One Day More
Sep. 7th, 2025 10:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aYesterday, I stayed home rather than going out hiking or biking because I wanted to spend some time with Elmer (and didn't want him locked up alone downstairs for his next-to-last day in Hawaii).
I'd hoped to clean up my office while I hung out with him, which involved getting my filing cabinet back together (it's been increasingly falling apart in different ways) and then doing a year's worth of filing. Alas, I decided the filing cabinet was unsalvageable. Over the years the drawers have stretched a little front to back, which makes the metal slidings constantly fall out and more recently the bottom fall out. I tried to get it back together, and likely could have if I'd had proper wood screws, but I didn't. Combine that with the fact that the file cabinet has been attacked by cockroaches and I threw up my hands.
New file cabinet ordered. (Wasteful? Probably. But I'm just not in a state for dealing with problems right now, and the filing cabinet has been a problem for more than a year.)
But Elmer got to hang out with me. And Kimberly. And the rubber mallet that I had out, to try and bang the drawers tighter, and he loves that rubber mallet: he grabs ahold of it and writhes all over!
(Weird cat!)
We had a much smellier problem in the evening.
Kimberly and I have both been feeling a bit sick to our stomach this week, and I especially want to make sure that doesn't turn into sickness Monday morning when we run Elmer to the airport at 4 in the morning, so we decided on light food for dinner. For me, that often means Bibigo Steamed Dumplings. Very simple food.
So we went out to the garage, so I could pull my steaming dumplings out of the chest freezer there and so Kimberly could see what additional lunch supplies she had. And when I opened the freezer I noticed a foul smell coming out of it.
The freezer was not on. And we hadn't touched it for weeks. Everything was foully rotted, with some of that rot dripping into the melted ice in the bottom of the freezer, turning it into a pool of putrescence.
Every bit as gross as it sounds!
I figured that I'd accidentally unplugged the freezer when I was redoing plugs a few weeks ago for my new multiport Ryobi battery charger. That was part of my garage cleanup before everything extra got derailed by the Elmer move. Because the fault was obvious mine, that meant the goal was to salvage the freezer. Kimberly and I got all the food (fortunately, in baskets, not lying in the rotting liquid) into the trash, which immediately began stinking. Then we managed to carry the chest freezer out to the gutter, to pour out the icky liquid, and to use my power washer to really thoroughly clean it out.
I wasn't convinced we had all the smell out, but we hauled it back to the garage to dry out.
That's when I traced the plug. The freezer had an extension cord on it, but it was plugged into the wall, not the powerstrip I'd been fooling with a few weeks ago.
Huh. So I fiddled with extension cords and power plugs for a while, ultimately plugging the freezer into the plug used by my Ryobi batterie, also using a fresh extension cord ... and the freezer still wouldn't power on.
CORRELATION DOES NOT IMPLY CAUSATION.
Apparently, it had just happened to die around the time I was fiddling with totally different cords nearby.
I'm not entirely surprised. The freezer was banged up with some pretty big dents when we got it, but it worked, so I shrugged my shoulders and said, I guess it's OK.
Maybe it was. But I'm also starting to get a little suspicious of all the appliances that have died since we moved here. In just under six years we've lost one old dishwasher, one new dishwasher, and one new chest freezer.
It makes me wonder if it's the electricity doing it. Yes, brownouts are frequent, but we're protected from much of that with our battery. But not all of it. So I've ordered some single plug surge protectors, and we'll see if those work and help.
We actually had some thermometers in the freezers supposed to warn us if either our refrigerator or freezer went out of spec. The console sits on the counter where I usually prepare lunch and dinner. But, it obviously didn't do the job. We just don't pay enough attention to it, and it doesn't have any type of alarm.
So K. and I have decided that if we do replace the freezer in the garage (which is definitely a boon for Costco shopping), it'll only be if we can get a thermometer that will properly warn us, not just wait for us to look at it. (She's found an internet thermometer that will probably do the job.)
The weird thing is, that didn't feel like a particularly horrible disaster. I mean, super-annoying. But I feel like it would have seemed overwhelming at times because resolving the problem has several moving parts (disposing of the old freezer, finding a new one, restocking, etc). But right now, somehow, with all of our attention and stress focused on Elmer, it was just a task to deal with and onward.
It's hot!
Well, it's only 79 according to Alexa, but it feels very warm.
That's because the Trade Winds died out this morning, and they're really what keeps the islands cool.
I've lived here long enough now to recognize the pattern: two to three days out from a hurricane nearing the islands, the Trade Winds drop and it's really warm until the hurricane's wind and rain lofts in.
Kiko is on its way, though it should only be a ~40mph tropical storm when it swings by Kauai early Wednesday morning. The current forecast only has half-an-inch of rain Tuesday through Wednesday and not particularly notable winds, down here on the southern side of the island, so I don't think there's anything to worry about, especially since Elmer should be in Boston by the time it even nears the Big Island.
So this is it, we're sending one of our orangie boys away in something like 16 hours now. We'd thought we were giving them a forever home, but instead we ended up fostering Elmer for three and half a years before sending him on to what should be a great home. So I guess that's OK too.
I expect it'll be stressful until we've heard he's landed, but I've begged off my usual tech writing for Tuesday, so Kimberly and I can at least hear he's landed in Boston, which should be around midnight tomorrow.
Gonna be two days of messy sleep, but then the hope is life starts to return to normal (in new, better configurations for all of us, but especially Elmer and his new adopter).
