That Stinks!

Now we both are sick.

I was on an antibiotic before Christmas, having developed a raging ear infection that required an intervention. By the big day, I was feeling better, but I also knew it wasn't gone. It still wasn't gone Friday when I finished up the antibiotic. I wrote my doctor, and she said to try a nasal steroid, which I have. I only have sharp pains in my ear every now and then and a bit of fatigue and fog brain.

My husband woke in the night Saturday night with congestion. Covid test - negative. A head cold, we think, possibly from the great niece or nephew who climbed all over him like he was a set of monkey bars when we saw them over the holidays, or from running all over Lowes and Home Depot trying to find something to fix an issue we are having in the bathroom.

We have a smelly drain in the shower.

He cannot smell it. It has been smelling for some time, and I kept waiting on him to say something. He never did, and when it reached the point where I thought I might throw up in the shower, I asked him what he was waiting for to fix that problem - and he told me he didn't smell a thing. I don't know how he could not, but whatever.

Anyway, he pulled off the shower drain cover, and there was lots of muck about it, and he cleaned that off, and then we doused the drain line with vinegar and baking soda, then a little bleach.

That did not take care of the problem.

So, we went off to one of the hardware stores on the day after Christmas. I wore a mask. He did not. We found a new drain cover and he picked up a scrub brush and some other things he thought would help, including Drano.

Then he sat to work scrubbing and cleaning the drain. He went back to the hardware store again for some bio enzyme sticks to put in there, too. He told me he stopped and talked to several people he knew, and he didn't mask up, either. He could have picked up some virus anywhere.

The smell is much improved but not gone. Yesterday, he dumped more vinegar and baking soda down the drain, and then he ran a water line through the clean-out line to the septic tank, which indicated nothing was stopped up there. He also poured water down the drain of the bathroom with a tub we do not use (we use it for storage) in case that was adding to the issue.

And there's still a smell that he cannot smell. It is better, but it is still there (fortunately not as sickening, but an indication of a problem). Now he is sick and I honestly don't know what else to try. We're on a septic tank and you can only pour so much bleach down the drain before you mess up the bacteria in the septic tank.

We are now putting baking soda in the drain before and after every shower. The hotter the shower, the more it stinks, so I am taking lukewarm showers. That is definitely a wake-up call in the morning.

We will return to trying to address this issue again when he feels more like dealing with it. In the meantime, I will be learning to hold my breath while under water.

Something Is Eating My Correlle Dishes

I am not sure when I noticed that the edges of my plates were beginning to look odd, but it has been within the last year. It has only worsened as time has gone by.

These are Correlle plates that we purchased in 2010. I hadn't realized the things were 14 years old until I went back to my blog and looked at when we bought them.

At any rate, it appears the dishwasher cleaner is to blame. From the Corning Museum of Glass:

"As of 2019, Corelle became a part of Instant Brands. According to the company, Corelleware can become weakened by repeated exposure to the abrasive detergents used in automatic dishwashers. Over time the glass may become rough or chipped along the edges. Previously, Corelle was made and sold by World Kitchen. When we contacted World Kitchen to ask about breakage in Corelle dishes, they recommended consumers use a less abrasive detergent."

I use Finish in my dishwasher. I do not plan to change detergents.

But maybe Santa needs to bring me a different kind of lightweight everyday plate.

He Did What He Said

As I am writing this, there is a man outside with my husband tearing out the old heat pump and preparing to install a new one.

This was a surprise. But the serviceman who was here on Monday did as he said he would and talked to "the boss" and the boss agreed it needed to be replaced after looking at the number of times we've had people out to look at it.

My main concern now is what kind of warranty we will have on this new unit. The fellow that is here is not the person who can tell me that. He is waiting on some other fellow to show up who can tell me that.

I am happy to report, though, that the serviceman kept his word, and this company is doing its part to make us happy with this very expensive purchase. I honestly didn't think either would happen.

Sadly, I have become quite jaded when it comes to the workings of the world.

***

In other news, in my little county where we seldom have things going on, we had an alleged racist pull a gun on a black man who was delivering a portable toilet to a worksite further on up the road from this man's house. What the hell is wrong with people?

At first the news media wasn't giving the man who pulled the gun's name or showing his face "because he was charged with just a misdemeanor," which I thought was weird because when did the charge become the criteria for giving names? Last time I checked, age or rape were about the only reasons to withhold a name. 

The name and image of the man holding the gun was later given by a different TV station that didn't withhold information. I do not know this person. Nor do I want to, thank you very much.

And Now This!

It wasn't bad enough that I backed my car into a stump yesterday.

Late in the day, I realized the heat pump had stopped working. Of course, this was on a 90-degree day with excessive heat forecast for the rest of the week.

