Archive for the ‘MrT’ Category

When Is It Time to Turn on the Heat

Wednesday, September 19th, 2007

Like a lot of people we turn the thermostat way down when the weather gets warm. The house pretty much warms up naturally and in fact often gets hot enough for air conditioning. You hardly wants to see the air conditioning and heater fighting for dominance during the summer so the best thing is to turn the thermostat way down and out of the way. Our furnace is responsible for hot water or we’d probably turn it off completely.
Some time in the fall, as the weather gets cool, people start turning their furnaces back on or their thermostat back up. This can get complicated at times. How cold do you let the house get before you turn the heat up/on? How long do you just get dressed sooner or warmer? How long do you wait for nature to warm up the house? How concerned are you about saving money on the heating bill? This last question is really important as heating oil is 2-3 times as expensive as it was a few short years ago.

This used to be easy for me. We ran the heat so that the house never got below 69/70 degrees. Why? Well my mother in law lived with us and her health was poor and she just could not handle being cold. Anything much below 70 degrees would not be tolerable for her. In fact at times we supplemented the heat in her room with a space heater and warmed it up more. She passed away about a year and a half ago and that excuse is gone.

What a lot of people do is to turn the heat down during the night and during the day when people are out of the house. They just warm it up for the late afternoon and evening. Not an option for me as I work at home all day. If I get too cold my productivity suffers. The last few days the house have been between 62 and 64 degrees in the morning. For me that is cold. I get dressed right away and have been wearing long sleeve shirts and stuff. But I’d rather avoid jackets or sweatshirts if I can. The house warms up on its own to about 70 by the end of the work day and the evening which Mrs. T is home is comfortable. I’m not sure how long that will last.

There are several things keeping me from turning up the heat. One is cost of course. But perhaps the biggest thing is ego. Do I really want to admit that I am “weak” and that the chill is too much for me? And what about the environment? Shouldn’t I avoid burning oil as long as possible?

At some point I will give up. I have a chill in me today and my office, the warmest room in the house, is only 67 degrees. Well maybe I’ll just run the space heater in here. What would you do?

The Benefit of Being Messy

Saturday, September 8th, 2007

I belive it was A A Milne (of Winnie the Pooh fame) who said that “the benefit of being messy is that one is always making interesting discoveries.” Well I can get pretty messy. This is especially true when it comes to my desk and office. In fact my office got to be such a mess that I abandoned it and set up my laptops in other rooms in the house. Well that can only go on so long and today I started day tow of the great office clean up.

It’s not done yet. I’ll need at least another day but I am at least working in the office now. I made a few discoveries along the way. I found a couple of bills that needed to be paid – last month. Oops. I found a telephone credit card that had gone missing so long ago that I had actually gotten a replacement card. And it was somewhere I was sure I had looked before. I guess I didn’t look that well. I also found a $40 gift card to Best Buy. I got it last December while Christmas shopping and misplaced it.

I shred documents with identifing information on them these days so somethings I would have thrown away un opened I now open to see if they should go in the shredder. Opening one such piece of mail I found a refund check for $180 that I didn’t even know was coming. It came a couple of months ago but it is still good. Thank goodness I found it now.

I’ve thrown out a lot of papers and stuff that was just plain old. So much has gone into the shredder that I had to empty it twice. I still have to clean off the desk, a cabanet that I want to replace and there is this stack of things beside the bookcase still to go. But I can vacuum the rug at least and I can walk everywhere I want again. The foton is clear enough not only to sit on but to lay down on. Who knows I may even hook up the TV.

What kind of flower is a Canna?

Sunday, July 29th, 2007

I am a
Canna


What Flower
Are You?

“You stand up for what you believe in, even if it gets in the way of what other people think. You are proud of yourself and your accomplishments and you enjoy letting people know that.”

The Problem With Vacation

Friday, July 20th, 2007

is coming back to work. I spent two wonderful weeks on vacation, seeing interesting places, doing interesting things, eating new food, sleeping when tired, getting up when rested and now I am back at work. Worse still all that fun activity mixed with different time changes – first four hours off from home and then six hours off – and I am just really tired all the time. I need to win the lottery so I can retire while I am still young enough to enjoy it.

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Next July Is Getting Booked Fast

Wednesday, July 18th, 2007

I just made an appointment for a one year follow up with a doctor. So now I have one firm appointment for next July. There is also a conference that starts the end of June and runs into the first week in July that I will probably go to as well. I can think of at least two other events that generally happen in July that I will likely attend. And let’s not talk about the family vacation that pretty much always takes place in one of the latter weeks of July or the first week in August! (First week in August this year BTW IT was booked last November.)

In general I hate planning things too far in advance. One never knows what might come up that would be more fun/interesting/profitable or whatever. But life isn’t like that. Some things have to be planned far in advance. I just wish there were not so many of them.

No Soap Radio

Monday, June 11th, 2007

The brilliant Scott Adams (a little suck up in case he sees this link) had an interesting blog post about soap. The problem has to do with bars of soap that get too small to be comfortable but not wanting to waste anything by tossing away the small bars. His readers had already made all of the suggestions I was going to make before I got there. But that just meant I had new questions.

What about those tiny little bars of soap they give you in hotels. I find them to be already too small. I do use them of course because I really don’t want to carry my own soap. I could carry my own soap as they make nice plastic travel boxes for bar soap. But you never know if they are going to open up and get everything wet and soapy. Sometimes soap takes a while to dry out after using. And what if the TSA decides to do something to the soap? I mean they probably don’t have time to mess with things like that but what if some disgruntled TSA inspector decided to spit on my soap while he was inspecting my suit case? Probably never happen. I am sure they pay those people really well and they all really love their jobs. I mean who wouldn’t love searching luggage with a week’s worth of dirty laundry in it?

And of course there is the little matter of the hotel staff cleaning away the used bars (sometimes every day) and wondering about what happens to them. Now there is waste. A couple of uses and those small bars are pretty useless. But sometimes people only stay overnight and take only one shower. Or maybe only wash their hands and face. So there could be lots of life (relatively speaking for such a small bar) left in the bar. Of course one doesn’t really want to reuse a bar that someone else has used. One never knows what has been washed with it. On second thought do you suppose there are people out there who get turned on by using a bar of soap that someone else has used? There are a lot of weird people out there you know.

This brings up another question. Can you wash soap and if so does that make it usable by others? So many questions, so few answers.

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Can You See Me Now?

Friday, June 1st, 2007

Well as quiet as the main page is here I am wondering if anyone even knows about this blog. For some reason I can’t get this one to work with Windows Live Writer. I keep getting a message that “A successful connection was made to your account however the server reported that you do not currently have an active weblog. Please ensure that your account with this provider is current before proceeding.” I keep thinking I should report it to the Windows Live Writer people. And yet Word 2007 is happy as can be to post blogs for me. Go figure.

Other than that I really like this blog format. I am thinking that I may mess with the layout some but that doesn’t have a high priority. Pretty much everything else is just so much easier to maintain and modify.

There is of course the fact that this page doesn’t show up on the main page for the domain. But maybe that is the best. In any case with this post I have the meta posting out of my system so perhaps real posts will show up soon. With or without anyone to read them.

Hello world!

Friday, May 25th, 2007

Welcome to Blogs.n1zyy.com/mistert. This is my first post at this new site!