I'd hoped to clean up my office while I hung out with him, which involved getting my filing cabinet back together (it's been increasingly falling apart in different ways) and then doing a year's worth of filing. Alas, I decided the filing cabinet was unsalvageable. Over the years the drawers have stretched a little front to back, which makes the metal slidings constantly fall out and more recently the bottom fall out. I tried to get it back together, and likely could have if I'd had proper wood screws, but I didn't. Combine that with the fact that the file cabinet has been attacked by cockroaches and I threw up my hands.
New file cabinet ordered. (Wasteful? Probably. But I'm just not in a state for dealing with problems right now, and the filing cabinet has been a problem for more than a year.)
But Elmer got to hang out with me. And Kimberly. And the rubber mallet that I had out, to try and bang the drawers tighter, and he loves that rubber mallet: he grabs ahold of it and writhes all over!
(Weird cat!)
We had a much smellier problem in the evening.
Kimberly and I have both been feeling a bit sick to our stomach this week, and I especially want to make sure that doesn't turn into sickness Monday morning when we run Elmer to the airport at 4 in the morning, so we decided on light food for dinner. For me, that often means Bibigo Steamed Dumplings. Very simple food.
So we went out to the garage, so I could pull my steaming dumplings out of the chest freezer there and so Kimberly could see what additional lunch supplies she had. And when I opened the freezer I noticed a foul smell coming out of it.
The freezer was not on. And we hadn't touched it for weeks. Everything was foully rotted, with some of that rot dripping into the melted ice in the bottom of the freezer, turning it into a pool of putrescence.
Every bit as gross as it sounds!
I figured that I'd accidentally unplugged the freezer when I was redoing plugs a few weeks ago for my new multiport Ryobi battery charger. That was part of my garage cleanup before everything extra got derailed by the Elmer move. Because the fault was obvious mine, that meant the goal was to salvage the freezer. Kimberly and I got all the food (fortunately, in baskets, not lying in the rotting liquid) into the trash, which immediately began stinking. Then we managed to carry the chest freezer out to the gutter, to pour out the icky liquid, and to use my power washer to really thoroughly clean it out.
I wasn't convinced we had all the smell out, but we hauled it back to the garage to dry out.
That's when I traced the plug. The freezer had an extension cord on it, but it was plugged into the wall, not the powerstrip I'd been fooling with a few weeks ago.
Huh. So I fiddled with extension cords and power plugs for a while, ultimately plugging the freezer into the plug used by my Ryobi batterie, also using a fresh extension cord ... and the freezer still wouldn't power on.
CORRELATION DOES NOT IMPLY CAUSATION.
Apparently, it had just happened to die around the time I was fiddling with totally different cords nearby.
I'm not entirely surprised. The freezer was banged up with some pretty big dents when we got it, but it worked, so I shrugged my shoulders and said, I guess it's OK.
Maybe it was. But I'm also starting to get a little suspicious of all the appliances that have died since we moved here. In just under six years we've lost one old dishwasher, one new dishwasher, and one new chest freezer.
It makes me wonder if it's the electricity doing it. Yes, brownouts are frequent, but we're protected from much of that with our battery. But not all of it. So I've ordered some single plug surge protectors, and we'll see if those work and help.
We actually had some thermometers in the freezers supposed to warn us if either our refrigerator or freezer went out of spec. The console sits on the counter where I usually prepare lunch and dinner. But, it obviously didn't do the job. We just don't pay enough attention to it, and it doesn't have any type of alarm.
So K. and I have decided that if we do replace the freezer in the garage (which is definitely a boon for Costco shopping), it'll only be if we can get a thermometer that will properly warn us, not just wait for us to look at it. (She's found an internet thermometer that will probably do the job.)
The weird thing is, that didn't feel like a particularly horrible disaster. I mean, super-annoying. But I feel like it would have seemed overwhelming at times because resolving the problem has several moving parts (disposing of the old freezer, finding a new one, restocking, etc). But right now, somehow, with all of our attention and stress focused on Elmer, it was just a task to deal with and onward.
It's hot!
Well, it's only 79 according to Alexa, but it feels very warm.
That's because the Trade Winds died out this morning, and they're really what keeps the islands cool.
I've lived here long enough now to recognize the pattern: two to three days out from a hurricane nearing the islands, the Trade Winds drop and it's really warm until the hurricane's wind and rain lofts in.
Kiko is on its way, though it should only be a ~40mph tropical storm when it swings by Kauai early Wednesday morning. The current forecast only has half-an-inch of rain Tuesday through Wednesday and not particularly notable winds, down here on the southern side of the island, so I don't think there's anything to worry about, especially since Elmer should be in Boston by the time it even nears the Big Island.
So this is it, we're sending one of our orangie boys away in something like 16 hours now. We'd thought we were giving them a forever home, but instead we ended up fostering Elmer for three and half a years before sending him on to what should be a great home. So I guess that's OK too.
I expect it'll be stressful until we've heard he's landed, but I've begged off my usual tech writing for Tuesday, so Kimberly and I can at least hear he's landed in Boston, which should be around midnight tomorrow.
Gonna be two days of messy sleep, but then the hope is life starts to return to normal (in new, better configurations for all of us, but especially Elmer and his new adopter).
no subject
Date: 2025-09-08 06:51 pm (UTC)Have you considered some kind of "smart" thermostat that emails you if it goes beyond a threshold?
In Which I Holiday
Date: 2025-09-08 08:21 pm (UTC)Yeah, that's exactly what I meant with a thermometer that'll notify us. Kimberly found one that is probably great, but I haven't had the energy to look at it yet.
Re: In Which I Holiday
Date: 2025-09-08 08:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-08 08:35 pm (UTC)We just hope that in the big picture, which is Elmer getting to Boston safely, they get it right. We still have faith that'll be the case, but that may mainly be because it's almost all in Hawaiian Airlines' hands at this point.