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House & Yard

NESTing the Thermostat

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Look at this extremely kewl thing my son gave me for Christmas! It’s called a “Nest.” It’s a thermostat that (allegedly) can learn your wants, desires, and real-world habits, can talk to your computer, can be spoken to through your  mobile devices, and on top of all that is decorative as all get-out.

So white-hot is the mob’s desire for this Objet that M’hijito, having ordered it in what he thought would be plenty of time for Christmas, only just received it from the manufacturer. Yes. A two-and-a-half-month backlog.

It really is very beautiful and very easy to operate. Instead of having to figure out and remember how to set a programmable thermostat using a manual that would make an engineer’s head hurt, you simply set it to the temperatures you would like at the times you ordinarily like to change the temps, spinning an outer ring much as we could do with old-fashioned, easy-to-work, now unavailable, round thermostats. A week or so of this and it will “learn” your preferences and adjust your climate control accordingly. You can set it to “away” to change inside temps to uncomfortable (but cheaper) levels when you’re at work or on vacation, and your manual settings can be “learned.”

And…it is very, very handsome.

If you have to ask, you can’t afford it. So…best not to ask. I could not believe my son spent that much on this thing. But having been gifted with it, I’m thrilled.

Now all we have to do is get it to work.

It looks easier to install than it is, especially in an old house with old wiring, the crumbling drywall hiding the ghosts of past air-conditioning units. M’hijito had no problem hooking it up to something and getting my MacBook and my iPad to talk to it. In the balminess that was Saturday afternoon, setting it at 68 degrees seemed to work just fine. It chugged along happily, and in fact I believe it was working fine.

Then I turned it off, because I prefer having it chilly for sleeping.

Sunday morning after the 4:00 a.m. hot flash wore off and the 62-degree ambience became apparent, I turned it back on and set it back to 68.

Three hours later it was still 62 in the house. The blower had been going nonstop, and what it was blowing was cold air. Apparently the Nest was actually running the house fan, not the heat pump. Or whatever heats in a heat pump.

For an extra $112, you can hire a technician in your area, certified to work on these things. So I got online and found not one, not two, but three of them who also appear in Angie’s List. All three have “A” ratings and rave reviews, which is something. Certainly not what I expected! Called the one with the largest number of customer reviews. Asked the dispatcher if she could tell, before I paid for someone to come traipsing over here, whether the thing was compatible with the new Goodman heat pump the insurance company had installed after the late great hailstorm. She said yes, sure it is. Asked if they had an Angie’s List coupon. She said yes, they sure do. Asked how much the job would be: $80.

So. Not good, but an improvement over a hundred and twelve bucks. And I think it just might be worth it. This thing is really, truly, extremely kewl. It is so kewl it’s Applesque.

Swimming Pool Delittering Joy

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Last night the wind blew briskly enough to pick up several sections of the newspaper that I’d left on the table under the patio cover. It pulled each section apart and scattered newspaper pages all over the yard. One double-truck spread even landed in the pool.

Took all of about ten seconds to walk around and pick these up. The result, after this heavy labor:

Lookee there! Ten feet down, not ONE devil pod or devil leaf. Floating atop the surface, not ONE blob of devil-tree pollen.

That is one litter-free pool!

Mwa ha ha! I am going to be so happy to burn the logs from the accursed devil-pod tree in the fireplace next winter!

Because the nights have been unusually warm, the water’s not even very cold. And today was lovely, warm and sunny. If I weren’t pounding on Death’s door with some lunger epizootic, I’d consider taking a plunge.

Ant Wars: The Battle of Kenmore

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Ant carrying an aphid

They’re b-a-a-a-a-c-k!

The Ondts have begun their summer campaign, and we have engaged the first battle of the season. A Myrmidon battalion was spotted this afternoon, undertaking an attack on the refrigerator. It appeared they were trying to roll it out the back door.

Ant intelligence agents are telepathic. How else to explain their unerring knowledge of the human exhaustion level? Invariably, they launch their raids when the enemy is quivering on the edge of nervous collapse.

O.K., O.K. I admit it: I haven’t cleaned the kitchen floor in a week, and yeah, something that I don’t clearly remember rolled under the fridge a week or so ago, and no, I’m just not strong enough to move the refrigerator, and so yes, it was inevitable that eventually the ant trash removal brigade would show up sooner or later. But really. They could have picked a day that didn’t begin at 5:30 a.m. with backwashing the clogged pool filter followed by the surprise 6:15 appearance of Gerardo’s non-English-speaking palm tree dude followed by MORE pool-cleaning followed by a very busy day of racing around the city followed by a wrestling match with Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner in 110-degree heat. They know. They do know.

I laid waste to legions of the lady warriors, though. Home-made glass & tile cleaner (rubbing alcohol + water + ammonia) does them in when it’s sprayed directly over their little bodies. Must’ve killed 80 or 100 of them. Experience suggests, however, that for every ant that croaks over, two ants are waiting to take her place.

Mopped up the field of battle with a microfiber rag on a swiffer mop. Vacuumed and vacuumed and vacuumed, in hopes of picking up whatever flecks of food are on the floor. Then dust-mopped again. Then mopped with a hot solution of Simple Green.