The heat pump is new; its warranty runs out in a month. I have said since day 1 that there was something wrong with it. We've had them out to check it several times. Over the winter, the emergency heat turned on constantly, and finally in March someone figured out that the factory had left a piston out of the compressor! So, the compressor had been running for about 8 months without a part it needed.

Then we switched to air conditioning. We noticed that when the heat pump shut off, it shuddered and made a loud noise like a truck not hitting gears properly. I've had people out three time about that noise, and so far, they've twice said it was fine that it made that noise. This last fellow said it shouldn't make that noise.

So then yesterday it simply stopped cooling. The man came out just at 5 p.m. and started talking about what he was charging me for, and I informed him very quickly that the thing was under warranty, and he wasn't charging me a darned thing. He wanted to argue with me about it until I showed him the paperwork from where I bought it last year.

He couldn't find anything wrong with it though. Some things weren't reading properly, something to do with the amps it was pulling, but it wasn't something really bad. He ended up running cold water over the unit to cool it off and then it started working and cooling again. However, the air wasn't as cold as it had been (which, in my opinion, was too cold), although later in the evening the very cold air returned.

The service man said he was going to talk to "the boss" about the unit this morning, but who knows if he actually did that. People seldom do what they say they are going to.

Every time I turn around, something is breaking or broken.

The Mailbox

My mailbox

Like many folks here in Virginia, we've had trouble with mail delivery.

Some days we don't get it. Sometimes it is here by noon. Other times it shows up sometime after 5 p.m.

Lately we've been very hit or miss with the mail, but not enough to concern me. I have switched most of my important stuff to online notices out of necessity, since the mail has become rather unreliable. The mail is like newspapers in that they are doing themselves in with their own efforts at downsizing. Video killed the radio star, indeed.

My two senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, have been vocal about reversing any changes to USPS that have affected the reliability of mail delivery. They've been trying to have improvement since 2020.

They don't seem to be having much of an effect on the quality of the mail service.

Yesterday, our neighbor called the local post office to find out why he wasn't getting mail. The postmaster told him that all of us in this area have mailboxes that are too low. She was going to hold the mail until this was fixed.

His response was to ask why we weren't notified so we could fix the problem prior to her holding the mail. According to him, she grew very irate with him, and they exchanged words. She did, however, tell him he had until the middle of June to fix the problem and if it wasn't fixed, she would stop his mail delivery again.

Then he went out and started measuring mailboxes. My husband found him measuring ours when he came in for his dinner.

Rural mailboxes apparently should be between 41" and 45" high. Ours is 36" high, which is what it has been since we installed it in 1987. Maybe that was the required height back then.

The USPS has these new van things, courtesy of expenditures of Postmaster General DeJoy. They sit up higher than a car. I am assuming this is why the height of mailboxes suddenly matter.

It does seem like my neighbor asked a logical question. This is the post office, after all. How hard would it have been to slip a postcard in the mailbox that said, "Your mailbox must be 41" to 45" high. If it is not fixed by X date, delivery will cease."

My husband was quite upset about this last night. He is in the middle of trying to cut, rake, and bale hay, which is very time consuming and labor intensive. He doesn't need anything else on his mind right now.

After dinner, I looked up various pages on the USPS website, such as missing mail, delayed mail, and rural delivery. There was nothing about mailbox height on those pages. Finally, I typed in "how high should my mailbox be" in Google, and way down on the results page was a USPS page about mailbox height.

But before I found that, because I could not easily find anything about mailbox height on the USPS website, I had dashed off a quick note to my two state senators. One of the things I learned when I was a journalist was not to wait. So, I didn't.

My husband rose early this morning and was at Lowes when they opened so he could buy what he needed to raise our mailbox.

At lunchtime, he called the local post office to find out about this problem for himself and to ask for one of those time extensions. He found the postmaster to be pleasant, helpful, and very willing to give him a month to fix the issue. She said the notices had gone out in March, but when at least seven different families around us say they received no notice, I am inclined to think said notice did not go out.

The postmaster was so nice that almost as soon as my husband hung up, she called right back to say that our mail was being delivered today and nothing would be held.

My husband was amused, and he looked at me. "Do you think those emails you sent out last night had anything to do with that?" he asked. "Somebody's said something to her. She sure has a different attitude from what the neighbor said."

I shrugged. "No way to know."

But it wouldn't be the first time I've dropped a line and made a change.

Never underestimate the power of a well-placed word.

Update: I understand several of the neighbors have gone into the post office and had words with the postmaster. It should be clear to her by now that this area did not receive whatever notification she thinks she sent out.

Today's Lesson

My lesson for today began with a load of laundry.

I washed a load of towels, threw them in the dryer, then tossed a load of my whites into my washing machine.

I use different detergent on my underclothes, Cheer Free & Gentle, because of my many allergies. I use All Free & Clear for other things, but I have always used Cheer Free on my under things.

