Mr. Fixit

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There are 111 posts filed in Mr. Fixit (this is page 9 of 12).

Oven over

Our gas oven has finally sputtered out. The thermocouple – the electronic pilot light that fires up the gas – no longer heats up and so the oven is out of commission.

While I might be able to fix it with a part from the great D&L Parts Company on Atlantic Boulevard, I’d rather not play with gas. So, if any of you local MT.Net readers want to recommend an appliance repair service, please leave a comment!

Good handymen are hard to find

I had a card for a commercial electrician in my collection – a guy who did excellent work for my company a few years back. I could tell he was one of those guys who loved what he did, so when we needed some work done here I thought I’d call him up.

His boss answered instead and so I put the question to him. “I know you do commercial work,” I said, “but is there anyone you could recommend who does good residential work?”
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Yet another busy weekend

Its been a busy weekend here at MT.Net. We had “family movie night” Friday evening when we watched a DVD of Lady and the Tramp. Saturday was still cold, but I wouldn’t know. I spent most of the day inside the attic pounding away at some new flooring I’ve been building.

Saturday night, Kelly and I watched Sophie Scholl – The Final Days from our NetFlix list. The movie chronicled the last days of Scholl – a 21-year-old anti-Nazi resister. Wow, Scholl and her brother were brave souls!
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Owie

What a way to finish the year. I’m aching today after spending hours working in the attic during the last few days. Now that the Christmas/Halloween decorations are ready to return to storage I thought now is the time to finally double the flooring space in the attic. Its turned out to be more work than I remembered.
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Annoyance Calls

For the past few weeks we haven’t just been getting car warranty calls. Another annoying situation has established itself where we’ll get a hang-up call at 9:15 PM on Sunday evenings, followed by one about 6 minutes later. Then, at 4:25 AM on Monday morning the phone will ring again and – just like the other calls – there will be nothing but a dial tone.

I’ve since configured Asterisk to block these calls so they will no longer get through. Even so, I plan to see how good the crackerjacks at AT&T are at tracking them down by filing a complaint with them. Back in my BBS sysop’ing days, I had a phone number to the phone company group that could track any number. I’m sure I can find the AT&T equivalent with a little effort.

This has gone on for weeks now and its time to fight back.

Compostin’

Hearing the city’s leaf-vacuum truck making its rounds this morning reminded me of a project we completed this weekend. Saturday’s weather was superb, so while Kelly and Hallie attended a birthday party, Travis and i spent the morning raking (and leafblowing) leaves. Travis really enjoyed aiming the leafblower as we cleaned the yard. He especially enjoyed jumping into the leaf piles we created!
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I think I found my sweater

I got tired of having to fiddle with our clothes dryer’s lint filter just to get it to fit, so I unscrewed the filter cover and took a peek in. A few scoops later and I had a pile of lint as big as a cantaloupe! The ill-fitting filter’s centimeter-sized crack was enough to pass a virtual mountain of lint in the three years we’ve had the dryer.
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Rain!

I hopped off a conference call this afternoon and was surprised to see it actually raining! Woohoo! Of course I grabbed my umbrella and went out in it. How could I not?

I did have to hook up my downspout to my water tank again, as its been hanging idle for two weeks. In just a short amount of time the light rain added dozens of gallons of rainwater to my tank. I guess I got about 80 gallons from an hour’s rain. So much that I chose to drain the tank into a garbage can to make sure I saved every drop.
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