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My brother in law’s 4 wheeler has been down a while now – the starter motor got cooked and he’s not had the money to pick up a replacement. We still take Duncan outside to kick a soccer ball around or let him stomp around the grass, but the grass is fast reaching a point where it stays wet. He doesn’t need to be wet and muddy.

If the 4 wheeler is visible, he gets grumpy. He doesn’t understand “it doesn’t work” or indeed the concept of “can’t” at all yet. He’ll walk over and smack the ATV Tires or try climb on it or whatever, which is just really sad.

I do hope he stays somewhat fearless as he grows up – I’ve seen plenty of kids who love this or that (loud things, bugs, etc) and then they reach a certain age where a switch flips in their head and they’re suddenly terrified of ‘em.

I’m not complaining about having a ~60F day in January, but where’s the bloody snow gone?

I feel like these warm days, where our house is toasty during the day and “brisk” of a morning – as opposed to chilly during the day and “let me spend all day in my blanket igloo” in the morning – are just lulling us into a false sense of security for a really bad winter approaching.

I feel like I should go out and split a bunch of wood and stack it all up on the porch in preparation for being snowed in. I feel like I should cobble something together out of some snowblower parts and a v8 just to clear out my driveway each day. In case you missed the joke, there’s a pretty funny video of a v8-powered snowblower somewhere on YouTube. I’d link to it but I don’t feel like searching for it right now.

Having a Snowblower is typically something I dream of… Usually each winter I have to go out and huff and puff and curse and sweat to clear the driveway at least 5 or 6 times – we’re into January now and I’ve not done it once. When there was snow on the ground, we just drove over it – and I’m not even driving the Suburban!

I’m not complaining though, a guy could get used to this.

It’s not terribly cold this weekend, but I’m just not enthused about the idea at all.

Our floodlight is hanging on by a thread (no fancy Kichler outdoor lighting for us, it’s a shitty floodlight on a sensor bulb that’s mostly broken and only stays on for about 5 seconds when it’s set off), and even if it worked it’s probably far too cold out there after dark anyway. I’ve got a stack of work to do right now, so that’s out of the question.

There’s still at least a face cord or two of wood that’s stacked up, but I’m trying to save that for “when we really need it” – my brother in law asked the pertinent question this morning: “when will that be?” I just don’t feel comfortable using that stuff up when I can go out there, grumble a bit and split some more.

So much hate for winter lately… Duncan managed to get strep throat somehow, and he’s got this weird gag-reflex thing going  on and the phlegm was making him urp up pretty constantly. We took him to the doctor and he got a shot of antibiotics, but that was after he’d urped up all over every thing we own, including all our towels.

So I went to do laundry, and it turns out the supply line to the washing machine froze. I connected another hose to it, ran that into the sink (so I could hear it if it started running), and then I put a heater in that stairwell to heat up the frozen pipes. Apparently though, the hose I used was frozen somewhere, and didn’t seal very good so when the line unfroze water shot everywhere in the stairwell to the basement.

Luckily I heard the water starting to spray everywhere, and I ran in there as fast as I could. I shut the breaker off, unplugged the heater and sat it safely out of the way to dry out. I then went to hook stuff back up, and touched the wet wall next to the wet area of the one goddamn piece of the old two-wire wiring in the entire damn house.

What happened next felt like a cross between touching something hot, and holding onto a vibrating mobile phone. It scared the shit out of me, and interestingly enough this is about the fourth of fifth time in my life I’ve been shocked – I’m starting to have this theory I’m immune to electrocution, but I’m not dumb enough to test it.

TL;DR: I almost electrocuted myself doing laundry, because it’s too friggin’ cold here. Anyone know of any good travel deals to the tropics?

I’m writing this at almost 5am, and I’m actually not cold despite the fact it’s below 20F outside – wooh! Me and Trevor were supposed to split wood again, because we’d just gotten the splitter back on Friday afternoon and then for some reason the con-rod of the engine decided that the engine block couldn’t contain it. So back it went again, and hopefully they sort stuff out with it quick so we can get the rest of the wood split before the really cold weather gets here.

So instead we split a bit of wood by hand (really thought we were done with that, goddamnit), I did some more winterizing on the house and then we sat and played Call of Duty: Black Ops for way too goddamn long. This happened, and I decided it was a good note to end on.

Before going to bed, I decided to go through and delete some of the comments from the various WordPress sites I admin – lots of unwelcome Russian text, penis enlargers, therapores reviews, that sort of guff. Gone gone gone. Good thing Akismet handles most of it so it’s not urgent, I just don’t like to be bugged by the little numbers on the dashboard. ;D

I just can’t get over how freakin’ warm it is in the house, so I had to say something about it.

