A weekly note

It’s June, and the boiler is finally off.

We mostly turned it off because of the leak we discovered in the pipe connected to one of the basement radiators. It was easy to turn it off because we finally had a week of warmer weather. Bonus?

There’s a laundry list of plumbing things it’d be great to have a quote for, so while the timing isn’t great, at least we can get some answers. Plumber visit on Tuesday!

Hey there, home ownership.

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We have a plastic tray catching the leaking water and the water looks like the cleanest water I’ve ever seen. I’m really tempted to taste it, but that would be ridiculous.

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I wasn’t entirely sure we needed a multimeter, but I wanted one and thought we’d find it useful at some point. We have a bunch of older wiring and two-pronged outlets in the house, so it’d be nice to know how to troubleshoot minor problems with some confidence.

There’s a whole range of multimeters out there and after reading a large handful of reviews and guides and how-tos, I figured that it was probably wiser to not get the low-end $12 one. Fluke seemed well trusted among people who know what they’re doing and their $100 model offers enough for residential use, so here we are.

I tested my first outlet and everything worked as expected. The second was stranger: hot to neutral measured 120v, but hot to ground measured either 10v or 66v depending on what angle I held the probe in the ground.

At that point I backed away and decided to read a bunch more—my guess is the ground connection just needs a little attention, but hey! I’m using the multimeter to troubleshoot a possible issue already. Look at that.

The next level to unlock is establishing a safe ground to verify the polarity on all of these old two-pronged outlets. Then! Determining if those boxes are grounded so that we can upgrade them easily.

Electricity!

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I have a lot of tabs open right now with varying attempts to answer “is it safe to…”

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More electricity. On Sunday evening we replaced the front light fixture. It’s a fun way to start making the house feel more like ours.

Many, many spiders had made their home in the box behind the old fixture over the years, so that was fun to clean out. The install went smooth, and the light looks really nice. (No multimeter required.)

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The poppies popped open everywhere. The allium has taken over the neighborhood, purple fireworks everywhere.

And we can finally refer to the lupine as bloomed. 2 weeks late, like most of Spring.

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Thunder Thursday.

This was the day A really acknowledged thunder. We were eating dinner when one of the day’s maybe two thunder claps happened. He gave a contemplative look out the window through the nice rumbling finish.

We had thunder Friday too, but he was asleep already.

Thunder on the Palouse two days in a row is something. We’re still excited to hear it after almost 9 years.

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Very successful parent hack: use a dough scraper to wipe up bits of food from the mat under the high chair rather than a rag. Less exponential splitting of food pieces, easier cleanup.

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A had his first swim lesson Saturday!

It was an absolutely wonderful experience. Michelle was awesome, A transferred all of his excellent kicking skills to the water, and I stood on the pool deck grinning ear to ear.

Also Saturday, A made the connection that yes he of course can reach his hand into the “What’s Inside?” box and pull out little stuffed animals and cars and things on his own.

Proud parents we are.

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I enjoyed Angel Olsen and Andrew Bird’s new albums this week. Also Steve Earle’s from last week.

I like the weeks where multiple good things appear at once.

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We watched Goodfellas on Sunday and Monday nights. I think it’s a movie that actually gets better every time you see it.

We finished WeCrashed and now I never need to hear about them again. Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway (and everyone really) were very good. The people they played, not so much.

We’ve started the first episode of Foundation and the set is already impressive. And the audio! We were able to turn captions off. In 2022!

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Book notes, week 2. Does that make it a habit?

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Let’s have a fun week. 🕺