That’s what my new high tech furnace-a/c system says it is outside now.  NOAA is reading ten at BWI airport too.  But the house is staying pretty warm.  Just the usual cold spots near the front and back walls and even those aren’t really cold so much as a bit chilly.  But it looks like death outside.  The sun is out and bright and the sky is cloudless but the only things moving are the tree branches in the wind and the birds around my feeders.  I don’t even want to think about what the wind chill is right now.  NOAA says it can be as much as 5 below.

A downy woodpecker was scouting out my suet feeder a moment ago.  It had itself fluffed up almost to the point its body looked like a little round ball of black and white feathers.  It lit on the feeder and then for some reason flew right back off.  Those things are shyer then I am.  I’m going to put out a second suet feeder in a little bit.  I already need to refill the thistle seed feeders the gold finches use.  Just thinking about going out in that is giving me the shivers.

I may not loose much weight this holiday break but my little rowhouse sure is.  I haven’t tossed so much paper into the recycling bins in ages. 

I have this bad habit of saving magazines and periodicals.  Not everything I read, but stuff I think could be valuable later.  Like the software developer’s periodicals I read for example.  Journals from the few professional organizations I am a member of, such as The Association for Computer Machinery.  I tell myself there is reference material in these I may need later.  But the fact is it’s all time sensitive.  Most of the fifteen years of computer trade journals I have on my shelves I can safely toss away now, because it either references technology now that is completely out of date and orphaned, or is online where I can more easily get to what I’m looking for via the seach engines.

It’s not like I have stacks of magazines here at Casa del Garrett.  I hate clutter.  So they’re all tucked neatly into those cardboard periodical holders and labeled according to publication and date.  It’s amazing how much of that stuff you can throw out when you ask yourself if you’ve ever so much as touched it in the last ten years.  That came to about four-fifths of it. Then I ask myself how much of it is online anyway and that’s another four-fifths of what’s left.

I’ve saved some newspapers, some of them whole, from certain historical event days.  Like the day the first humans walked on the moon.  The day Nixon resigned.  The day the supreme court overturned Hardwick v. Bowers.  I have the front pages of all the local Washington D.C. newspapers the day gay folk rioted in San Francisco after Dan White got off with Voluntary Manslaughter.  I’ll post the front page of the Washington Star that day later. 

I have lots of old Advocates and other gay periodicals, journals and underground ‘zines from the early to late 1970s, when the movement for respect and equality was getting up some steam.  The optimism of those days is almost painful to read again.  Everyone just assumed that the gains made in the sexual revolution, and for racial equality and women’s rights would naturally translate into a better world for gay people too and it didn’t.  But when you look at how the rest of the era’s equal rights movements played out that’s not so surprising. The straight, white, protestant majority took in the new freedoms that applied to themselves, and pretty much let everyone else keep on struggling.  Racism is still a curse on our country, women are freer to have sex with men now, but not so much to make the same money for the same work, climb the corporate latter, or rise in politics.  Yes, it’s all better now then it was back in 1972 when I graduated from high school.  But isn’t that what they tell gay people when we complain that we are still, after decades of struggle, second class citizens?   Oh cheer up…think of how better off you are now then you Were…!  I was flipping though some of the old gay community newspapers and magazines from the 70’s and marvelling and how anti-gay bullshit just hasn’t changed At All in decades, just the faces speaking it. 

Most of that stuff is going in a Rubbermaid storage container and I’ll have to find someplace in the house for it because that old newsprint degrades rapidly if it’s subjected to wide temperature and humidity swings.  By the time the recycling drop-off reopens I reckon I’ll have another few hundred pounds…yes, that’s right…of paper to deposit into it.  All the old computer journals.  The old libertarian movement journals, Inquiry and Reason.  The occasional lifestyle magazine issues I’ve saved because that particular month’s issue was really good…Cigar Affectionado…Vanity Fair…  The old Regardes from back when I was working as an architectural modelmaker…  The issues of Popular Photography and Camera 35 and Peterson’s Photo-Graphic from when I was trying to be a freelance photographer….  It’s fun to look back on the world as it was when those issues were published, but that world is gone now and if I want to go for a stroll in it again I can do it online.  I need the space more then I need the paper memories.

I’m holding onto my old Mad Magazines and Consumer Reports though.  And the issues of Model Car Science I bought and read thoroughly when I was a kid.

