My house has three bay windows in it. When I bought my home I thought they were great: they let in a lot of light and looked nice from the outside. Figuring out how to drape them properly was a pain. The windows were too close together to allow for a standard curtain rod installation. Standard curtain rods were too long to fit. Shorter curtain rods fit, but then I couldn’t cover the windows properly and light spilled in around the edges. I tried getting curtains that were too wide and forcing them to billow out, but that looked odd. I eventually gave up and let light creep in through the windows.

That is, until Sedagive? suggested the Bayview flexible curtain rod by Umbra Solutions.
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On Monday I noticed that some of my things were damp underneath the kitchen sink. Turns out that there was a small leak coming from the cold water hose. No problem, right? I read the specifications right off of the hose, went to Home Depot, and purchased a replacement.

I turned the knob on the cold water shut off valve and started to unscrew the old hose. Water started spraying out. Hrm … didn’t I just turn the valve off? I turned it the other way, to make sure. Then this happened:

The knob snapped off right in my hand. Water sprayed ten feet back and all over the floor. I clamped my hand over the spray; it was the best I could do while Sedagive? scampered for a bucket. The bucket filled almost instantly.

Here’s the fun part: I had no idea where the house’s shut off valve was, and the last time I had to do this the valve was under a manhole-style cover in my yard in Williamsburg. We had about four inches of ice and snow in the yard, and I didn’t even know where to start looking. I decided to try underneath the house in a hope that the shut off valve was in an accessible — and dry — location.

Sure enough, there were three valves under the house. I channeled my inner R2D2 and shut them all down. It took us quite a while to clean up the water. We went to Lowe’s to get a replacement plastic valve, and the gentleman explained that the valve was a Quest fitting that was no longer made. Apparently Shell made a bunch of this shit out of polybutylene and it had a reputation for failing. Shell settled a class action lawsuit for a billion dollars (which I missed by seven months).

I bought a metal “shark’s tooth” style replacement fitting. It didn’t make me super confident — you just push the fitting onto the pipe and it clamps down on its own. How reliable would it be? What made me even less confident is that while the cold water started working again, there seemed to be a leak from the hot side now. My dishwasher feeds from that line, and I didn’t want to deal with trying to replace that fitting.

The plumber is here now, and he had to scrounge for some antiquated Quest parts. Keep your fingers crossed.

About a month and a half ago I left for Georgia on vacation. My friend Grizzly Adams stayed here at the house to watch the dogs and keep an eye on the premises. When I came back, the upstairs was 78°F. The downstairs was 72°F and the air conditioning was running full-speed. Normally I keep the house at 68 – 72° at all times, and I have separate air conditioner units for each floor. I have a home owner’s warranty on the house (they replaced my upstairs unit already), but I was tired and wanted to go to sleep with cool air blowing through the house. I reset the breakers, waited awhile, and turned the unit back on. Everything seemed cool.
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I liked my Dyson DC07 so much that I sold it to buy an upgraded DC14. One of the things I really missed from my DC07 was the flat floor brush. About a third of my house is wood floor, and although the Dyson does a good job on the carpet, I don’t like how it performs on wood without an attachment. The DC07′s flat floor brush was low to the ground and easy to use, and I hoped that the Low Reach tool for the DC14 would be an incremental improvement.

Unfortunately the Low Reach brush is a bit too hard-core for hard floor.
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I haven’t used spray paint in a long time, but my memories are still crystal clear. I was eleven years old. I wanted to spray my BMX-style bicycle matte black. I was out behind our utility barn; my father told me not to use his spray paint unattended. I waited for him to go into the far pasture and broke out the matte black. I quickly coated my bike a few times and smiled. I thought I was being super sneaky.

“Why did you paint your bike?” my father asked about a half hour later.

“Huh?” I blubbered.

He pointed at my right hand. There was black paint all over my index finger from the shitty nozzle.

I thought I was being super sneaky.
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Yes, I know this is similar to the title I used when I wrote about the hardwood stump borers I find every now and then. But these bugs are just as damn scary, and this time they are inside the house.
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I loved living in southern Oregon. The weather was perfect for me, the way of life was slower without seeming backwater (unlike the South), and it symbolized a big tipping point in my career in Web junk. It also started my path towards self-sufficiency, and was a good cultural setting to learn about the three “Rs” of waste reduction: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.

