it had to happen at some point — Emily’s nursery is finally put together to a point that it is usable. We still have not determined where we are going to hang the quilt and we still need to pick up a small bookshelf, but if we had Emily tomorrow, we could use the nursery if we needed to. With that said, for convenience sake, we probably will not use the nursery for the first few weeks. It would just be too much of a hassle to hike up and down the stairs to feed and change the baby every two hours. So, we will likely be bringing the pack-n-play downstairs so that we will not be navigating stairs in the middle of the night. Once she starts sleeping a little longer, we will move her upstairs to the nicely finished nursery.

I finished cataloging the books in the master bedroom this morning. Here are the current stats:

• 252 books scanned.
• 155 books are mine (61%).
• 97 books are Ashley’s (39%).

The upstairs will be a beast. Two full-sized bookshelves full of books, plus all of Ashley’s textbooks and many of my technical books on the computer desk. As a comparison, neither of our downstairs bookshelves are full-sized — they are only half-height shelves with storage underneath.

Much like Misty, I started cataloging all of Ashley and my books into Delicious Library. So far, I have processed the bookshelf in our dining room. Here is the breakdown so far:

• 170 books scanned.
• 95 books are mine.
• 75 books are Ashley’s.

Today, I did not care to start scanning books again — that is an arduous task. Perhaps later tonight I will start on our bedroom. Instead, I started playing around with the export capabilities of Delicious Library with the ultimate goal of getting our library linked as a page off of the site. Basically, Delicious Library exports the entire library as a tab-separated file with the field names as the first line and each following line containing the information for one scanned in item. While that file could be linked off of the site, it would not be very pretty. So, I wrote a small python script to munge the data into XML so that an XSL file could generate a web page from the data. That is working fairly well so far.

I have also found that Delicious Library stores all of its data as XML. So, I am considering just writing some code to transform that file into one containing only the data I am interested in. Either way, expect a new link off of the sidebar soon containing our library contents.

Every day and every night, spirits would communicate with us by flickering the lights in the house, sometimes so much that the fluorescent lights would cut off momentarily. Daily, the faint *beep* *beep* *beep* of the UPS could be heard from the office as the spirits tried to communicate using the computer. Unfortunately, the 1998-era technology was just too much for them — the lights downstairs would just flicker more with their frustration. The haunting had been going on for the better part of three months.

Bound and determined to figure out the cause of the flickering, I scoured the house searching for an explanation. I came up with obvious, logical hypotheses: the water heater is shorting out, the new heat pumps are having problems, my UPS is defective. None of these hypotheses turned out to be true, so I decided to call in the experts. Either the power company would find a problem with our feed or our house was truly haunted.

The first time I called, I waited and I waited. Eventually, I forgot about the call and weeks passed by. At my wits end with the spirits inhabiting the house, I called again two weeks ago. Apparently, the foul demons did not want to be driven out; they had gone so far as to erase any record that I had ever called the power company and put in a maintenance request. However, this time the maintenance request went through and I had two service representatives on the way out to the house. All I had to do was meet them there in a half hour.

I make it to the house and the demon decides to intervene. “THOU SHALT NOT DRIVE ME OUT,” it exclaimed angrily. Minutes later, I receive a call from the power company saying that it has been unavoidably delayed by an emergency call; they will try to be out to the house as soon as possible. Cursing the demon, I settle in for what turns out to be a three-hour battle of wills until it weakens enough to allow the service representatives access to the house. However, the demon was still too strong to be beaten; it blinds the service representatives with ignorance and disbelief, clouding their minds against the true cause of the problem. They insist that the problem is not on their end; I must hire an electrician to battle against the demon inside the house.

Help in the form of the Electrician arrived around noon on Halloween. The Electrician is a powerful force for good in the world; the demon had no power over it. He easily disproved the web of lies and deceit that the demon forced the service representatives to utter. The Electrician determined that the problem was not in my domain, but rather that of the power company. Only they had the tools to successfully drive the demon out of the infernal transformer at the edge of our property. Working as a powerful advocate, the Electrician convinced the power company that it needed to come out and look at the transformer as soon as possible.

