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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page). Relocating to Boise? Use my realtor, neighbor, and friend, Cindy Smith csmith@1realtyone.com.
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Saturday, June 10, 2006
House Project: Kudos To Our Builder; Kudos To The Maker I've been complaining a bit about slow follow up to our complaints and occasional lack of attention to detail. Let me say something nice here about our builder. The frame under the exterior doors was sealed with some sort of foam. It wasn't very attractive, but I never got around to whining to our builder about it. But sometime in the last couple of weeks, he came up and put in a nice piece of wood that made it all look quite a bit more buttoned down.  Click to enlarge No complaints about the Builder of the world. Here's some pictures I took from around our house after breakfast: Morning in Horseshoe Bend.  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge Last house project entry. Labels: house project Friday, June 09, 2006
House Project: Fun With Appliances There aren't many house project entries left, since we have moved in, and there is only one significant task left for the builder--epoxy painting the concrete to solve the problem of inconsistent coloration. But there are a few surprises, some of them amusing, some just irritating, that have come up since we moved in Monday night. Washing Machine & Dryer We have run a few very small loads through the washing machine, and it has worked just fine. Then, we put in something close to a real load--and during the final spin cycle, it started walking its way out from under the counter, headed north. ("You don't normally see that kind of behavior from a major appliance.") Then, after my wife turned it off (before it decided that it wanted to be Canadian), she noticed that the dryer wasn't drying clothes. At this point, my wife, who has developed a certain level of anger at our builder for a certain lack of follow-through on details, was screaming his name. I opened up the installation manual for the washer--and it was still in an sealed bag, so much for following instructions--and saw that the walking problem was sometimes caused by the washer not being level. I can't give an explanation for this behavior that would get much of a grade on a physics exam, but I have an intuitive feeling that vibration causes one leg to lift off the ground and then fall again. Because the leg is on a slope, it ends up in a slightly different location than last night. Repeat! Sure enough, the washing machine was on a slight slope--and the downslope was north, its direction of migration. By this point, I was about to join my wife in cursing Scott's name. I leveled the washing machine--and it didn't much care. The washing machine kept saying, "I'm not American, eh?" and heading for the border. The next step was to call GE Customer Care--and even without putting the phone up to the washing machine, the gal at the other end could tell that it was time for a service call. "Even if it weren't walking, that is not right!" It turns out that the earliest we can get someone out from Boise to look at this is next Tuesday--we are on the wilderness service route, I guess. Perhaps our service rep will arrive by dogsled, wearing bucksins. Maybe our builder should have leveled the washing machine, but that would not appear to be the core problem. The dryer was a simpler solution--and the joys of good luck. As all of this appliance excitement was going on, a Suburban Propane truck arrived behind the house, on the back driveway. The driver was there to get the serial number off the undergound propane tank, so I asked him to check the dryer. (It runs on gas.) Two problems: the gas valve behind the dryer was closed--making it rather difficult to dry clothes. The second problem was that the hose that connects the back of the dryer to the external vent was not hooked up, spewing lint on to the floor. Now, my builder's excuse for the gas valve being closed was that this is a safety issue--you never turn that on until someone has moved in. Well, perhaps, but he knew we were moving in, and should have had that on his checklist. I was prepared to believe that the hose pulled loose from the back of the dryer when the Suburban Propane guy pulled it out from under the counter--but when I climbed back there to hook it up, I noticed that the airplane clamp that holds the hose to the back of the dryer was so loose that it could not ever been connected. Groan. Jetted Tub I soaked my poor aching back in the jetted tub, and in spite of my initial concern some weeks ago that the jets weren't powerful enough for what we paid, I have changed my mind. They are powerful enough to provide some massage to sore muscles. But then I noticed that only three of the six vents were operating--and at least two of the round knobs above the water line that control the jets were just spinning freely, turning nothing. So I called up WhirlJet, the maker of this tub. We have been in their factory showroom near Boise. The warranty service head at first claimed not to recognize this type of control as being a WhirlJet tub. I explained that we bought it at their factory showroom. Then I found the web page where our particular model appears. When last we talked on Thursday, she was insisting that the jets are controlled by a round flange around each jet. If so, I'm confused, because none of the flanges turn as she indicated that they should. Aggravating matters is the water now has a faint greenish tinge--which from what one web site that I found (and have since lost) indicates, sounds like copper in solution, aggravated slightly acidic water sitting in pipes in warm weather. Backup Generator Does Work We had a lovely electrical storm last night--and we lost electricity briefly--and within a second, the backup generator had started up, and replaced the missing current. While not a problem for appliances to lose power for a second, desktop computers don't like that. It is probably time for uninterruptible power supplies for the desktops. Last house project entry. Labels: house project The Joy of Moving When Cats Get Bored As I mentioned previously, we moved ourselves on Monday (the heavy stuff) and Tuesday (everything else). Cats, if you didn't already know, have a habit of hiding toys in out of the way places. For example, this collection under the love seat in the living room was exposed on Monday.  