… but only in our bedroom.

Mostly everywhere else in the house it’s nice and warm, but our room is cold for some freaky reason. About all I feel like doing when my hands are achy like this is playing some Call of Duty and deleting all the spam comments from my different websites (hullo mr lipozene, saying that you really like peta because you love animals!).

So we’re well into fall now, and though the first bits of October didn’t exactly seem like it (we had one day that was basically 90F!), the cold weather is finally here. We started some of the winterizing stuff, and this year (our 5th here, I believe?) we’re finally not going to be stubborn and do like everyone else with an older house does, and put clear plastic over our windows to see if that helps the drafts.

We still haven’t pulled out the down comforter or the electric blanket, but it’s getting pretty close. I was actually uncomfortably chilly last night – Duncan of course with his little thermals is usually roasty-toasty.

I’ll be going back out to the woods this weekend as well, and I plan on doing that until the ground gets too wet to make it out there. My back is well and truly sick of doing that though.

This morning we needed milk, and it was kinda cool when I got up (thanks to a surprise kick in the junk from Duncan), so I figured we’d wind up walking up to the store instead of driving. By the time we got him ready and Sabriena got dressed and whatnot, it was warming up a bit.

By the time we got back… whew. It was like an armpit. We spent probably a good twenty minutes sitting in the driveway under the shade of a nice big tree, and I even tweeted about how nice it’d be to have some outdoor furniture like a picnic table, and then a couple of nice laptops so we could just chill outside most of the day under a tree.

We came inside and I got something to eat, and began the long and arduous process of waiting for the thunderstorms to arrive and cool us off. They’re still not here, but I get the suspicion they’re not far away.

Once again, mid-western weather overcomes the best laid plans.

Friday started moderately well, but everyone knows that most of the people who work (and are therefore not desperately trying to cash-in, and are actually looking to get rid of some of their stuff) are all busy on Friday so Saturday’s the day.

It was a terrible omen that as I went to warm the car up, it poured down raining for about 5 minutes. That basically set the pattern for the entire day – a pretty warm day with patches of torrential downpour, so not surprisingly the whole place was like a giant armpit.

The inclement weather of course meant that the only people out selling stuff were those who were safely in garages and barns, and those people didn’t seem to have too much interesting stuff. One place that we went to, which was way out in the middle of nowhere, allegedly had a ton of baby clothes. Well, it turns out they had nothing but little girl clothes, which isn’t terribly interesting if you just had a little boy. They also had equestrian apparel and other horse paraphernalia (curious for Indiana, but not particularly interesting to me), along with a shitload of panda stuff (I think someone had a fetish to be honest) and not a lot else. We did score a couple of matching ceiling fans though.

My personal haul didn’t really consist of much – the Rock Band crap from friday, a small widescreen LCD I picked up for $2 that to my surprise actually works, and a 2-port KVM switch. Ironic that last year we saw all manner of stuff we’d have liked, and didn’t have any money – this year we actually had some money and didn’t see anything at all.

Aww well, I’m sure there will be more, smaller pockets of sales throughout the summer. I need to find something interesting for Hungry Hacker.

Fuck what the calendar says, spring isn’t really here until I have to mow the lawn… and that day was yesterday. Our lawn mower’s pretty beat up – my brother in law managed to hit a piece of metal pipe with it, couldn’t get it running right again, so did what any responsible teenager would do: He shoved it in the garage, called it “winter” and reasoned to tell me about it next spring.

I dug it out of the shed, put some fresh gas in it and got it running… sort of. The governor’s off quite a bit and it shakes like crazy. I’m going to try and track down a cheap place to buy a new blade for it rather than trying to balance the old one back out, and then once it stops shakin’ I’ll see if I can fix the governor to get it to run at a reasonable, stable speed.

It did the job though – I tampered with the governor spring a little to bring the revs back down to a sane level which stopped most of the shakes. It was good enough to mow the entire half-acre, though some portions were extra thick and still a little moist so it was tough going, and I had to take the recycler off for those parts.

Another year’s probably going to pass where we don’t get to build our deck – I’ve planned the thing out about four or five times now, and something always seems to come up in the way. Summer in our back yard is fantastic – sitting in the shade with a laptop and that almost-ever-present mid-western wind blowing in is much better than being cooped up upstairs in front of a desktop.

So I’m thinking a reasonable sized deck to cover the nasty area behind the laundry, with an awning, some outdoor rugs and some patio furniture would be a fantastic way to work all summer. Alas, it’s probably not to be – I’ll be stuck in this nasty old patio chair under a leaning tree with the laptop sitting on my lap and the bugs jumping out of the grass onto my feet. In fact as soon as the rain goes away I might go spread some bug killer powder out to stop that last bit.