Getting Caught Up

I think we let too many things go for too long around here sometimes. It's really easy, in fact almost a necessity much of the time, to look at something that needs to be done or to start doing it and then decide that the finishing stages of the project can just wait. Unfortunately, sometimes they wait for days and days or even weeks.

We did manage to get all the junk down to the road, although that took us about four months of putting it off until it was too late to actually accomplish (note: we can only do that in one narrow window per month, so rain or a sudden burst of busy-ness usually stopped it). Usually, because there's so much to do in the living room and kitchen (to keep up with the "little children who can't") that's the site of the halfway projects. Today began for me with dishes (kind of typical), taking out the trash (actually, I made the first child that wandered into the kitchen do it), and taking care of the compost, which is what we let go waaaaaaay too long and was equally waaaaaaay gross. That was my job, being the one that handles most of the gross things.

Another project we've been letting go for too long now (about four days, although I'm not sure when we're going to find time to do it -- one could say that this post is using time that could be used to do this) is replacing our hot water heater. Little did we know a few years back when we bought a highly acclaimed new hot water heater with an excellent energy efficiency rating and mostly glowing reviews that it was a defective model (the Flameguard FG1F4040S3NOV produced by Whirlpool) that would crap out on us long before the warranty expired, although by the time that happened a class-action lawsuit against Whirlpool would have been filed, settled, and expired because we were lucky enough to have it last a little over four years for us instead of the more typical eighteen months. What all that realistically means, according to all I've read, is that it's not worth our time or effort to make a warranty claim, which will only send us a part that will surely crap out on us again in rather short order (and which we'd have to pay to install). Thus, we have to get a new one. Awesome. In the meantime, all of the cold showers have been a fun, growing experience. Actually, they're just an inconvenience: my wife and the kids are going to my mom's house every day or two to take a shower and, since I tend to take cold showers in the summer anyway, I just deal with it, hooting and hollering for the first three or four minutes every time I wash. All I can say is that at least it happened in August instead of January!

Replacing the water heater is goodmanliness outside of my skills set, so now it's just a matter of finding time to go pick one out and get it installed. I have done what I could, though, spending several rather painful hours sitting on this machine trying to figure out which ones are and aren't pieces of crap (which is almost impossible to decipher from the wide variety of reviews on apparently every model in existence) as well as making absolutely double-sure that the model we currently have isn't worth fixing (and learning how to relight the pilot, trying that, and hoping I didn't blow myself or one end of our house up in the process -- luckily (?) it didn't work).