This may be her last time in this carseat.
Life tip: Don’t stick a baby food jar in the garbage disposal.
Somehow a glass baby food jar made its way into our garbage disposal this week. The way I found out was this: Karianne called me into the kitchen because the disposal was making a funny noise. I carefully inserted my hand to remove the obstruction, then pulled out a bloody stump.
Okay, that’s over dramatizing a bit, but I did cut my thumb. The disposal would only make a humming noise. What to do?
First, put it off for a few days. This is how I like to handle the catastrophic failure of major appliances — maybe it will “fix itself” somehow! Yeah, that works out real well.
Second, google “how to get glass out of a garbage disposal.” This was actually helpful, so here’s something I found. The bottom of a normal garbage disposal looks like this:
Our reset button was already pushed in, so I tried sticking an allen wrench in the “jam clear” socket in the center. I could rotate this, but with some resistance, so all I had to do was figure out how to get the glass out without slicing my hand up and I knew I could get the thing running again.
It turns out that the only tools you need for this are a butter knife, some barbecue tongs, and a flashlight. First I turned off the breaker that controls the disposal (safety first!). I used the flashlight and butter knife to find the larger chunks of glass and position them near the center, then I carefully reached in with the tongs and pulled them out. This felt exactly like playing the game “Operation!” 🙂
With the big chunks removed, I tried the “jam clear” again and it turned smoothly. I tried the disposal, and it’s now working fine!
You might be saying to yourself, “who cares? Why are you posting about this?” Well, partly because I’m not that handy, but I wish I was, so I’m feeling proud of myself for being able to fix something. But also because I think it’s great when people blog about things they figure out (how to fix things, what’s a good software program for problem X, I found a DVD player I like, that kind of thing), and I want to contribute something to that.
But don’t worry, cute baby pictures from Kaeta’s first birthday party will be forthcoming 🙂 Thanks for humoring me!
Video: Some New Tricks
Kaeta is walking a LOT now. Here’s a video with her walking, clapping, dancing, and then giving me five!
Also, you know how you can cross your arms in an X to mean “love?” Karianne does that and sasy “I love you” to Kaeta, and now when we say “Kaeta, I love you,” she does her best approximation:
Sometimes she does it all on her own — it’s really sweet. (Sorry for the UT shirt, Ags… there has to be some compromise in a mixed marriage 😉
How do you spell that sound that Tim Allen makes when he gets a new tool?
A couple of weeks ago, I was literally seconds away from finishing mowing my front lawn when suddenly my lawnmower’s engine sort of… um… fell off. Apparently I had bent the crankshaft, which is bad. So the mower had been shaking, but I couldn’t tell why, so I just kept going, and eventually the bolts connecting the engine to the frame ripped free. Really, it’s hard to imagine a more catastrophic failure.
So, I pushed the mower’s pathetic remains (which I’m looking forward to taking apart!) into the garage…and finished mowing the front yard using my weed eater! (There wasn’t much left, but that part of the lawn looked like a bad haircut for a while 🙂
Last week I got this mower:
It’s awesome! It’s the Toro Recycler 20017. It’s self-propelled and optionally a bagger. It was the #4 Consumer Reports pick, I think.
I’ve only used it once, but one feature I liked was the speed sensor built into the handle. The mower moves faster depending on how hard you are pushing its handle, and it works perfectly! I think I mowed in about half the time it would normally take me — the self-propelled feature just worked wonderfully.
Anyway, it’s just my first time using it, but so far I’m really happy with the purchase, so I thought I’d share in case anyone else is looking for a mower. It was $400 with a 1-year warranty from Austin Outdoor Power.
That’s right, more painting!
When you forget to take a “before” picture, you’re stuck with whatever you can find. Here’s a picture of some friends of ours:
Try to ignore all of the people in that picture, and instead focus on how boring the walls behind them are. Now, compare them to these super awesome walls!
And furthermore, if you were sitting on that futon right now, this is what you’d see:
Now I will let you in on a secret. If you were to take that extension ladder and climb WAY up to the highest corner in our living room…
…you would find a special greeting:
I left that for future painters of this living room — it’s a pun! 🙂
Thanks to some painting help from Paul and some baby-watching help from Karianne’s parents, we got this all done in just 3 days! It’s nice to have a change — the living room seems much more cozy now. Here’s the view from above:
What kind of tater?
You know what word bothers me? “Commentator.” That is, one who gives a commentary.
I mean, why is it not just “commenter?” Why the extraneous syllable? Following the use of “commentator,” why shouldn’t an interpreter be an “interpretator?”
Because it sounds ridiculous, that’s why! Unfortunately, “commentator” is already entrenched — it’s in the dictionary, and Googling for it yields over 13 million results (that’s the true test of English word usage, naturally). It’s too late for me to do anything about commentator except rant about it on my blog. Oh, well.
Gratuitous baby photo:
Video: Clowning Around
For some reason, the other day Kaeta slumped her head forward at dinner, and Karianne and I both cracked up. She looked up at us with this look, like “I don’t know why this is funny, but okay!” and did it again! Now it’s become this little family joke. I know, it’s probably not that funny to anyone else, but please, indulge us:
She loves to make us laugh! She has such a great personality 🙂
Video: Already a better dancer than her father
Through no real effort on our part, Kaeta has learned to dance:
I’m amazed at what things come naturally to her. We’ve danced with her some, but playing music on her little table and dancing along? That was totally her idea. Sometimes she’ll even dance when I sing to her!
Painting Project #1
We painted the kitchen! It used to look like this:
Now it looks like this:
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I’m embarrassed to say, this took us about 4 weeks to complete. But it was a total of maybe 12 hours of work. Those of you without kids, do the math: you get 3 free hours per week. Use them wisely. 🙂
Painting Project #2 is much more lofty (pun intended: there are high ceilings involved). On Wednesday we start painting the living room! (Don’t be fooled by that exclamation point. I approach this project with much fear and trembling.)
Free Bible Software!
WORDsearch has released its Bible Explorer program for free! This is definitely worth trying out:
It currently comes with 14 free books, with more free books to be released in the coming months. Tell your friends!
(One note: Not all of the free books come with the initial program download, but you get them through a catalog that’s built into the program, and it’s really easy. Here are instructions for that.)