Some of you may be old enough to remember how defrosting the refrigerator was a regular chore.  If you have one of those small office cube refrigerators you might still be doing it.  But near as I can tell these days they’re all the so-called "frost-free" style.  Actually, frost still accumulates, it just gets melted off the freezer coils periodically so it never builds up. 

Casa del Garrett came with a nice frost-free GE fridge.  It’s actually bigger then I need, but I won’t bother getting a smaller one until this one dies.  And it has an ice maker, which I’ve found handy.  But I’ve never lived with a frost-free fridge before, so not having to defrost every now and then has been a new experience.  These frost-free models hide the freezer coils behind a panel at the back of the freezer compartment, and just blow cold air into it via a fan.  So if frost starts building up back there you won’t know it right away.  Let me tell you how I know this.

Earlier in the week I noticed my ice maker had stopped filling the tray below it with ice.  So I pulled it out to examine it, and found a nice web site that explained step-by step how to diagnose a problem with it.  Many of the test required a multi-meter to check resistance across various switches and the motor…and being a geek of course I had one handy.  So I went through all the tests and came up empty.  Everything was working.  The problem was it wasn’t working.

I didn’t want to replace a perfectly good ice maker, but I didn’t want to call out a repairman just for that either.  I figured for the price of a service visit I could just buy a new one.  And ice makers are in the category of things I consider luxury items anyway.  As long as the fridge worked it wasn’t an emergency matter.  So I left the ice machine out and got some ice trays and began making ice the old fashioned way until I could figure out what was up with the ice maker.  In the meantime I noticed frost was starting to form at the back of the freezer compartment.

I checked to see if there was a defrost switch somewhere and of course there wasn’t because frost isn’t supposed to form on one of these kinds of refrigerators.  So I let it slide, thinking it was just a little spurious frost that had accumulated because I’d had the door open so much while debugging the ice maker.  This morning when I checked it, the little patch of frost had grown to cover almost the entire back of the freezer. 

Uhm…that wasn’t supposed to happen…  So I go dig out the owners manual.  The prior owner of the house was cool enough to save every bit of documentation on all the major appliances in the house and gave all that to me on settlement day in a big plastic pouch.  The manual for the fridge didn’t even have a section on frost in the troubleshooting guide.

Okay, thinks I, never having owned a frost-free fridge in my life…obviously frost build up inside the freezer is something so beyond normal that the manual doesn’t even cover it.  And this is happening at the same time the ice maker quit on me.  Maybe there’s a connection and I need to call a repairman.  I’m thinking at this point that maybe frost had gotten inside the water inlet line to the ice maker or a control somewhere.  But before I called for service, I began checking prices of new refrigerators. 

The one here at Casa del Garrett was at least 20 years old, judging from the service records the prior owner left with the owner’s manual.  And there were at least a half-dozen service calls made on that fridge by the prior owner.  I hadn’t really looked over all the things he’d left me in detail, just this and that as needed.  This was the first time I’d looked at the packet for the fridge.  Seeing all those service tickets concerned me.  But I’ve owned the house since June of 2001 and haven’t had any trouble with the fridge.  On the other hand, it was at least 20 years old, if not older, and it had needed a lot of work in the past.  Mostly for minor things though.  The thermostats seemed to be the biggest trouble makers.

I could get a good, state of the art energy saver fridge, sized just right for a single guy, for around 850 to a thousand bucks.  Or I could get a decent low tech smaller one for about 300-400.  I figured if I was going to replace the fridge I might as well buy a good one, but money for one of the good ones wasn’t in the budget.  But do I want to call a repairman and spend almost what a new low tech fridge would cost anyway?

I gave it some thought.  I figured since it couldn’t be the compressor it wouldn’t be hugely expensive.  And the thought of just tossing a fridge in the landfill when it could be repaired and kept in service bothered me.  So I called for a GE service tech and luckily one was available to come this afternoon.  When he arrived I told him about the ice maker, and the frost.  When he saw the frost on the back of the freezer compartment I could tell from his expression that it was a bigger problem then I’d taken it for.

Boy was it.  He had me empty the freezer and then he removed the ice maker and the back panel.  Here’s what it looked like…

Holy Crap…!!!  Look at that…the freezer coils are almost solidly bricked in.  I had no idea the frost problem was that bad.  I couldn’t see it.  It was all happening out of sight.  The tech said frost was all under the freezer floor panel too, and he asked me if I’d noticed the fridge wasn’t keeping things cold anymore.  But I don’t keep things in there for very long so I hadn’t really noticed.  Then he told me that the frost build up would keep the ice maker from working, because it depends on its own thermostat switch and won’t turn on unless the freezer is at 16 degrees or colder.  So that explained why the ice maker could pass all the tests I’d given it and still not be making any ice.  It was behaving the way it was supposed to.  The freezer just wasn’t getting cold enough.