A friend once asked me why I did this, and I told her because while I am pretty sure I can use All Free, I know for certain I can use Cheer Free.

A big bottle of Cheer Free, which is the only way one can buy it these days, lasts me a long while.

The towels dried and the whites had finished, so I started chucking them into the dryer. I noticed these tiny little white beads of stuff all over the washing machine.

What is this stuff?

It was slick. I thought maybe my husband had left a Chapstick in his pocket and I'd missed it somehow. Or maybe he'd been using some kind of silicone product and I missed that.

I realized whatever it was, it was all over my clothes. I'd already put some of the clothing in the dryer, and now the stuff was also in the dryer.

I hauled everything outside and began shaking off the white stuff. In one instance, I found a glob of the stuff, which I set aside to show my husband when he came in for lunch. The longer I was out in the sun, the slicker the stuff became. My clothes felt slick.

Surely, I thought, I've run some kind of silicone he was using on the ball bearings on the hay baler through the wash.

I left the clothes outside and went in to wash my hands. They were starting to burn a little. I picked up the Dove soap. That didn't help. My hands felt slick, like the clothing, so I washed them with Dawn soap, too.

My husband came home for lunch. No, he'd not been using anything like silicon, he said. Nor had he been using Chapstick. 

I showed him the junk all over my clothes.

He looked at the stuff in the dryer, too. I'd already wiped out the washing machine but had left the stuff in the dryer for him to see.

He wiped that out. He was as puzzled as I.

In the meantime, my hands turned red and started to swell. I washed them again. Then I washed them with alcohol and washed them again with soap. They still felt slick. I washed them with vinegar.

I took a Benadryl because I was obviously having a reaction.

We thought something must be wrong with the washing machine. Maybe a bearing had gone bad and it was leaking white grease. (Is there such a thing as white grease?) I ran a load of warm water with vinegar through the washing machine while we ate. When it finished, we opened the lid. Everything looked normal.

I realized I'd washed the towels and not had a problem. I'd washed those in All. I'd washed my whites in Cheer. That was the only difference. I told my husband to look at the Cheer bottle and see if it looked weird inside.

It looked fine inside, but on the outside, where there was buildup from where I hadn't wiped the bottle, was stuff very similar to what was all over the clothes.

"Alexa," I asked, "Can liquid laundry detergent go bad?"

"Yes," she said. "It can deteriorate after a time and it can be toxic."

Well damn. Who knew? I looked at the bottle and couldn't find an expiration date. I couldn't find a "made" date, either.

We finished up lunch while I let the washer go through an entire cycle of water again. We opened it up and everything looked fine.

My husband left to go back to the hayfield.

I decided to call the phone number on the bottle to find out how to find the date. After a long wait, I connected with a P&G associate for Cheer.

I explained what had happened and asked if it could have been the Cheer. "Does Cheer go bad?" I wanted to know.

"Yes, it's only good for about 18 months," she said.

Well, an expiration date on the bottles would be nice, I thought.

She said the issue I was having was called "scrud." Scrud is a build-up of soap, in this case, old soap. Turns out, the bottle I was using, which I had purchased two years ago from Walmart online, was made in 2012.

That is a long way from 18 months of life. I guess Walmart dragged it from the back of a store somewhere when they sold it.

The way to find the date is to look at the bottle cap. In tiny little letters is the "made" date. But there is nothing about an expiration date on the bottle anywhere. And I'd have never found the "made" date if the Cheer woman hadn't told me where to look. I could barely see it as it was.

And that date is different on a new bottle, or a different size bottle. I know because I pulled out another bottle of Cheer that I had here, one I bought last summer in August at Target, and asked how to find the date on it. The numbers are on the twist cap, not the dispenser cap, on this new bottle. After I found the numbers, the woman told me the bottle I have here was made in 2023, the year I bought it, so I need to use it up soon.

The reason I have Cheer Free here in storage is because it is hard to find. I had been ordering it from Walmart online because I could not find a local store that carried it. Then I ran across that bottle at Target so I picked it up. 

Today, Target's website does not list Cheer Free and Gentle. Just regular Cheer. I need the "free and gentle" part. Walmart says it has a bottle online for $34. I am not paying that for detergent. None of the other stores (Kroger, Food Lion, local Walmart) has it, even online, except Amazon. It has it for $14. In the comments lots of folks note that they can't find the detergent anywhere else. So this detergent is difficult to come by.

Anyway, to compensate me for being on the phone for 40 minutes with the Cheer lady, P&G is sending me a $9 debit card. I'm not sure that covers much, but it's better than nothing.

I told the associate I thought there should be an expiration date visible on the bottles, wished her a good day, and hung up.

I washed my white clothes again, this time in vinegar and water. I checked them and they weren't slick or anything, and there were no white balls of goo on them.

Just to be safe I am running them through a third time in straight hot water. They should be thoroughly rinsed, anyway. I sure don't want my private parts turning red like my hands did.

