The thermometer and watch battery people appear to be in cahoots. We've had this outdoor digital thermometer since we bought our house, and in the ~20 months since we've moved, it has displayed this "change battery soon" warning for nearly 15 of them. I'll put a new battery in it...
Two notes now that we're in the cold part of the year.Replace your furnace filter. It's probably filthy. Rebalance your vent registers. Are some of your rooms colder than others? Open the registers in those rooms all the way and close the registers in the rooms that are warmer (not...
I had an arborist limb up a tree in our front yard because the branches were growing awfully close to our cable line, and I don't want a wind storm to knock any branches down and take out our cable. In the process of removing these limbs, one fell and...
Apparently this squirrel shows gratitude for getting some nuts by showing us his nuts....
Among the many dandelion divots I've left across my front lawn is this bigass hole I found earlier today. I have no idea how it got there. Some sort of burrowing animal is probably at fault. Bees were flying into and out of it when I was standing there, though....
I'm really annoyed with dandelions. They had taken over both our front and back lawns well before we bought our house, and now I have to deal with the infestation. The photo at right shows a particularly bad example. The weeding tool that came with the house helps immensely, but...
One of the best parts about having resident rabbits is that they eat dandelions like crazy. I approve. The only downside: rabbit poop. Not approved!...
If you work on cars (check) and have a lot of ... junk to store in your garage (check), do think twice about buying a house with single-car garage doors instead of a wider, two-car door. Having only a single car's worth of width makes it really challenging to do...
There's a divot in our concrete where water sometimes puddles. During the winter, enough soil and grass seed accumulated to get grass to grow....
One of these came with the house. I tried it once on some weeds last summer but was entirely unimpressed. Pulling weeds out of the loose soil by hand was way easier than using this thing on a pole. But Layla ran across a recommendation so I busted it out...
Layla cleaned the garage yesterday. For the first time (ever) I now understand why the hell spring cleaning is such a big deal. It's good to be rid of all of that clutter that piled up during the cold, cold winter. P.S. Thanks, Layla. Awesome job!...
The WTF snow did a real number on the hedges along the back of the house. See how they're all bent to the left? They should be standing straight up, and typically are only a few inches from touching the house. WTF, snow?...
I'm annoyed that when I take clothes which are both wet and dirty, put them through the washer and dryer, and then remove them, they're still wet. One of these two appliances is not doing its job.The washer isn't soaking clothes enough for initially dry clothes to be indistinguishable from...
As a followup to my question about floor-bound laundry, I'd like to present lintsam (inspired by Bonnie!) as a word to describe all of those damned socks I drop on that patch of pavement between the washer and dryer....
Layla and I bought a new desk a while back, but it took a few weeks to arrive, and we're probably going to pick it up soon. The thing is that it's much less of a monstrosity than our existing desk, and will no longer be able to hide the...
Is there a name for all of the miscellaneous clothes dropped on the floor in front of your washing machine as you move soaked garments from the washer to the dryer? If there isn't, there should be....
When it's dark outside, it's difficult to tell the difference between the blue bin (recycling) and the green bin (compost). And every once in a while, I get close to accidentally dumping a bunch of recycling in the compost bin (or vice-versa). Up until last night, when I dumped a...
Layla and I have only really bought one new piece of furniture since we moved into our house earlier this year, so we picked up a few pieces today from a local antiques importer. This particular piece came complete with a dorknut Aleph. P.S. It looks a little fruity in...
I took the first picture today, at 11:24am. The EXIF lies, as my camera is apparently exempt from daylight savings time corrections1. Back yard at 11:24am This next picture was taken less than a minute later. Front yard at 11:24am What the deuce?! 1 As we speak, I am now...
Have you ever had to clean out the filter and trap at the bottom of a dishwasher? Totally gross. This thing smells like death....
Somehow, these managed to grow in the back yard without Layla or I noticing, until today. The larger one is ~6" across....
This is a raccoon. In our back yard. Lovely. P.S. I realize Ralph's pointy kitty is not a raccoon....
That's right, folks: it only takes me 6 weeks to patch a [expletive deleted] hole I put in the ceiling. Before After Maybe I'll paint the ceiling eventually, too. Maybe....
