Thursday, June 28, 2012

If you give a pig a pancake... the home owners version

For our house inspection we were told we needed to get the attic fan fixed. Over last summer we thought let it go and ALLLLLL of my candles that I had put in the boxes of decorations melted. So I made an "ultimatum."  The fan needs to be fixed! NOW! So, Sean asked a friend, a heating & air conditioning guy, to come over and look at it.
When he came & looked we found that most of the electric in the house were connected to 2 breakers.
We also found wires that didn't have good connections.
So we called an electrician.
He came in to give us an estimate for 2 new wires into the attic, one for the attic fan & lights, the other to attach to the bathroom GFI outlet. Also to put the drier on a different outlet & put a GFI switch for the washing machine in the basement.
The guys came to do the work.
They were able to put the lines to the attic & get the fan running. woohoo, no problems there.
Then they move down to the basement to put the drier on the same line as the washer, and find that the washer isn't on a GFI switch, like it's supposed to be. (GFI switches are grounded and have a circuit breaker right in them, and are supposed to be on all switches/plugs associated with water. i.e. the bathroom, kitchen & laundrey room) So they had to change out the outlet before they could add the dryer.
Then they went to attach the wire that they ran to the attic for the bathroom. Found that the bathroom didn't have a GFI switch either! So they had to install on in there.
Then they installed the GFI switch for the sump pump, the only one that we planned on installing.
Sean was checking everything to make sure it worked. The sump pump kept shorting out the new GFI switch. The guy was nice enough to look at the pump. yeah, It's so corroded we are lucky we haven't flooded. sigh.
So now, we have to go buy a new sump pump.
Oh the joys of home ownership!

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Reasons I hate the English Language

I'm still waiting, rather impatiently now, for my lilies to bloom. There are bunches and bunches of buds, but no flowers yet. sigh. So I thought I'd tell you about an issue I've been dealing with :) The other day at work I was trying to edit a webpage and rewrite just one sentence on the page. I was struggling with the wording so I talked to one of our English writing guys. We have 2 that I know of on staff that check ALLLL the writing in our office. So anyway. The word was "drag" but past tense, so I'm thinking "drug." Uh, no, a person or thing can't be drug, they are "dragged." huh? But if you "hang" something on the wall, it was "hung." But a person wasn't "hung until dead" they were "hanged until dead." WHAT?!! Who makes these rules anyway? And how about fun? There is no such word as "funner" or "funnest" but if you put an "ny" on the end of "fun" you can say something was "funnier" or funniest." why? seriously, I HATE ENGLISH! This has made me second guess most of what I say. And if you know me, you know I LOOVVVEEEE to talk  :) Yeah, I hate being seen as ignorant more, so this makes me want to keep my mouth shut! grrrr. And what about "farther" and "further" ? hmmm, who in the heck decided we needed two similar words that mean almost the same damn thing. And what about "lay" and "lie" Do you "lay" down or do you "lie" down and who determines the difference? And to make matters worse, think about a single goose, and many geese. But if your looking at a single moose, you also look at many moose. huh? wait, aren't they spelled almost identical?! What's the difference? change one letter and you change the rules?! Who made up these stupid rules anyway?!! so there you have it, I hate the English language and these are just SOMMMMEEEE of the many words that I hate :) Now maybe I can sleep at night and stop thinking about it. As for talking, I'm going to go speak Spanish now, at least there they have rules!