The tech removed the ice with a stream of warm water from a small pump bucket he’d brought along.  Then he tested this and that and determined the problem was the defroster thermostat. The way it works is this: a timer periodically turns on a heating coil by the freezer coils to melt off any accumulated frost.  A thermostat shuts the heat coil off when it detects the temperature near the freezer coils is above freezing.  Wash-rinse-repeat.  This keeps the frost off the freezer coils.  Apparently the thermostat on this model fridge fails in such a way that it keeps the heat coil turned off all the time.  So then frost…happens.  And here’s the thing…you can’t see it happening because all that stuff is hidden from view in a frost-free fridge.

The tech replaced the thermostat and tested everything again, and before he left he told me it would take about four hours for the temperatures to stabilize to the dial settings.  So now my fridge is busy getting cold again and I reckon I have to toss out most of what was in the freezer since it’ll have been out long enough to thaw, even in the ice chest I stashed it all in.  The total bill for the service was just under $200.  Not so bad considering, and he was thorough. 

I have a fridge thermometer and I monitor that occasionally.  I’m buying a freezer thermometer tonight so hopefully I can see this failure mode happening sooner rather then later in the future.  I suppose the new fridges have some sort of self diagnostics built-in now.  If they don’t they should.  Some little indicator panel that displays an error code that tells you somethings wrong and what it is.  They should have temperature displays too so you can see that things are nominal.  A good geek fridge should have all of that.

Some weeks ago my bathroom shower faucet froze.  It’s a single knob type…you it pull outward to adjust the flow, and turn it clockwise or counter-clockwise to adjust the temperature.  One morning as I was getting ready to take a shower I pulled the knob outward and it simply stopped moving.  Luckily it froze in the off position and there was no pouring water emergency to deal with.  So for the past several weeks I’ve been using the shower in the basement, while I hemmed and hawed over whether to fix the upstairs one myself, or call a plumber.

My upstairs shower adjoins a closet which hides a trap door, which gives me access to the pipes that service the shower and the bathtub.  Normally there are shutoff valves located there, but my shower had none.  So one motive for calling in a plumber would be to have shutoff valves installed.  Even that would be something I could theoretically do myself.  It’s not like soldering copper pipes is any magic art…in the past I’ve helped friends do that in their own houses.  But the space behind my bathtub is tight, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to fuss with it.

So I thought about it and thought about it, and shopped for propane soldering tools and read various manuals on how to fix shower faucets.  And then it occurred to me that there might be shutoff valves down in the basement somewhere, before the pipes took a turn to the upper floors.  You’d think after owning the house for seven years I’d have had all the plumbing here mapped out by now, and I did have a general sense of how it was all laid out.  But I hadn’t actually taken an inventory of all the shutoff valves, just an ad hock survey.  I knew where the shutoff valves were to the kitchen sink and the ice maker in the refrigerator.  I knew where the shutoff valves were to the basement shower, the washer, the hot water heater and the central air humidifier.  I know where the shutoffs are to the outside faucets and I know where the main shutoff valve is to the service to the house.  So I went down into the basement and looked again at the place where the pipes split off to the second floor and sure enough, there was a set of shutoff valves there too.  But they were frozen tight.  I reckoned they’d likely never been turned since they were first installed.

So that wasn’t helping.  I dosed them with WD40, figuring I’d work on unfreezing them a little bit at a time.  Then I went back to my shower repair manuals.  I found  a schematic of my Moen shower faucet and tried to figure out how to disassemble it.  Turns out the knob had a cap I could pry off.  I’d checked it for that when it first froze up but didn’t see any obvious one.  But seeing it there in the schematic it was obvious how to get the knob off and I grabbed a couple of small screw drivers and went to work.  With the cap popped off, I saw the phillips head screw attaching the knob to the mechanism and quickly unscrewed the knob and removed it.

The plastic knob was broken.  That was the problem.  The faucet mechanism it was attached to was fine.  I couldn’t turn it because a piece of plastic inside the knob had broken off, essentally disconnecting it from the mechanism.  Sweet.  I took the knob down to Home Depot and found a replacement for a few bucks.  With the new knob on the faucet worked again and the shower was back in service.  So in the end, all I had to do was replace the damn plastic knob. 