It appears that a prior resident of this house is willing to trade 1,000 free hours of AOL service for the childish fun of homemade throwing stars. Imbeciles—it's one thousand free hours! This was spotted in the same vine pile as the still-unidentified armless torso found abandoned two weeks ago....
This little guy torments the cats....
Admittedly, I've got a better photo of the cucumber. But the picture at right—well, it's just got something special to it. P.S. Yes, we've got cucumbers growing in our front yard. Layla planted them there as part of the pre-wedding lanscaping....
The aforementioned network infrastructure box is now completed, installed, and whirring away quietly in the attic. However, in pulling the existing RG-6 out of the walls (to be replaced by Cat 6) I've managed to drill a 2" hole in one of the ceilings. So sometime this week I'll be...
I climbed into my attic and sawed closet doors in half. Really....
For Thursday's week of housework project, I built a box for all of my networking gear. The impetus came from the giant mass of cables and power cords that lives in one of the corners in my office. The cable outlet is in the middle of the wall, and so...
My plan for Tuesday was to remove the anode from the water heater, inspect it for wear, and replace it if necessary. Anodes are good ideas—they're essentially sacriicial pieces of metal with lower oxidation energies than whatever they're attached to. The idea here is that the anode will corrode instead...
I'm behind enough on housework that I've decided to take every1 evening this week and spend each doing some sort of manly around-the-house thing. I thought of this yesterday, and it still seems like a good idea. So that's a good sign. On Sunday I removed all of the ivy...
Now that we're back from our honeymoon, we've gotten back into the routine of cleaning and fixing everything in the house—and after all of the clutter from the wedding, we've been at this most of the weekend without much of a break. The nice part about going through everything is...
This morning, Layla woke me up and asked, Can my mom and I paint the ugly wood paneling in the living room white? I said, "sure," and 15 hours later, here's the result....
When Layla and I bought our house, the fantastic ~500 sq. ft. deck off the back end of the house was freshly built, but wasn't yet finished. This is pretty typical of the area, since you really have to wait for wood to dry out before you can seal it,...
I'm guessing this bad boy is at least four inches across. I hate bugs....
In an attempt to weasel out of the lawn-thatching I promised yesterday, I decided to move some more dirt. About 7,000 pounds more. As you can see at right, the rear suspension on the Ford can't take much more than a solid cubic yard of topsoil. I'm guessing here that...
This is what I look like after I've moved two cubic yards (~4,000 lbs.) of topsoil into my back yard, and broken down another cubic yard of hard-packed dirt mounds into a level field. Tomorrow involves another cubic yard, and when I'm all done hauling dirt, I'm going to get...
We've got bamboo in our backyard. Thankfully, it's not the weedy kind—it's more like a giant bush, and it's (reportedly) not likely to spread very much, or very quickly. But about six feet away from the base of the bush was a nice spot where I wanted to plant a...
A bastard squirrel did this to my deck earlier, and in only about fifteen seconds. He was apparently trying to get at a peanut crammed between the planks. Dammit....
She painted yesterday, too. Paint, Layla, paint! Yes, that's my fence in the background. I'm all done with the rails!...
We got these flyers recently. I smell a scam—either by Mr. Ho, Le, and Do...or by their advertising agency....
First, some background. Our new house didn't come with a clothes dryer. Technically, a washer was left here—but it's in crap shape and I still don't know if it works because the outlet next to it didn't even work until a few days ago. Additionally, the refrigerator that came with...
Technically, it was time to party. It's now over. After moving in three weeks ago, we've gotten the house unpacked and organized enough to throw a housewarming party. So we busted out the beer, balloons, and melon bowls (pictured) and had ourselves a, uhh, shin-dig. I think between 30 and...
Wow, it's foggy this morning. We get clouding like this once every handful of months here in the Greater Puget Sound area—typically in the spring. When I took this picture, visibility was around 200m, which is the worst I've seen it in recent memory. And in the time that it...
There's an outlet in the garage used for a clothes washer hookup, but the damned thing is falling halfway out of the wall and it doesn't appear to work. It turns out that this was the problem: a blurry photograph of unconnected wires. The wiring ran from the outlet, up...
