Scattered Thoughts . . .

W e've had an old, beat-up, dented, filthy range hood in our kitchen longer than I've lived here.  Shortly after I moved in, I cleaned it up and spray painted it.  It didn't work all that well so it always was covered in slimy grease.  The light wasn't working on it anymore either so I replaced the electrical bulb socket too.  This was a "temporary fix" until we were able to renovate the kitchen. Well, we still have not yet gotten to renovating the kitchen although quite a few more temporary fixes were done to various parts of the kitchen.  We've been slowly reconfiguring the kitchen to our planned new kitchen.  We never did anything with that old, dented, ugly range hood though.   About a week ago, I knew that range hood filter was in need of cleaning so I pulled that out in an attempt to clean it again.  I immediately noticed that the entire hood was dripping grease...  the fan was caked in grease...  the light was covered in grea...

I nside the house throughout the winter, we've always had extremely dry air that dries out our sinuses.  It gets so unbelievably dry in there that we even have difficulty swallowing while sleeping because our throats and mouths get so dry!  Not only is that annoying but it also makes it a bit difficult to sleep through the night.   To counter this, we've always left a big stock pot of water simmering on the stove.  Unfortunately, this simmering stock pot remedy never seemed to resolve the dry throats and mouths.  It did help increase the humidity in the house but it wasn't not effective enough.  This 24 hour a day simmer stock pot idea also caused a pot rot out on us due to constant use with hard water!  The mineral deposits ate right through that first stock pot.   The humidity in the house drops down below 10% in winter.  For comfort, it really should be in the 40-60% range but the stock pot solution wasn't getting us any higher t...

W e awoke this morning to another blackout due to downed tree limbs covered in heavy ice falling on power lines nearby.  The ice adds too much weight for the branches to bear and it has been a bit windy too which doesn't help.  I think we had power again in about two hours.  That was just long enough for us to collect all of our battery operated lamps, lanterns, flashlights and power stations.  This time of year we worry about freezing pipes but short blackouts aren't a major problem unless they fry electronic components throughout the house and we had that potential today! When we lost power, the power was flickering for about ten or fifteen minutes which caused all sorts of problems with our electronic devices, appliances and entertainment center.  Once we had power back on I quickly realized that all the flickering had pushed everything into "pairing mode".  This meant that I needed to set up each device again.  We also had issues with a few of our ...