So, the lessons here are: detergent can get old and become toxic. Goopy stuff on your clothes is not good. Vinegar is a great cure-all, as is Benadryl.

Nothing is as it seems sometimes.

A Useless Warranty

After going through 4 different dryer timers on a GE dryer we purchased in 2019, we finally threw up our hands, tossed that thing out the door, and bought yet another new dryer on April 22, 2022.

We purchased a Speed Queen with a five-year warranty. It's the closest thing to a commercial dryer you can get.

I have known almost from the first that the timer on this dryer was not right. It is terribly spongy and won't stay where you put it. If you put it on "Most Dry" it won't even start, so you have to move it down a notch.

Sometimes I'd dry a load of towels and it would short cycle, and the towels would not be completely dry and I've have to run them through again.

So it was that Sunday night my husband threw some coats he'd washed into the dryer, and turned it on around 8 p.m.

When we got up to go to bed at 10 p.m., we realized the dryer was still running. It was incredibly hot - I don't know if his coats melted. The heat coming off the dryer was intense. The timer had not moved and the dryer was on its hottest setting and had been running that way for two hours (I hate to think what that did to the electric bill). 

Monday morning, I called the place where we purchased the dryer to see what I needed to do for service. The man was rather snotty with me because I didn't want to use the first person he told me to use and I asked for other service providers. We'd had the first person out last summer when the dryer door broke. We're still waiting on him to come back and do the repair he said he would. (We fixed it ourselves right after he left. With my husband recovering from hip surgery, no less. I unscrewed the door, and he figured out how to get the handle back on, and then I put the door back on. That guy was an idiot.)

Anyway, I called a different service provider and the fellow showed up Thursday. Nice guy, very empathetic to our situation, but he could only do what the tech people at Speed Queen would let him do, and they wouldn't let him replace the timer. They tried to say it was because we were running the timer counterclockwise. I assure you, I never run the timer on a dryer counterclockwise (aside from the time the timer broke on the GE, when I ran it counterclockwise and made it work through the weekend until we could get the part to fix it).

Now I am left with a dryer that runs, but I have to set the timer on the oven or Alexa when I start a load and go check it every 30 minutes. Sometimes the timer runs down like it should, sometimes it doesn't. So I can't trust this dryer. Can't throw a load of clothes in and run to the grocery store to have them finished when I return. Someone has to be home now when the dryer runs.

My choice here is to do this: keep using this dryer as it is and call the repair people and have Speed Queen pay for a visit every so often even if they don't replace the part (it's a warranty call, after all), or, since we have the part number, we can go get a new timer and replace it ourselves, which of course would void the warranty. I guess I will be sitting home watching the dryer go round and round for a while.

It's not like I have other things to worry about. Or a life to live.

Speed Queen, you suck. You made a bad dryer and you won't honor your warranty. You are worse than a cheap whore at a truckstop. You're a horrible company, and you can bet your sweet bippy that if this dryer burns my house down, I'm coming after you with every lawyer I can find, and I will own you before it's over and done. I don't care what your stupid paperwork says about liability. You've been warned with a service call and you chose the cheap way out to save a buck instead of doing the right thing.

You are not an honorable company, and you do not deserve a good reputation. I will never again write or speak well of this company. Speed Queen, you suck!

About That Leak . . .

I mentioned the other day that we'd found a leak in the "closet" in the garage.

The area really isn't a closet. It was a half-bathroom. The plan was for my husband to use it so he wouldn't track dirt into the house. However, when we built this house in 1987, we didn't finish the half-bathroom because we ran out of money.

So, my husband used the bathroom off the kitchen, which would have been the children's bathroom had we had kids. And when we finally did finish the half-bathroom in the garage, he constantly forgot about it and just kept tracking dirt into the kitchen to go the one he'd grown used to using.

Finally, I suggested that we take the toilet back out and install shelving and use the space more effectively. It took some convincing, but after we purchased an industrial-type shelf and placed it in the bathroom, and then loaded it with paper towels, tissues, Dr. Pepper, etc., - mostly large purchases from Sam's Club that we made in an effort to save money - he decided it was a good idea.

And then the valve from where there was supposed to be a toilet leaked.

I don't know how long it had been leaking, but the bottom shelf was soaking wet and completely ruined. Fortunately, it held only extra porcelain tiles from where we'd had the bathroom refinished in 2013, so it didn't really hurt anything but the shelf.

My husband attempted to pull the baseboard away without removing the shelf and contents, but I was terrified things would fall on him, plus he was crawling around on his belly and he has no business doing that at his age.

So we hauled everything off the shelves. Now I have crap piled in the kitchen and all over the garage. We had to move the car outside to make room. Who knew you could cram so much stuff into shelving? (It didn't help that just last week we'd made a Sam's Club run to stock up.)

