Dales son David and Dave’s wife Lisa were here in Arizona this week.
We took a day-long trip to the Grand Canyon on Thursday, and went hiking in the desert Friday and Saturday, besides lots of meals and time spent getting to know each other better.
It was wonderful having them here, as it was last year when Karen brought her kids.
Now some day we hope that Jen can come back again too so we can meet her family.
Today Carl the carpenter brought all the pieces of the entertainment center that he has been building for the past 3 months. He only had a small trailer, so he had to bring it piece-by-piece, and it was too late to start assembly today.
Right now all the pieces are standing behind the sofa in the family room. Carl has promised to come back bright and early tomorrow and assemble it.
When it is assembled it will be 84″ tall, 16 feet wide and have a large space in the middle for our big screen TV. On the sides are spaces for the speakers and drawers for about 1500 DVDs or a smaller number of VHS tapes. It includes a cabinet for Gisele’s ironing board (she likes to iron while watching TV), and lots of other space.
Once this is installed, we won’t have any excuses any more for not completing the unpacking from the flood, darn it.
I’ll post pictures tomorrow after it is assembled.
For Christmas Gisele and I got a Roomba, robot vacuum cleaner.
We like it! Every night at 3:00am it wakes up and wanders around the lower floor vacuuming up dog hair and dust bunnies. In the morning I get up and empty the dust bin, and put it back down, ready for another day. Our floor has never been so regularly clean!
About 2/3 of the time it finds its way back to the dock at the end of it’s daily toils, but once in a while it either gets stuck behind the sofa, or tangled up in a wire or string I left lying around. It’s never a big job to untangle and send it back home.
It’s a little noisy and sometimes wakes me up when it starts its rounds. I usually just close the bedroom door and go back to sleep.
Geek alert. May not be interesting to the casual reader. Technical, gadget-type stuff.
We have had our current water heater for over 15 years (it came with the house). It’s inefficient and I’m concerned that it is ready to cause another flood. So I updated to the latest technology.
I got a GE Geospring water heater. It has a conventional electrical resistance water heater combined with a heat pump. Heat pumps are much more efficient — it uses less than half the electricity to heat water using the heat pump alone. However, a heat pump is slower, so the resistive part helps when demand is higher. There’s a nice animation here.
On the negative side it was about 3 times as expensive as a conventional electric water heater, but the savings in electricity should pay for the difference in about 3 years. So it’s really an investment.
On the plus side, the heat pump extracts heat from the environment to heat the water, so it will actually help to cool the garage (a little). A nice benefit in the summer, but not so useful right now while the outside temperature is in the 30s, and supposed to drop into the 20s tonight.
Took me most of the day to install. I’m OK at sweating (soldering) copper pipes, but it took me a while to figure out that one of the pipes had water dripping into it, and it’s almost impossible to solder a wet pipe.
Now, don’t you non-techy types wish you had observed the warning at the top? Is there anything much more boring than a water heater?
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