Moral of the story…don’t call the plumber until you’ve made sure it’s not a simple fix. I could have ended up paying for a whole new faucet I didn’t need.

I still need to get those shut off valves to the upstairs bathroom unfrozen though…

When adding a few flowers around the house fails to improve the scenery…

Flowerpot’s spontaneous combustion blamed for fire

MENDOTA HEIGHTS, Minn. – Fire investigators said a fire that destroyed a Mendota Heights home last week was caused by a flowerpot. Fire Chief John Maczko said a flowerpot on the home’s deck spontaneously combusted.

While rare, spontaneous combustion can happen to pots with the right mixture of soil, moisture and heat.

Homeowner Dan Stoven said it’s hard to believe, but said he’s just glad his 17-year-old daughter was able to escape when passers-by entered the home to wake her up.

Investigators said the soil was in a plastic pot that had become hot after several days of high temperatures and humidity. It ignited July 8, and wind helped the fire grow and spread to the deck and then to the house.

Next time I go shopping for flowers I need to check their flame retardant rating.

My twenties were a period of time where I wandered from one low paying job to another, while I was trying to make a living as a freelance photographer.  I did a lot of warehouse work in those days, and various Manpower temp jobs.  In the process I think I’ve put up more generic utility steel shelving in my life then Carter has pills (as my mom used to say).  I’ve put up a fair amount of wood shelving too, including the Ikea particle board and veneer bookshelves scattered all over Casa del Garrett.  Which is all to say that, dazed and confused though I am about a lot of things, I pretty much know how to put together shelving. 

Casa del Garrett is full of shelving.  There are bookcases everywhere, both free standing and bolted onto the walls.  I’ve added the occasional shelf to the kitchen cabinets where I thought they were needed.  There’s wall shelving in the basement, where I keep my winter supplies, and little glass shelves where I keep my favorite bottles of sugary cordials by the bar that I’ve modified slightly to suit myself.  This afternoon, I attempted to put up some new steel shelving in the basement, in a corner that I’ve needed to organize for some time now.  I say ‘attempted’, because I ended up buying what must be the worst piece of junk I’ve ever seen in my entire life.  Which kinda impresses me in a way, because as a fifty-four year old American, I’ve seen a lot of junk.

The corner in my basement where the dryer and the sump pump live is an odd one.  I’ve been fussing with it ever since I bought the house, never quite knowing what to do with it.  Eventually it began to accumulate a bunch of other things I didn’t know quite what do with either, mostly tools.  In one spot I kept all my tall yard tools…various rakes, shovels, and such, and the wide utility bristle broom.  These were all kinda piled together in the corner and getting one particular one out of the pile was getting to be a chore.  Next to that was a spot where I’d been stacking up power tools in their plastic carry cases.  Some of them, like the grinder, didn’t have nice carry cases so I left them in the boxes they came in.  On top of the grinder box I had two rubbermaid storage bins full of various things.  One bin holds all my extension cords.  Another some darkroom equipment that I seldom use anymore, mostly relating to the enlarger I don’t have anymore.  Next to that, was the big box my leaf vacuum lives in between seasons.  I had the miter saw stacked on top of it. 

So that was an area of the basement that needed organizing.  What kept me from doing it was that all the dimensions there were odd.  Most ready made shelving comes in 36 or 48 inch widths and I had only one chunk of space of 30 inches and one of 22 to work with.  Additionally, the circuit breaker box and electricity meter is near the middle the wall and the water pipes and shutoff valves to the bathroom on the other end toward the bathroom.  I couldn’t build shelving over either of these, and I couldn’t put anything over the spot in the floor where the sump pump was.  Every time I stopped to think of ways to organize that space, I’d get bogged down trying to resolve all the odd dimensions I had to work with, and I’d just put it off some more because there was always something else to do around the house.  I could have easily built some custom wooden shelving, but I didn’t want wood next to the dryer, which is gas.

What finally got me motivated was sometime during that night last Thursday the bathroom toilet sprung a small leak where the water feed connects to the tank.  A small trail of water then spread from the leak out the bathroom door and toward the sump pump.  Which is good…that’s where leaking water is supposed to go in the basement.  But along the way it seeped into the cardboard boxes where my leaf vacuum and grinder live, which made the bottoms soggy enough that they collapsed under the weight of the bins and the miter saw stacked on top.  I came downstairs yesterday morning to get some things out of the dryer, only to see the miter saw and the Rubbermaid bins tumbled onto the floor, the leaf vacuum box on its side, the grinder’s box sagging to one side, and water seeping out from the bathroom door.

