Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Monday, March 19, 2007

This great Dylan tune is a perfect description for what seems to be going on with the physical elements of our home here of late. It seems that things started last weekend when I tried to mow the lawn only to discover that the riding lawnmower wouldn't start. Being somewhat mechanically inclined, I was able to determine that the battery of the machine had succumbed to the elements and was in need of replacement (I love multimeters). Given that I have this before with cars, I was surprised to learn that they no longer actually get the battery ready for you to just drop in the machine; you have to fill it with acid and charge it yourself now-a-days. So I had to buy a charger too. Once I got the battery ready I could start the mower but the thing wouldn't move. After some additional poking around, I found that the drive belt had come loose and I was able to get that fixed. I felt like I had been pretty clever.

During this time, our dishwasher stopped working. A little bit of a pain but we can do dishes by hand so not a huge deal. Hoping that the solution would be as easy as the lawnmower I did some poking around but I was unable to figure out to fix the problem which seems to be a temporarily (I hope) seized motor. Then, yesterday while I was mowing, our downstairs furnace cut out and now only moves the air around without heating it. I stay a long ways away from HVAC stuff so we'll call someone about that. Fortunately, we have dual zone heating so the upstairs of our house was still being heated or it might have been mighty cold last night.

Finally, we found that a bat had gotten into the house last night. We're not exactly sure how but this makes us wonder if bats have moved back into the walls of one of our second floor dormers. I guess I'll have to get that bathouse built and put up on the back of our property and hopefully lure them out of the house and to it. I'll also have to find a way to seal up the house to keep this from happening again.

Oh the joys of home ownership.

Hopefully, the old wives' tale of things happening in threes is going to hold and we're done with things breaking. On the positive side, I got two really good rides done over the weekend and I'm over 600 miles for the month. This week will be a recovery week with medium long and easy rides planned for each day of the week.

Thanks for reading and I hope you have a good week.

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