This strategy seemed to beat them back.

Ah, but the night is young. Puny human efforts to vanquish the armies of the night, as we know, little avail us. I expect they’re still out there. Waiting.

Image: Ant carrying an aphid. Luisifer. vlastní fotografie. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Workman Waltz: Save the Last Dance for Me…

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Ohhhhhhhhh moan! The handyman charged $615 to repaint the eaves, install two new motion-sensitive lights, and plane down the solid-core door on the office so it will close properly. That doesn’t count the cost of the paint, which was more than any reasonable person could expect.

I can’t complain too much. He repaired some dry-rot that the roofers should have fixed and that was in their contract to fix but that they ignored (too busy chopping back my prize trees, I guess). The paint job he did is far superior to the one committed by Bila the Bosnian Lightning Bolt.

Bila, who does nothing but paint (well, he also will hire out for a few handyman jobs, but by trade he’s a painter), painted the entire house from stem to stern in a day. He accomplished this with a sprayer, which he used to apply a light coat over everything. As you can imagine, this hasn’t held up very well. Jack, on the other hand, actually painted the woodwork—you remember, with a paintbrush and a roller? He also filled cracks and generally repaired the tired wood trim. It looks very nice, and it appears likely to last for quite a while. It took him a day and a half to do this, and for Jack a “day” extends until well after dark.

This hail damage thing is turning into quite the financial fiasco. Fortunately, so far the insurance company has covered all the repairs. I’m going to scan Jack’s invoice and the receipts for the paint and exterior lights, mail them off to the adjuster, and we’ll see if they’ll spring for a little more cash.

And…even if they don’t, I still can’t complain. They’ve covered almost $12,000 in repairs so far. If I have to pay $600 or $700, that’s still a darn sight better than 12 or 13 grand.

Thanks to the hailstorm, the entire neighborhood has had a facelift. Almost every house got a new roof. Given the exorbitant cost of roofing, as you can imagine many peoples’ roofs were already pretty weary before the depression started, and what with the hard times, our houses were beginning to take on a kind of Appalachian look. Quite a few homeowners also managed to change out the 20-year-old Goettl air-conditioning units. These new units not only look a great deal less ugly, they run whisper-quiet. My neighbors’ AC/heaters used to growl like jet planes. Now when Terry’s and Sally’s units come on, I can hardly hear them. That adds a lot to the livability factor.

{sigh} By dint of assiduous penny-pinching my savings account had finally, within the past week, recovered its former glory. Just transferred the cash over to checking to cover the draft I wrote to Jack. That puts savings right back where it was a few months ago.

Hope a decent tax refund materializes. Hope the insurance company will cover some of this bill.

We still have the security door to install in back. Urk!

Image: A Modern Trade Painter. Lukeroberts.  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.

Of Dentists, Trees, and Retirement Pay

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So yesterday I ran over to the dentist’s office to get my teeth cleaned. As you’ll recall, I canned Delta Dental when it became clear that Delta’s huge deductible, its $20 copays, and its skimpy coverage would combine to cost as much as or more than what it would take to simply pay the darned dentist out of pocket.

When I explained to him that I’d dropped the dental insurance, that I’m permanently unemployed, that I’m over the hill, and that I can’t afford to make separate paid trips to his office just to chat with him about what he plans to do, he cut his fee by 10 percent. This resulted in a significant reduction in the amount I owed him: from about $170 to about $140.

This was somewhat cheering.

The arborist came by in the afternoon to look at the damage inflicted by the idiot roofers. He was not pleased by what he saw.

As to the stump of the major branch those clowns chopped off the desert willow, cutting out a good quarter of the crown and stealing much-needed shade from the front courtyard, he opined that left the way it was it would die back, rot, and leave the tree vulnerable to bacterial infection and insects. To head off this fate, he cut it all the way back to the trunk.

I’m still dead furious about the damage to that beautiful tree, but it least now it looks better cosmetically.

The SOBs did the same thing to the paloverde in back: hacked off a chunk of a thick, major branch, this one casting shade on the west side. I’m afraid that little antic will make the westside deck unusable in the summer. Before they pulled this stunt, I actually was able to sit out there in the shade even when it was very hot. But now too much sun will pour down on that area to make it livable anytime after about mid-April. Just flicking infuriating.

He cut back that branch to a point where he thought the tree might be able to stop the mortification of the damaged area, although he made no guarantee. He said it will die back some. If it starts to die back further than a certain point, which it certainly could, then that entire limb will have to be removed, too.

Amazingly, he performed these small bits of tree surgery for free. I offered to pay him at least a trip charge; he said how about $10 for the gas.

So that was pretty astonishing. Now I’ll have to hire him to come back and do some serious (and seriously well-paying…) work as soon as I have the money. If I ever do. LOL!

Speaking of money, I haven’t received my 2011 back sick leave payment (RASL), which was supposed to be disbursed in February. The woman who runs that program took herself a nice long vacation this month; she’s not supposed to get back until today, when of course I have to spend the entire day in the classroom or lurking on the campus between classes.

