I am a Mighty Hunter

June 15, 2006 at 12:48 pm · Filed under Chris' Posts

So, a week or so ago I was walking around in our basement and I saw an intruder in my home. This vicious creature was lurking near me and, ready to pounce. Luckily, I noticed him before he expected and I was able to elude his attack. What a close call. I attempting to ignore the beast, hoping it would not continue its siege on our house. A few nights ago my fair maiden and I were watching a movie and eating diner. It was dark, but being a natural wilderness man I was like a fish in water. Soon, I felt a presence that did not belong. I quickly removed my damsel from the area and retreated myself. It had won this day. In the following days, I went to the hunting supply store (Lowes) and stocked up on war materials. I then set my traps and armed my weapons. The battle was fierce and I didn’t think I was going to make it. I have wounds to show for the fray, but the next day as the smoke cleared, I stood victorious. The mouse was dead…. I mean beast….. oh crap…..

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The Things I’ve Learned

June 7, 2006 at 9:28 am · Filed under Chris' Posts

Please play the attached song while reading this post. It creates the right mindset for my life.

Ok, so I thought I would share some of the amazing things I have learned since buying a house. I didn’t realize how valuable these little lessons really are until I had a conversation with one of my coworkers. He was amazed with my findings, so I thought I would share them with the world (or the part of the world that reads this). Well the first thing is, any project you think will take one hour will actually take about five, and that’s only if it goes well. (Examples wiring, cleaning, carpeting, etc) Next, never be afraid to tackle something yourself….if you have an expert with you. The example for this point is a little story. It all starts with the first weekend we had the house. We had a ton of people helping us clean. During the cleaning, people were dumping dirty water in the toilet, which causes it to flush. This is great unless you dump rags in the toilet also. Which happened two separate times. There were no immediate clogs and everything seemed to be fine….it was not. A few days later we went to have dinner with my brother and his girlfriend only to come home to a basement with a few inches of water in it. Here’s what happened….The rags had gone through our system fine and began to travel to the main sewer line in the street. On the way there, the rags ran into a few roots and stopped. Water was able to pass through this clog, but at a very slow rate. So, say I take a shower, the water would run out to the clog and the slow down, as it slowed down it would start to fill the sewer line. If too much water filled the line it would start to come out of our drain in the basement. Usually this would require a call to Roto-Rooter to fix the problem. Cost $95. I tried to wait as long as possible to get his done. During this time I met my neighbor, who to my great pleasure is a plumber. Not only that, but when I told him of my problem, he offered to come and help me fix it. All I had to do was rent the machine. Cost $35. So after 30 minutes of running an oger through a substance I can’t describe we had an open drain once again. Priceless!

The next “learning experience” was a few weeks later. The next piece of advice is this, there’s always a fuse. This story starts back at our old apartment. Our apartment did not have a dishwasher and Nicole hates to do dishes. When we started to look at houses Nicole’s one requirement was a dishwasher. The house we found did not have one, but one of my coworkers had a portable one that she wanted to sell. So, for $100 we got an almost new dishwasher. Nicole was very very happy. So, the other day Nicole plugged in the dishwasher and nothing happened…NOT good. We had left the previous weekend while it was running, and we had left it plugged it. So my guess was that something fried it. You should have seen Nicole, it looked like someone died. I was not too happy myself. I refused to be beaten by the dishes. I started to take it apart. After a few hours I had taken off the case and was examining wires. Everything looked fine. Again I refused to give up. I started to search online for schematics. I found a site that had the correct diagrams, and had a parts list. After a little bit of examining I found a thermal fuse hidden within the control panel. So, I took the control panel apart and found my fuse. It showed a resistance rating of 1 on my multimeter. That mean no electricity is passing through it. So I hooked it up without the fuse to test, and sure enough the little lights came on when I plugged it in. So, $11.97 I had my dishwasher back. Take that dishes!