Anyway, once we got the shelves empty and removed, then it was easy to take up the baseboard. There was mold behind the baseboard, so we cut that part of the drywall away and threw it out. We also pulled up the tile that has been down for 36 years because the water had made some of it curl.

We sprayed everything down with bleach. After that dried, we sprayed again with some stuff called Concrobium Liquid Mold Remover, which we have used successfully before.

Now we are running a fan and trying to make sure everything is dried out before we repair the damage.

The fix will consist of plywood boards to replace the shelf, and plywood nailed around the bottom where we cut out the drywall. Then we will put back baseboard and quarter round, only we will just purchase prefinished rubber-type stuff that they make now that just sticks to the wall instead of bothering with real wood. After all, this is in the garage and we plan to die here. It can be someone else's problem in 30 years.

First, though, we have to make sure we've mitigated all of the mold, and that might take a few days and a few more sprays of bleach.

Here are pictures:

Stuff piled in the kitchen.

Stuff piled in the garage.

The shelving we took out.

The place where it leaked.

The original tile. I still like it.
Too bad you can't find it anymore.

The one spot that concerns me. We can't
decide if that's mold or just a little wood rot.
We'll be able to tell more when it is completely dry.

Happiness Challenge - Day 30

 

I am happy today that my husband found a water leak in the garage before it got worse.

It was bad enough as it was.

We had turned a half bath into a closet (we weren't using the bathroom), and the valve in there had started leaking, unbeknownst to us.

My husband needed something out of the closet and discovered the leak. It had already done a significant amount of damage - ruined the bottom shelf of the shelving we were using, ruined the tile floor (no great loss, it was 36 years old), messed up the baseboards and trim.

There was mold in behind the baseboards, so we had to cut out the dry wall. Plus, we had to empty those shelves, which were full of paper towels, Dr. Pepper, tissue paper, extra rolls of aluminum foil, glass jars, trash bags, and other assorted items that didn't belong in the house.

It took us several hours to empty out the shelving and for him to tear out the bad wood. I held the flashlight so he could see what he was doing as the bathroom/closet was not well lit. 

The water had been dripping a good while, that was obvious.

After he had everything removed, we bleached everything to kill the mold, and now it has to dry.

The good news is it could have been worse if we hadn't found it. The bad news is it didn't help my back issues any, but that's life.

The Power Men Cometh

Today I have spent hours learning about electricity.

First, a gentleman from a whole-house generator installer came out to give us an estimate on the installation of one of those. I'd rather not have a repeat of the lack of power and heat that we had a few weeks ago. 

It is expensive, though. We will have to think about it. Ultimately, it will be up to my husband to decide, since he would be the one having to deal with generators and such should the power go out again.

Then, a man from the electric company showed up after I called and told them I was being shocked in the shower. He came within an hour of my call, which I had not expected.

Apparently, being shocked in the shower is fairly common. The workman who came was a nice fellow who went above and beyond the call of duty to help us sort out this "ghost," as he called it.

After some kicking around and digging, he and my husband found the ground rod buried in the dirt outside of the house. He sanded off the grounding wire and reworked it and reconnected it because it was loose. He thought this might be the source of the problem.

This was actually something the electrician we'd had out earlier should have checked, I suppose, but the power company fellow wanted to fix the problem. He lives just down the road, we learned, and he said he was helping out a neighbor.

I like nice men who enjoy their work and want to help. He had a ruddy complexion and was quick to smile. He was stocky and exactly what you'd expect an electric repair guy to look like. He was very polite and called me ma'am.

He also gave me his cell number and told me to call him personally if the issue continued. I appreciate that kind of gesture.

We'll see how it goes in the shower tonight, but my fingers are crossed that we have resolved the issue, and there will be no more shocks in the shower.

Sparks in the Shower

Regular readers may remember that when the power was out over Christmas, we managed to have warm water on Christmas Eve. This happened even though the hot water heater was not hooked to the generator.

After the electricity was restored, my husband and I both received shocks in the shower when we touched a stainless-steel hose on the hand-held piece that goes with the showerhead.

We called an electrician.

He and his crew came out, but he could not replicate the shock. Of course, he wasn't standing naked in wet water in the shower, although he did take off his shoes and stand there in his socks. But his socks weren't wet.

Electricity was leaking from the circuit breaker for the hot water heater, so he replaced that. He also tied another ground wire to something or another.

This appeared to fix the problem.

But last week I received a little zap in the shower. I mentioned it to my husband, who said nothing.

Last night, I received another zap in the shower. This time, I experimented. Grabbing the stainless-steel hose did not cause a zap, but if I put my fingertips gently on the hose, I felt the electricity. I no longer chew my nails, but I keep them clipped short, so the skin there is sensitive.

I called to my husband that there was still electricity in the shower.

He came to me bearing a wad of tissues.