Good morning sleepyhead!   So the first thing on the agenda was finding out where the leak was coming from, and then turning off the water to the bathroom.  It’s…disturbing…how much water can result from just a small drip drip dripping leak over just a few hours.  The previous owner had installed these really nice ball valves on the lines leading into the bathroom in the basement, so shutting off the water to the bathroom wasn’t a problem…I didn’t even bother with the toilet shut off valve.  Those ball valves are nice…at some point I want to replace all the shutoff valves in the house with them.  Once the water was off I moved everything out of the area and mopped it all down.  I spent a few minute checking the miter saw and the grinder for damage.  They looked okay.

I put a bucket under the toilet tank by the water feed and flushed once to empty the tank, then disconnected the water feed and removed the old fill valve and let the remaining water drain out.  I checked the area around the inlet to make sure the tank hadn’t cracked on me, which thankfully it hadn’t. Then I took a quick trip to Home Depot for a new fill valve, and a flexible water line to replace the solid one the previous owner had installed between the toilet shutoff valve and the tank.  The only flexible water lines in Casa del Garrett are the ones I’ve installed since moving in, and that’s basically the second floor toilet.  Eventually I want to replace every final connection to every faucet with flex line too because it makes things easier to work on.

While I was at Home Depot I wandered around the shelving area.  Now I really wanted to get that corner around the dryer and sump pump under control.  Over the years I’d let it become a clutter that I had to wade through whenever I needed something.  Just getting out the big broom usually meant taking several other long yard tools out of the stack first, just to get to it.  While I was looking around Home Depot I saw just the thing: a really neat looking yard tool organizer made by Black and Decker, that looked like it would fit in that area nicely.  It was only twenty bucks. 

Then I spied some shelving that was just the right size: Thirty inches wide and not 36.  So I brought a box of that home too.  It’s this shelving I want to warn you about.

As I said at the beginning of this, I’ve built a lot of steel shelving in my life.  This stuff, made by Edsal, is just plain junk.  When I got the box back home and opened it I saw a collection of cheap steel stampings that, when you fitted them together, simply would not stay together. 

Note that the propaganda on the box says the "Unit holds up to 1,000 pounds!"  Sure sounds like they’re telling you this thing can hold a lot of weight.  And here’s what’s supposed to hold all that weight:

That’s it.  That’s what you get.  A bunch of cheap steel stampings and four 1/8th inch pieces of particle board. There are little tabs on the uprights, and groves on the cross members you’re supposed to fit together and, as the instructions say, lightly tap into place until they lock. 

Except they don’t lock together at all.  The cross members kinda loosely hang over the tabs…

I tried for hours to get the pieces of that thing to stay together long enough that I could fully assemble one section (you’re supposed to bolt two sections of this thing together (!), one on top of the other, to get the advertised height) and they just wouldn’t.  Look closely at that joint.  There are two fatal flaws in the design that I can see.  First, the groves on the cross beams don’t seat all the way down on the tabs.  At least, not with the "tap" that the instruction manual says you give them.  In fact, you can take a hammer to this joint pretty forcefully and the cross beam still won’t seat fully.  But look more closely.  Notice that the end of the cross beam doesn’t fit right up into the corner of that upright.  There’s a small gap there, between the end of the beam and the corner of the upright.  That allows the beam to move slightly along that axis, even after it’s seated as far as you can get it to seat in the tabs.  If it sat snugly in the corner it might not be so bad, because it couldn’t move then.  But I still wouldn’t want to load this thing with a thousand pounds of anything.

Some steel shelving uses x bracing you attach to the back of the shelves to add rigidity.   As near as I can tell, Edsal expects the particle board shelves you lay over the beams to provide enough rigidity to the unit that the beams won’t wiggle out of their tabs.  But they don’t.  The entire unit can still flex and twist enough that sooner or later one of the beams wiggles free and then the entire thing collapses.

I never got it put together.  After a while I started trying to out think the poor design of the thing, and that led me to determine that I’d have to drill holes in it so I could bolt the damn thing together, and then add some additional bracing in the back of it or else I could never trust it to hold anything.  I was seriously considering doing that, but I eventually realized I was letting my pride get the better of me.  I didn’t want to admit I’d just been taken for a sucker.  I’m not normally that trusting of what I see on the box.  But I never expected in my wildest dreams to open a box of basic utility room steel shelving that was this utterly pathetic.