State retirees who elected to participate in the 403(b) plan rather than the state’s pension fund are required to take a drawdown from investments to remain eligible for all three payouts of their RASL. I’m concerned that she’s decided the $1 a month that Fidelity told me was OK is NOT OK, and that she will announce she’s decided I’m “not retired” and will refuse to pay me any further.

This is another stage in the endless runaround the state deals out to its retired employees. Every time I asked someone in the state GAO (which administers the RASL program) what was the minimum amount I could draw down, I was told to talk to the people at Fidelity. Every time I asked someone at Fidelity, he would say he didn’t know or he would find out and get back to me. Obviously, “get back to you” is run-around talk for “flake off, please.” Finally I reached a middle-management type who claimed that you could take as little as $1.00 a month and still remain eligible for RASL, and that a number of Arizona state retirees he works with have done exactly that.

Nevertheless, given that the money hasn’t shown up, I expect the RASL administrator to announce that the buck a month doesn’t qualify, thereby giving me the shaft in the biggest way possible. It’s a fitting good-bye from state service.

The Workman Waltz: Flirtation Stage

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So here we are at the first stage of hiring workmen to replace the air conditioner and reroof the house. The insurance company ponied up about $11,100 for a new AC, a new roof, and repairs to the CoolDeck. That amount will cover the air conditioner and the roof, just barely.

I joined up Angie’s List by way of getting names of contractors who have at least not driven SOME people into fits of rage. The result was a little mixed, but I did find a roofer who’s supposedly OK. And, having become disenchanted with my own AC guy after the company changed hands, I’d already learned of one air-conditioning contractor from my neighbor Sally; the other new neighbors, who moved in to Dave’s (former) Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum, recommended a second one based in Sunnyslope, right around the corner from us.

M’hijito and I have used a roofer—both houses needed to be reroofed shortly after we purchased them—who did a good job and seemed to be honest. I called him and found him strangely reluctant, but he showed up and produced a bid of $7,200: almost $2,000 more than he bid five years ago to roof the same house, when he had to replace rotted plywood to the tune of $48.50 per sheet.

The Sunnyslope roofer wanted $5,400 to install a 14-seer Goodman air conditioner, the smallest SEER for which the government will disgorge a $1,500 tax kickback on a high-efficiency unit.

$5,400 + $7,200 = $12600
$12,600 – $11,100 = $1,500

Unfortunately, it’s highly  unlikely that I’ll ever see any tax refund from that federal offer, because it’s unlikely that I will pay any taxes at all this year. Thanks to the costs of Medicare B, Medicare D, Medigap, and long-term care insurance, my medical costs—before the $700 pair of glasses—far exceed 7.5% of my income. Social Security, the main source of my 2010 income, is taxed under some strange and incomprehensible system that keeps the cost fairly low, and I’ve hardly drawn down any of my savings this year. Income from teaching is even more minuscule than Social Security benefits. And the S-corporation will shelter almost all my freelance income, which was more minuscule still.

So…I’m going to have to land the best deal I can on the least cheesy product anyone will offer me.

The Sunnyslope air-conditioning guy came in with a bid of $5,400, and he proposed to defraud my insurance company by emanating a bid for a 14-SEER unit but calling it 13-SEER, since he claimed that the insurance company would pay for nothing better than 13-SEER—once again proving that crime doesn’t pay. Sally’s guy issued a bid for $5,200 for 14-SEER, hold the bullshit.

Two hundred dollars isn’t a big difference, but he didn’t propose to lie to the insurer. In my experience, if a person will cheat someone else, sooner or later he’ll cheat you, too.

Now about that $7,200 roof… The guy whose name I got from Angie’s list gave me a bid of $6,100, eleven hundred bucks better than my old roofer’s proposal. Same job, same quality of shingling (different brand, though), a little higher on replacing plywood, decking, molding, and fascia.

That’s getting down into the almost reasonable range.

$6,100 + $5,200 = $11,300

Only a couple hundred bucks more than the insurance has paid.

However, here is a very interesting site, where various kinds of contractors go online and talk shop. Get into the roofers’ forum, explore around, and eventually you’ll come to a thread where the men are chatting about a practice in which the outfits that descend on a town after a storm offer to pay a homeowner’s deductible to get their business. Well, there is an outfit in the neighborhood just now that doesn’t appear to be altogether fly-by-night. It’s a little suspicious that the company’s A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau dates from November of 2010 (and, one might note, that when one looks into how you apply for an A+ rating, one is not left with much confidence in that), but the Registrar of Contractors shows that they’ve been in business for 20 years. They’re flying through with crews of six or eight men and reroofing each house in a day or two. I could ask for a bid and find out if they’ll come down the amount of the $2,000 deductible.

The forum-going roofing guys think this practice is unethical. Some of them think it’s illegal—they think it’s insurance fraud. However, it’s hard to see how it would be fraudulent if the insurance company has already paid out and has seen bids from legitimate companies that are not basing their bids on any such schemes. Once the insurance company has paid what its representatives think is fair, it’s up to the homeowner to find the best price within the confines of the amount she has to work with.

What fun! I can hardly wait to get started on the construction.