"Why are you handing me tissues?" I asked, toweling off my hair. 

"You said you wanted a tissue."

"No, I said there was electricity in the shower."

He says he doesn't have a hearing problem, but I'll let you, dear reader, figure out how "electricity" became "tissue."

"Anyway, I was shocked in the shower. Had my electric shock treatment, I guess," I kidded.

This time, he admitted that it had shocked him earlier as well. He'd showered before me.

My request for him to call the electrician was met with, "I'll do it when I get time."

Since I like my life and would prefer not to be murdered by my shower, I want him to call sooner rather than later, and if he hasn't called tomorrow, I am calling myself.

In the meantime, I put down a plastic mat in the shower. It's the best I can do to offer some kind of grounding.

Damn Dryer

In April, we bought a new dryer because the one we bought in 2019 was constantly needing a new timer.

The thing isn't even two months old, and the handle fell off.

A $1,300 piece of crap.

Three Cheers!

Last week, I finished up my last bottle of Cheer Free & Gentle. I've used this detergent since before I married. My mother used it.

Yes, there's a note on the
bottle reminding my husband
not to use this detergent.

But even before the pandemic, it had become hard to find.

After the pandemic, it was nigh impossible, unless I wanted to pay $30.00 for a 64 oz bottle on Amazon.

I did not.

So, I used it only on my personal intimate clothes, and squeezed about a year out of this bottle.

I tossed it into the recycling bin with much sorrow.

Then, on a whim, I checked for it again on Amazon. Still $30 a bottle. A comment, though, suggested it was now available at Walmart again.

I checked there and hit the jackpot!

I could get Cheer Free & Gentle for $8.08 for a 64 oz bottle! Yes!

It arrived over the weekend, and I am so pleased.

For my other clothes, I use All Free. I have been asked in the past why I don't simply use All Free for everything.

The answer?

Because I suspect I can use All Free on my intimates and not break out, but I know for certain I can use Cheer Free on them and not have any issues.

Hurray for Cheer Free!

New(ish) Gnome

This firefighter gnome came to live with us years ago. Maybe 15 years ago or more, I don't remember. I don't know where I bought him or what I paid for him.

The gnome

He was looking his age, though. All the color was gone from his hat, and his boots were all scraped up. Otherwise, he was in good shape.

I brought him inside and washed him off, scrubbing him with one of those smiling scrubby things, which took off even more paint.

I sat him aside, but over the last week, I've been repainting him.

Now he looks like this:

The gnome repainted!

Side/rear shot of Mr. Firefighter Gnome

Ta dah!

Now to find some clear coat paint to finish him off, and then he'll go back out into what used to be the rose garden, but which now is a rock garden.

Exterior Spruce-Up

When we built this house, we put the rear where the front should be. Back then, when you built a house on top of a hill, you put the front of the house toward the view.

However, we drive up to the back of the house, and everyone comes in the back doors. I don't think anyone has ever come through my front door. There are no steps leading to it, and no real reason to walk around there.

In fact, the only time I know of anyone using the front door, or the small porch there, was one year when the UPS man left a package there during bad weather when no one was home, and I didn't find it for three months.

The back part of the house is where the heat pump is, and we've always kept a flower bed around the heat pump. I started out with perennials, but soon switched to roses only. My husband's grandmother was a prize rose grower, and she gave me starter plants.

The roses never did as well as I wanted. The ground here is Virginia clay, and that doesn't grow things well. Mulch and flower food helped, but since the roses were never strong to start with, they easily caught disease and were home to aphids and Japanese beetles (although come to think of it, I haven't seen Japanese beetles in some time. Maybe the stink bugs ate them.)

Of course, I am older now, and I've some health problems, so weeding and keeping up with this little plot had become something I wasn't doing as well as I wanted.

Monday, the last of Grandma's roses went to the compost pile. My husband had decided he wanted something that looked better there.

It does look better, and once I buy some flower baskets there will be flowers. Also, there are mums in the old whisky barrel.

Of course, all of this could have been avoided if we'd reversed the house to begin with, so that the heat pump was not by the driveway, main entrance, and patio.

Live and learn.

A Clear Phone Screen

A while back, I took the case from my phone, removing the screen protector in the process, in order to have the battery replaced.

The battery replacement went fine. The screen protector, not so much. It was terribly dirty when I replaced it and it bothered me.

Today, UPS brought me a replacement screen protector for my little iPhone 5SE, and in about 20 minutes, I had a clear screen on my phone again.

This makes me very happy as the dirty-looking screen that I had before, with the old screen protector on it, was driving me nuts every time I looked at the phone.

So, yay for a clean phone screen protector! Hurrah for clarity!

I was even able to get the case back on it without a lot of grumbling. Good as new!

It's the simple things, yes?

August 18 Happiness Challenge

My house is clean! Not clean like I keep it clean, but sparkling. It's really clean.