Click to enlarge Prescription bottles. Bottle caps. Film canisters. Even, amazingly enough, some real genuine cat toys! Oh No! The Cramers Are Moving In! We have been looking at this house on top of one of the adjacent hills to ours ever since we bought the property.  Click to enlarge The combination of windows on this face will, depending on your generation, either remind you of Edvard Munch's The Scream, or "Oh no! Mr. Bill!" (You didn't even know that there was an Official Mr. Bill website, did you? Contemplating a New Market Opportunity Among the painful experiences of Monday was moving my desk, and my wife's desk. My desk is gray painted steel--probably government surplus of some sort. I don't know when or where my brother found it, but in the first year after his schizophrenic breakdown, he abandoned his Miracle Mile apartment and became a street person. My father and I moved all of his possessions out of that apartment in an astonishingly short time--and I ended up with this desk. My wife has always hated this desk. It is, admittedly, uglier than a mud fence, but it works, and after moving both it and my wife's considerably more attractive wooden desk, I have gained a new appreciation for it. Ugly as it is, there are eight nuts that hold the top on to the two sets of drawers. The top is heavy, but one strong person can pick it up and carry it with just a small amount of cursing. Because it is made of steel, and uses bolts and nuts, it is pretty quick to disassemble and reassemble.  Click to enlarge My wife's desk, attractive as it is, suffers from the fault of being very heavy. The top is larger--but it is a 1" thick piece of some pseudo-wood surface combined with particle board underneath. There are single persons that can pick it up and carry it, but most of them look like California's current governor. Worse than the weight, it is held together by wood screws and imagination--more axe carpentry like the oak dresser set that we sold at the garage sale. Disassembling it caused a number of wood shims to move, requiring a bit of analysis to get Humpty Dumpty back together again.  Click to enlarge And it struck me: why are either of these desks so heavy? The wood desk is especially inexcusable. I am half tempted to replace that monstrously heavy desktop with a 1/4" sheet of Delrin instead. It would almost certainly be much lighter, and 1/4" Delrin is at least as hard as wood. Better, you can drill and tap it--unlike particle board. Perhaps there's a market for highly durable but lightweight desks. Lightweight anything is sounding pretty good right now. Another One Bites The Dust The death of al-Zarqawi, head of Iraq's division of al-Qaeda, brought to mind a bumper stick that I saw in the Lowe's parking lot recently: It is God's job to judge the terrorists.Unfortunately, I expect that in another five years, we are going to be seeing some college students (you know, the really smart ones for whom conventionality is a badge of dishonor) with al-Zarqawi T-shirts and posters, and professors lamenting that the death of al-Zarqawi was the last chance for authentic, indigenous Arab democracy. Wednesday, June 07, 2006
Moving, Or Dental Work? I'll Take Dental Work This has been an extraordinarily busy week. 1. Last Friday, my son moved into his own place. So I rented a truck, and helped him move. 2. Friday night, my best friend Brad arrived from California for my son's graduation from high school. 3. Later Friday night, my daughter and son-in-law arrived from Moscow for my son's graduation and to look for a house here. 4. Saturday morning the Legends Annual Neighborhood Garage Sale generated a traffic jam in our subdivision, and of course, we had gobs of trash and treasures to dispose of that way. 5. At 10:30 AM, my daughter and son-in-law piled into a car with our neighbor the Realtor Cindy Smith. My friend Brad tagged along to provide witty repartee and often deep insights into structural concerns about the proposed purchases. I'll be blogging about that. 6. At 5:00 PM, we went out to dinner at Sakura, a Japanese restaurant. (My son's choice--I find Japanese food alternately disgusting or too bland to enjoy, depending on the dish.) 7. At 7:30 PM, Centennial High had its graduation ceremony--and the school superintendent gave a speech that would not have been given in many California schools, emphasizing faith and the courage of those members of the graduating class entering into military service to protect our freedoms. 8. Sunday afternoon, we showed my daughter, son-in-law, and Brad the new house. My daughter and son-in-law leave, not thrilled with the houses we saw. Brad, me, and Cindy the Realtor go look at new houses--nice places (a little cheaply made, maybe) but only slightly more expensive than houses that were of questionable structural integrity. (Why is that roof concave there?) 9. Monday: I rent the same 17' moving truck, and we start moving. Oh my! All the big stuff was moved by the end of a very long evening, but everything that wasn't sore or bruised was scratched. I will muse and mutter about the weight and awkwardness of ordinary furniture in a later blog entry, perhaps with ruminations on building office desks out of more sophisticated materials than wood or metal. Among the tasks was disassembling a neighbor's dog run so that it can become a duck run. At the moment, it's a jigsaw puzzle in the garage that I hope I remember how to reassemble. 10. Tuesday: I took off work again to continue moving. 11. Wednesday: Finally back at work, catching up hundreds of work-related emails and hundreds of pieces of spam. Oh yeah, and return the cable company's boxes to them. Oh, that's who owns the Motorola cable modem that I had? Grumble. Must return that tomorrow. 12. Try to get together with people that want to buy the old washer and dryer. Lots of phone calls. Still not free of it. 13. Fun and games with the new washer and dryer not working as expected. Another blog entry soon about that. On the plus side, while there are still odds and ends sitting the old house, and a bit of patching and painting is still required, we are now living at the new house. It is astonishingly quiet. The old house was quiet, but it is New York City cacophony compared to the new house. The views in morning and afternoon are astonishing--and I woke this morning to two quails outside the bedroom window. The drive to work took 28 minutes this morning; the drive home, even with Eagle rush hour traffic, took 31 minutes. I can live with that! |