Later that night, service representatives once again appear at the house. The demon quickly clouds their mind with disbelief of everything that I relay to them. Even staring the evidence in the face, they dismiss the claim that the problem could possibly be on their end. At that very moment, my neighbor arrives and confirms that the demon has been active in their house as well. Reluctantly, the service representatives agree to shut off the power and trying to exorcise the demon from the transformer. A short time thereafter, I got out to check on the progress off the service representatives. They admit that the demon has defeated them and that they must remove the infernal transformer and replace it with a clean one.

Fast forward several more hours. It is just after midnight on All Saints‘ Day when the power goes out. After a furious battle outdoors, the power comes back on forty-five minutes later. The power company has replaced the infernal transformer. It has now been several days and there appears to be no sign of any spirits or of the demon. Our house now appears to be clean.

Well, it took us about three weeks, but Ashley and I finally decided which HVAC installer to choose to replace our faulty heat pumps. The installers are coming out Monday morning. Given the time estimate, they should be finished by mid-week next week. Thanks to everyone who has loaned us fans to use while the A/C has been out!

Update: Our A/C replacement was finally finished Wednesday night! Our house is now cool again.

Alabama gets rather warm during the summer months. The current forecast for today is for the high to reach around 101 degrees Fahrenheit. As if that were not bad enough, the compressor on one of our two heat-pumps, the upstairs unit, has gone out and the unit needs to be replaced. In addition, the duct-work for both the upstairs and downstairs units are falling apart. We are currently in the process of getting estimates for the replacement and repair work.

Luckily, the downstairs unit works, although we are pretty sure that we are trying to cool the attic in the process. Thus, we are only able to run the downstairs unit at about 40% efficiency at the moment. Between that and fans, the downstairs is relatively livable. We are also avoiding going upstairs whenever possible, but it is not too bad in the early morning hours.

This past weekend was just a nice quiet weekend. I got some much needed yardwork done — mainly, I trimmed all of the hedges around our house because they needed trimming quite badly. Looking back, I can honestly say that would not have been done if it were not for my new riding mower. I was happily able to mow my back yard in around a half hour without breaking a sweat so I felt like I had plenty of energy left over to do some of those every once in a while tasks like hedge trimming.

We also were able to get a quote for removing our broken tree that came in under what I thought it would cost, which made me happy. It is going to get taken down and hauled off at some point during this week. After a long and tiring day Saturday, Ashley and I wound up watching Pirates of the Caribbean after which I promptly fell into a deep sleep.

Sunday was a day of movie watching for me. Since we had some rain during the afternoon, I spent most of the day laying around on the couch watching movies we had gotten in from Netflix — namely, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which was an all-around, creepy, good movie, and The Terminal, a suprisingly entertaining movie. I crashed hard again last night, but I woke up this morning feeling very refreshed from the weekend and ready to go after the week.

After a month of mucking around with our push mower and not getting the grass mowed, I finally broke down and purchased a riding lawn mower. Why not just get my push mower fixed or buy a new push mower? Both of those options would definately be cheaper. However, neither option would give me the satisfaction of sitting on my rear while getting the lawn mowed without breaking a sweat. Granted, I only mowed the front yard last night due to my needing to clear tree bits out of the driveway, but getting that front yard finished in less than a half hour — including weed-eating the portions that I could not get to with the mower — was a thing of beauty.

Well, I cannot answer that question, since I was at the house when our Bradford Pear split during a particularly nasty storm last Saturday, sending a rather large quarter of the tree crashing down onto our roof. First and foremost, no one, including the pups, was hurt. Secondly, it appears that the only damage done was a bent-up gutter. That is pretty amazing considering that the branches were laying on the roof of the first story and continued up to the roof of the second story.

Sunday, I had Tim and Stephen over helping me to cut the tree down from the house. That was going ok, if somewhat slowly due to the lack of power tools, when it started storming again. Monday morning, I had Stephen back over at the house, this time with a chain saw that we borrowed from someone at church. We made fairly quick work of the tree at that point, getting the rest of it down in just under two hours. Most importantly, we managed to get the rest of the tree down with a minimum of excitement, which is what you want when cutting down a large chunk of tree with a chain saw.

Well, the master bedroom is finally finished. I started work on the project right around the end of December and here it is, late January, when I am finishing up. I originally estimated that it would take me four days to finish — it took more like nine, plus a few nights after work. It turns out that I am not so good at estimating the time it will take to complete a project like this. However, I am pleased with the way the room turned out.

As promised, here is a before picture of the room:

Here are a few final shots:

You can see other photos of the renovation here.