I have a young woman who comes in about every 5 weeks to do the mopping and heavy cleaning that I'm no longer able to due thanks to the f*cked up surgery I had in my abdominal area over eight years ago. While it sucks to not have the strength to mop and crawl around under the bed cleaning up spider webs, I'm very happy that we can afford to have this young woman come in and help me every so often. With the heavy cleaning under control, I can manage to dust occasionally and run the vacuum to keep the dirt down.

Today was cleaning day. I'm very thankful that this young woman is available to help me out.

And very happy to have the spider webs gone.

Each day in August you are to post about something that makes *you* happy. Pretty simple. And, it doesn't even have to be every day if you don't want it to be. It's a great way to remind ourselves that there are positive things going on in our lives, our communities, and the world.

The Clothes Dryer

I do a lot of laundry, considering there are only two people here.

My husband can go through three changes of clothes in a day, working on the farm. In the winter, there are extras - insulated coveralls, jackets, thermal underwear. 

If I don't stay on top of it, stuff piles up.

Saturday is always change-the-bed day. However, the day after Christmas, I suggested we wait and change it on Sunday because I had not done the laundry for two days plus we'd each received new clothing. All of that needed to be washed.

I put my husband to work taking a few items from his closet. It's the rule - new clothes in, old clothes must come out.

I washed a load of clothes, hung them up. Turned around and loaded the dryer with a load of towels.

I turned the dial and there was nothing. It moved freely. This dial on this dryer had always been a bear to turn; even my husband found it difficult to move around the circle.

Now it moved and nothing happened.

I bought the dryer on February 21, 2019. It hadn't even hit two years yet.

"The dryer won't run," I yelled. He came in and twisted the dial. 

"The timer is broken," he said.

I went to the warranty drawer (yes, I am organized enough that I have a warranty drawer), and pulled out the file marked GE Dryer 2019. I had purchased a 3-year extended warranty through Lowes.

First I tried to call. I ended up somehow with GE, even though I'd called Lowe's, and was informed the one-year manufacturer's warranty had ended.

My husband took the phone from me and went through the menu options again, this time getting the correct place.

He was on the phone for over an hour. The customer service person, whom we shall call Miriam, did everything she could think of to keep from having to pay out on this warranty claim. She asked for non-existent numbers, non-existent invoices, etc., etc.

My husband, finally, had had it.

"Let me get this right. I'm sitting here with a receipt for a warranty I paid $130 for, and a receipt for a dryer that I paid for, and you're telling me because there isn't some number that you think I am supposed to have, that you're not going to service this dryer. Is that what you're telling me?" His voice was terse and his jaw was set.

But yes, that was what she was telling us. She would, however, set up an appointment with their factory repair people and someone would be in touch.

In the meantime, I had a load of wet towels to deal with. I have a clothes rack, so I put it up in the kitchen next to a space heater and eventually got the towels dry. They were stiff as a board, but they were dry.

My husband watched a video on how to fix the dryer at some point during the day.

Sunday night, as we were getting ready for bed, I had a thought. "You know, I've always turned that dial clockwise," I told my husband. "Maybe I should try turning it counterclockwise."

He laughed at me.

I went in to the laundry room and turned the dial counterclockwise. After a few turns, it started making the strange ticking sound it had always made when I turned it before. I stopped it on a drying cycle, and hit the start button.

It ran.

My husband cursed.

That wasn't the end of it, of course. Monday morning he rose at 5 a.m., because he had to feed. He threw a load of his thermal underwear in the washer and put it in the dryer.

I watched the timer. It went a little long, but it dried the clothes. He left to feed and I tossed another load in the washer. This time, the dryer didn't want to work as well. It stopped before the clothes were dry. I backed it up and started it again.

When my husband came back from feeding, I told him the dryer still wasn't working right. He called Tribles, which is a place that carries appliance parts, and told them what he needed.

They had a timer.

He went after it. I emptied out the laundry room so he'd have room to work. He came home, replaced the timer, and just like that, we were back in the laundry business.

We cancelled the appointment with the repair person.

I learned several things. First, I will never, ever buy the extended warranty from Lowes again. In all likelihood, I will never purchase another appliance from Lowes. Their customer service is simply awful.

Second, I had no idea how much my life revolved around doing the laundry. I hop up and down every 45 minutes to go wash something or dry something. I also like doing it.

Lastly, this thing of planned obsolescence that the manufacturers have going on simply is horrible for consumers. A $600 dryer should last me a very long time, not less than two years.

The Mattress Saga

Around the same week that the world stopped because of the coronavirus, my husband began to complain that he was having trouble sitting on the bed to put on his shoes.

I initially thought it had something to do with the ankle surgery he had in November. I solved the problem by bringing a kitchen chair into the bedroom so he could sit and put on his shoes.