For kicks and grins, I did a google search on Edsal steel shelving, and came across these customer reviews over at Amazon of the 36 inch wide model…

Awful

Complete junk – The other 3 reviews describe the issues perfectly. I had to use duct tape to hold the pieces together.

… 

Junk!

This product has got to be one of the most poorly designed that I have ever tried to assemble. While boltless design may sound appealing, the slide-in tabs are not built to fit the piece that must be locked into it. Therefore, one is required to wedge, bang, or pry open the tabs so that they may be large enough, but once you get the pieces to fit together, the opening is far too large for it to stay secure. So then you try to bang it closed. Very sketchy. The whole piece wobbles, falls apart at random moments throughout the assembly process, and the cardboard shelves are flimsy, full of splinters, and cheap. The whole experience was frustrating, right down to trying to fit all the pieces back into the box so that I can return it.

…..

Worst EVER

These shelves won’t even support their own weight. I’d hate to see what might happens if a person actually tried to store something on them. I have fairly extensive experience with this type of inexpensive metal utility shelving and these are BY FAR the worst Ive ever tried. No matter how well you seat the boltless "fasteners", the unit sways and twists uncontrollably. A close reading of the instructions reveals that the shelves must be attached to the wall to work (this despite the clear picture of a free-standing unit on the box). Additionally, the 1/4 inch(!) particleboard shelves are weak like cardboard (but heavier), and do nothing to support the structure of the frame. The last straw is the complete lack of a crossbrace which might work to keep the thing square. What a total waste of time and energy. On the plus side, disassembly is a breeze since it falls apart on its own. :D

…

Four big NO votes on American Inventor..!

"Close, but no cigar" describes this attempt at a "boltless" shelving unit. It’s nice not to have to worry that there’ll be enough nuts, bolts and washers in some plastic baggie, but the reality of it is an extremely frustrating experience.

The tabs are poorly designed- both tabs on an end of the horizontal supports are exactly the same length. This means that BOTH tabs have to be started perfectly AT THE SAME TIME, to make them slide in. If one tab was slightly shorter, you could start one, then the other.

If the tabs are bent AT ALL, they won’t line up properly and either won’t slide into the slots, or will poke out to the outside instead of properly sliding all the way through the slot. Either way, it means taking the joint apart and bending the tabs until they slide in.

The problem with that is that there is NO positive locking of the tabs once they finally DO get through the slots. This means the end you struggled with for 10 minutes may pop out while you’re trying to deal with the other end. Trying to remove one end to re-align the tabs is likely to disloge BOTH ends, making you start completely over. The weight of the shelves and the items on the shelves will hold the tabs and slots together once you get that far, but during assembly it’s a recipe for extreme frustration.

There’s more wrong with the desigh, but you get the idea… I never wished so much for a plastic baggie full of nuts and bolts.

So I’m not the only one who is a tad displeased with the product.  This crap should have never made it out of the drawing room.  Somebody in management should have laughed in the face of the "engineer" who brought them this thing.  You’re joking…right?  Hahahaha…good one…  Now get back to work…

I’m taking the shelves back to Home Depot in a little while.  I’ll let you know what happens there.  Basically, I’ll settle for a store credit.  But I’m going to strongly urge them to get word back up the chain of command there, that this stuff is dangerous.  Somebody manages to actually get this shelving together and actually tries to load it up with a thousand pounds and they’re going to get hurt.

[Update…]  Home Depot cheerfully accepted my return, no hassle…

Me:  Hi…I bought this here yesterday…

She: Yeah…I think I sold it to you. 

Me:  Right…yeah…you were working the register…

She:  (cheerfully) So what’s the problem hon…?

You gotta love Baltimore folks.  I explained the issues I had with the shelving and she took the merchandise back, scanned in my receipt and issued me a credit.  So that’s that.  Hopefully word percolates up the ranks that this stuff isn’t worth selling.  Somebody gets hurt when one of these collapses under weight and you just know the lawsuits will go flying…

It’s nine degrees at BWI airport as I write this.  You can really tell how poorly insulated a 1950s brick house is when it gets this cold.  The two exterior walls here at Casa del Garrett, front and back, are just radiating coldness.  It’s days like this I don’t mind that I didn’t buy an end-of-group unit.

Ironically enough, the previous owners installed really nice double-pane glass windows.  The concrete block and brick veneer exterior walls probably loose way more heat then the windows in them do.