My Old House

Well, sorry I haven’t posted in a while. Things have been fairly uneventful. I’ve been waiting for a bright, sunny day to take some photos of the new roof… and to take some better interior shots. Looks like that will have to wait, though.

Today I installed a railing in the upper half of the stairwell leading to the second floor. Since my parents are coming in from out-of-town for the Thanksgiving weekend, I really felt I needed to install this railing. (My mom has trouble taking steps.) We happened to find a railing in the basement when we bought the house. It’s general design matches a railing in the basement. It’s just a simple wooden rail… nothing fancy. In fact, it’s got some paint blotches on it, so we’ll probably have to refinish it next year.

But I put it up just the same. The only problem I encountered while installing it was that the stud-finder was particularly useless. I’m certain that at least one of the three railing brackets I put in was nowhere near a stud. Oh well… here’s hoping the other two hit a stud at least partially… or that the latt that they hit will suffice. The railing seems very firm. I guess we’ll see.

Then, at about noon yesterday, the power went out! You see, we awoke to a small snowstorm — “thundersnow”, in fact! There were about 3 inches on the ground by 5 AM…. 6 inches total when it stopped snowing at 10 AM. The snow started melting right around then. You would think that a transformer would have gone out DURING the snow, since the snow itself was wet and heavy. However, the one down the block apparently waited a few hours before dying.

And with my parents en route, I was particularly worried! No heat! No way to cook! What do we do? Hotel ? What about our cats?

Well, fortunately, Independence Power & Light restored our power about 30 minutes after my parents arrived (at 4:30 PM) !! So, we endured a few chilly hours and about 30 minutes of embarrassment. I lost my “big dream” of how I was going to treat their arrival: Since this was going to be the first time they would see our house (other than via this website), I had the Christmas lights all up…. Christmas music was going to be playing softly throughout the house… the mood would be “elegant holiday”!

Oh well, scratch that!

In the end, it didn’t matter all that much. The lights came on a half hour later and they could get the “grand vision” then. Not that big a deal.

And despite the sudden power-flickering and power-loss, the only electrical casualty throughout the house was a receiver I was using to play Christmas music. At least my computer was okay!!

Ah, but now I see that something’s gone amiss with the template for this blog / website. Guess I’ll have to stop my post now and get to investigating that.

Thanks for stopping by!

-= Dave =-