As indicated in my article about plastic bags almost a year ago, I like reusing stuff. That’s the easiest way for me to reduce the stuff I toss into a landfill. I keep a lot of the plastic containers that food comes in, try to reuse plastic or paper bags at least once before binning/recycling them, and re-use boxes and shipping components. I’ve stopped using paper towels almost completely in favor of rags.

Most of my “reduce” activities center around water and power consumption. I shave out of a big coffee mug instead of letting the water run the whole time. I use compact fluorescent lamps instead of incandescent bulbs where I can. I microwave my kitchen sponge for two minutes every time I run the dish washer to avoid tossing out a perfectly serviceable sponge and reaching for a new one.

Recycling was a part of the conservation triad that I always refused to participate in. Recycling was a major pain in the ass when I lived in Oregon. I had to separate plastic from paper (subdivided into newsprint, magazines/glossy inserts, and then other paper products), glass had to be divided up into clear and green (they didn’t take brown bottles … or was it green ones? I forget). I had to remove labels from all containers. Cardboard was accepted, but only if it was thickly corrugated. Who has time to wash, sort, and judge all that shit? Plus you had to pay.

So, fuck that. Fast forward almost six years, and the niece is living with me. She looked at all the other conservation shit I was doing around the house. “Why don’t you recycle?” I told her about my Oregon experience. She asked me to check into recycling here, and I did, just to appease her. I was completely surprised.

The Central Virginia Waste Management Authority runs a (free!) curbside recycling program that is dead simple for lazy people like myself. Their rules are simple:

1. Wash out your nasty stuff.
2. Throw away lids.
3. Only recycle plastic items with a 1 or 2 on it. When it doubt, throw it away.
4. Huck all your recycleables in one big ass bin. Or more bins, if you need it. No sorting necessary.
5. Tote big ass bin(s) to the curb every two weeks.
6. Don’t pay anything extra.

Apparently it’s all sorted out at a facility. I couldn’t be happier with the program. My fiscally conservative self is satisfied knowing those people aren’t sucking money out of the welfare system. I am putting less stuff into the garbage bin, even with the niece living here. Double the occupants yet only 2/3rds of my original waste going to the landfill? Score.

Instead of a sorting chore, recycling is a game now. I like filling the recycling bin up with junk mail envelopes and the magazines I’ve finished reading. I enjoy looking at plastic containers to see if I can recycle them or not. I was pleased to put my gigumbo-sized empty detergent bottle in the recycling bin instead of throwing it into the trash.

The moral of the story: check to see what your community does for recycling. You might be surprised at how easy (and effortless) it is.

It probably seems odd that a guy who loves buying stuff so much wants to eventually move as far off-grid as possible, but it’s true. If I had a hojillion dollars I’d refinish a retired nuclear missile silo and make room for my bestest friends in case the Avian flu comes a-callin’ behind the wheel of a monster truck.

But I don’t have a hojillion dollars, so I have to think of less money-intensive ways to have a little patch of land to call my own.

Buying land and then building on it always seems extremely expensive. My father and his wife built their “dream house” in Colorado and drilling their well cost more than they budgeted for. Like, 200% more. Then they had to have their house built, a road cut, etc. etc. They wound up so jaded on their dream house that they sold it a few years later and moved to an even more remote location in Colorado. Their new home is a lot smaller, and they seem much happier. Dad has always been good at teaching me by example, so I started researching “start small” options.
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I keep at least two weeks’ worth of food in the pantry that only needs heat and/or water to prepare. I have a fair amount of canned goods — beans, mostly — and I have always been concerned about stacking them too high. I also have to remember to rotate my stock every time I buy more beans from the store. I was looking for home storage products and found the Three tier can rack shelf from Get Organized. I thought I could use the rack to save space, store my cans more safely, and more easily put new cans into rotation.
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Once a year, a mighty battle is waged at the DrFaulken abode. The forces of man clash with the forces of nature in what can only be described as a fight to the death of epic proportions. The combatants: me and seventeen oak trees in my front and back yards. Last year I disposed of nearly 4800 gallons of leaves, and this year the photosensitive scourge was back with a vengeance. I was determined not to repeat the days upon days of work required to pick up and bag the leaves by hand, and the gnarly aftermath of ripping the bags open at the town dump. I had a secret weapon up my sleeve this year: a trailer-contained leaf vacuum.
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