However, when Saturday came and it was time to change the linens, I discovered that the mattress on his side of the bed was bulging out about three inches. Super bulging, actually. This was why he couldn't sit on the bed - the mattress was collapsing.

We'd purchased the mattress in June 2012. At that time, my husband was complaining constantly of his back hurting and I thought a new mattress would help the problem; it did. Score one for the wife.

I hunted up the warranty paperwork. To find the warranty, it said, one had to look at the "do not remove" tag on the mattress.

This tag was hidden from me, as we have a hypoallergenic cover on the mattress. And of course the tag, once I felt around for it, was not at the end that opened. The mattress cover had to be removed.

This mattress is huge and fat. It weighs about 150 pounds. I can barely lift a corner to get the sheets tucked in properly. After much cursing, tugging, and pulling, I got the mattress cover off and threw it in the wash.

I took pictures of the tag with the information I needed. My husband came in and helped me put the now-clean mattress cover back on it. We left the tag at the zipper end. We also turned the mattress so that the bulge was down at my feet and not at our upper bodies.

We'd purchased this mattress from Haverty's. Haverty's went out of business locally in 2013, though I understand the chain still exists in other places. Nowhere near us, though.

I contacted the furniture store we use now, and asked if they could help. The manager called me back with a number to call for the mattress manufacturer. I called that number. A nice woman told me that my mattress still was under warranty but I should deal with the store from which I bought the mattress.

After much explaining, she understood that the store is no longer in my area. The mattress warranty then fell under the mattress manufacturer. They needed pictures. They needed to be sure the mattress wasn't soiled or otherwise misused. They also needed a picture of the silk tag identifying the mattress.

The silk tag, of course, was at the end of the mattress under the cover and not where the thing zips up.

We waited until the next Saturday, because I change the bed linens every weekend, to take the mattress cover off again and take pictures. We took every photo I could think to take, including one with a ruler showing the bulge, and measurements of the mattress across the bottom and at the bulge. We could also see that the mattress was bulging on the sides in other areas, so total failure at some point was imminent.

The is the biggest bulge in the mattress.

Our effort to measure the bulge.

I went to the website and submitted the photos, the warranty information, the receipt, and everything else they had asked for.

Then I received a notice that they needed more pictures. Sigh.

I called to see what they needed, because I couldn't imagine what there was left to take a photo of. The helpful person on the phone put me on hold, reviewed the photos, and immediately approved my claim.

Then she looked up what an exchange mattress would be, because mattresses do not stay the same. They change every year, like clothing, so that you can't go back the following year and purchase the exact same mattress.

It seems to me that if one makes a good product, one should stick with that, but I'm not a manufacturer or in retail, so perhaps there is some profit motive I am missing. I also think a mattress with a 10-year full replacement warranty and 25 years of some kind of restitution after that would last at least 10 years, but it didn't. (I think refrigerators, dishwashers, and washers and dryers also should last a good 25 years or more, like they used to do, but they don't anymore.)

At any rate, the next step was to test the mattress the helpful lady said would be the replacement.

The furniture stores here are not completely closed. They have limited hours. But I have been trying hard to self-isolate (up until yesterday) because of my asthma and my propensity to catch every virus that flies past me in the air.

So we did not go straight out to test a mattress. The company gave us 90 days to do that because of the current shut-downs and the virus situation.

Since we had to go out yesterday to take care of my husband's retirement paperwork, we decided to go by the furniture store and check out the mattress. My husband had called around on Saturday and found a store that had one.

When we reached the store, they would not allow us in because they were limiting patrons to 10 at a time. I did not mind the wait. I thought this was a good thing. One person came out and the man doing the counting said one of us could go in. I told my husband to go in and check out the mattress and then he could come out and I could go check out the mattress. He put on his mask and went inside.

Later another person left and the man motioned that I could join my husband. I put on my mask and went inside. I tested the mattress, which my husband thought was great. I thought it was a little hard but I actually sleep on a bed wedge anyway, for the most part, and not on the mattress.

My husband said that was the mattress he wanted.

Yesterday I called the mattress company again to order the mattress. I was told that (a) the plant is not operating at the moment and (b) if I ordered one now, it would be delivered to the doorstep and dropped off. Or I could wait and call back after May 15 and see if they were bringing items into homes and setting up the mattresses.

The man on the phone told me the new mattress would weigh 153 pounds. That is very heavy.

The part of me that is concerned about off-gassing from this mattress wouldn't mind letting it sit in the garage for a few days before we tried to sleep on it. However, the part of me that knows there is no way my husband and I could remove the old mattress and bring in the new one won out, and I will call back after May 15.

In the meantime, I am hoping the mattress holds together and we don't end up on the floor. We don't have a spare bedroom and the couch isn't made for sleeping.

I don't think this is something duct tape can fix.

So we've also had this going on in the midst of this pandemic. A sagging mattress. It is always something.