Experiments in Life

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.

After our previous water problems were fixed, I expected that life would return to normal. To my surprise, I was greeted by half a dozen representatives of the water company, a representative of the cable company, a representative of the power company, and a backhoe when I got home from work on Friday. The line feeding our house had developed a leak, presumably from the increase in water pressure from fixing the prior leak. Thankfully, the backhoe was digging up part of the yard across the street and not my yard. All of the people present just made it a little difficult to get into our driveway. Since it was late on a Friday afternoon, they just jumped a small rubber line from our neighbors feed into ours and left. We were without water for 10 minutes or so, but I assumed that they would be back Monday to fix the problem.

Monday and Tuesday come and go with people out in our front yard digging around. However, there was no visible change to my eyes. The rubber jump line still went from our neighbors water line to ours. This morning proved to be a little different. I got up and my normal time and got in the shower. Halfway through the shower, the water was cut off. After letting fly a few choice expletives, I realized that there was not much I could do about it, dried off, and set about trying to gather up everything I would need for work, checking the water every few minutes to see if it was cut on again. After about 20 minutes, the water finally was cut back on. I peeked out the window and saw the water reps. filling back in the holes that they had made. I quickly jumped back in the shower so that I could finish getting ready for work. As I left for work, the workers were still filling in holes, but it looks like our water line has been repaired. Hopefully, we will not have to go through this again anytime soon.

This is just what you want to happen when you get home at 10:45 pm. I went to go wash my hands and… nothing. No water anywhere in the house. I called the water company and apparently a water main burst a mile or two from our house. Supposably it will be fixed by the morning.

Update: Well, my acute hearing woke me up at 1:00 am when the toilet tank started refilling. When I got up to investigate, the water pressure was slowly starting to come back. This morning, it appears that our water pressure is better than it has been in weeks.

Well, it has taken several weeks, but I have finally gotten around to posting photos of our vacation to Oregon at the end of June, courtesy of Flickr and FAlbum. You can visit any of our photo sets, including a set of the most recent photos, by clicking the Photo Gallery link on the main page. Here are the photo sets that include the pictures we took on our vacation:

• Oregon Zoo
• Klamath Falls
• Crater Lake
• Butte Falls
• Salt Creek Falls
• Japanese Gardens
• International Rose Test Gardens
• Columbia River Gorge History Highway

1. Xanax is a wonderful drug
2. They have PELICANS in Klamath Falls, OR!
3. Oregon has no sales tax.
4. In Oregon, they pump your gas for you
5. Flying first class is nice
6. Singing sinks are the dumbest invention ever!
7. Chocolate chips do not travel through straws very well
8. Pregnant bellies are not as squishy as they look. They are in fact fairly solid.
9. I am prone to sympathy bathroom breaks when around pregnant women.
10. Pink eye is also known as eye goop.
11. Linn County, OR is one of the top grass seed producers in the state.
12. Speed limits are just a suggestion there.
13. It stays light until almost 9 PM during the summer.
14. Taco Time is better than Taco Bell.
15. They have the world’s cleanest McDonalds restaurants ever.
16. Lampreys swim upstream to spawn, just like salmon. Who knew.
17. Fish ladders are cool.
18. Multnomah falls is a tourist trap and not as impressive because of it. It is also the 4th largest falls in the country and the largest in the state of OR.
19. Salt Creek Falls is the second largest falls in the state of OR.
20. You can buy emu oil in a few OR gas stations, preferably those located near an emu farm.
21. There is an animal known as the tree kangaroo. Weird

That is probably enough for now. I’m sure I’ll think of other things though. Who knew you could learn so much when on vacation…and I wasn’t even trying. Imagine what I might have learned if I’d actually taken my brain on vacation with me

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, it took us long enough, but Ashley and I finally planned enough of our vacation so that we could go ahead and book our flights, reserve a rental car, and reserve a hotel room in Portland for our first two nights of the trip. We are heading out Saturday, June 24th, and will get to Portland that night. Monday, it will be time to drive down the Pacific coast to California so that we can see the Redwood National Forest. We will probably stay somewhere in that area Monday night before driving over to Klamath Falls on Tuesday to visit my sister. After several days with them (which we have not planned yet), we will head back north to make it to Portland by Sunday so that we can catch our flight back home. The great thing is, I then get two days off for the 4th of July holiday for some much needed recuperation before work.

Ok, I know that I have fallen off the writing bandwagon lately, but saving the world is tough work. I have been super busy at work lately and I have either watched movies, read, or played my GameCube every night after work for the past few weeks. That has not left a lot of time for writing. Saturday was the best day for playing video games. Our yard was sopping wet from the storms on Friday night, so there was not really any yard work that I could do. I got up about 6:45, played on the computer until Ashley got up at 8:30, and then started playing Ocarina of Time. I decided to stop playing somewhere around 2:30 or so. Instead of doing anything productive, I convinced Ashley to watch Return of the King with me (not that it took a lot of convincing). That consumed the rest of the day (the extended version is around four hours) with a slight break for dinner around 5:30.

However, today I have been productive cleaning and getting the printer working (again) on the file server. I did pick up some new hardware for my home file server, a new 200 gig harddrive from the OfficeMax that is closing in town. I picked it up for less than 50 cents per gig, so I felt like I got a pretty good deal on it. This will take me one step closer to ripping all of my CDs so that I have my entire music collection available to my new stereo downstairs without having to swap discs out all of the time. Plus, I have started carrying music to work (and forgetting to bring it home), so having my backup copy on the server will still let me listen to it when I leave the disc at work.

The link is fixed now!!!!

Oops!! Technical Difficulties….again!! I now know that the link is not right, so, please be patient. I will get it corrected as soon as I can.

Sorry it has taken me so long to get this up. Again, it’s been waiting but I haven’t been able to post it because of technical difficulties. Anyway, let me know what you guys think.

My receipt number is f2a1b850dfe0

My Personal Dna Report

Okay, I finally managed to get this thing posted. I’ve been trying to get it up for over a week now. I have a few others in the works too, so be ready for ‘em! We’ve made some changes and I haven’t been able to make this quite look the way it should, but my loving husband has fixed things for me so that I can post again. YEAH

I took the two question quiz Jessica did. Here are my results. Let me know what you think