REMEMBERING WHAT HAS TO BE DONE TO CHANGE SEASONS - JUST NOT IN TIME

 Changing seasons -

Well fall came in – and rather quickly around here, though we are to have a burst of warm weather to come this week, before it leaves again.

Of course every year for the two big seasonal changes – to cold weather and to warm weather, of course – we plan to be ready to make the change, but never do.  

Our house has a hot air furnace, something neither of us grew up.  We both grew up in houses that had hot water heater – furnace heated water which then ran through thin pipes throughout the house and the  hot water doing so would heat the air in the rooms, finally returning back to the furnace to be heated again and return to heating the air in the room again…  With the furnace we have in our house hot air is blown through vents to the various rooms in the house and then after it cooled it is sucked back down to the furnace to be reheated…  Seems the same, but it is not.  

Both kinds of furnaces need to be cleaned for the heating season.  When husband was still working I would remember to call the company which delivers our fuel oil (same as diesel) to run the furnace to come and do the annual cleaning of the system.  In the most recent years (even before the pandemic) I seem to keep putting it off until when I call they are all booked and we get it cleaned late.  So, it has not yet been cleaned this heating season and by the time it is – April – the heating season will be either mostly or completely over – unless they have a cancellation (or actually enough cancellations) as we are on the wait list.  I put a reminder in my computer calendar to remember to call them in June starting next year (though if they don't service it until April, I will just skip next year's cleaning.  

Husband has some tall sticks (made for this purpose) which he sticks in the ground around our two driveway entrances to mark where they are so he can see where the ramps are when there is snow and it has to be cleared.  Last year – a terrible year for snow with many storms of deep snows – he had forgotten to put them in the ground – before it froze.  They never did go in deep enough to stand up properly.  So for this year I made a notation in my calendar in early September to remind him to put them in the ground.  I have put back the date by 2 weeks 4 times now as the weather is far from cold enough for the stakes not to go into the ground or to have snow (at least no snow of any sizable amount).  

And now the big problem that causes me to post about my lack of preparing for winter.  Our humidifier.  Since the house is heated by hot air the air in the house gets extremely dry which is not good for me (nose bleeds from dry nose) and not good for the house or furniture.  In the past we had a humidifier in our furnace, well at least in it's outgoing vent, to deal with this.  But several years ago we changed oil companies and the new one told us that a humidifier in the furnace system is NOT a good thing as it helps rust it.  I should mention that our furnace is original to our house which was built in 1949 so, depending on when the former owners (there were several of them) had the furnace humidifier put in – it has worked well and not, apparently rusted.  

So now we only have a humidifier in our bedroom as nighttime while sleeping is the major problem – at other times we can just put out some water if we find the air too dry.  This humidifier only runs while we are going to sleep, sleeping, and waking up.  It needs to be refilled from the kitchen sink about once, maybe twice a week.  We had the sink spout setup with a piece on the end of it that allowed us to snap a hose on it to fill the tank of the humidifier.  It is not a huge tank, but it is not small either – I can lift it when full much easier than husband so it tended to be my job to do so.  At the end of last winter the end of the sink spout cracked – so, due to the pandemic – the sink has tape around the spout, which means we can no longer snap the hose on it.  

In addition there comes the problem which I am in the midst of dealing with and caused me to write about it.  Gunk builds up in the tank, the filter and the plastic holder of the filter from minerals in the water.  It is suppose to be cleaned on a regular basis during the heating season as well as at the end of the season.  Not something we do.  Normally I clean it once a year as the heating season starts and I remember it needs to be done.  To clean it a mixture of water and vinegar has to be put in the tank and swirled around – then it sits in same.  Then the tank is rinsed out several times and hopefully both the gunk and the smell of vinegar are gone.  The base also needs to soaked in the same manner (without the swirling).  The filter – a web of very easily breakable thin metal – also needs to be soaked in the same manner.  As I started to write this post I was going to tell you that I know we bought vinegar for this and something else (in another season) which needs to be similarly cleaned – but I have searched my kitchen pantry closet, as well as my work table in our studio which is being used during the pandemic to hold cans, bottles, cleaning supplies, and paper goods in excess of what we normally have so it does not all fit where it should.  I looked through everything several times – I then gave up and just put in water in hopes that it would it at least loosen the “gunk” I can see.

We are looking for a replacement unit that will be easier to deal with and clean since we can not refill it from the bathroom sink until we can replace the sink spout.  Of course this process of finding a new humidifier has just started – a bit late in the season.  Husband is looking online on his computer (upstairs in our office) and came down to ask what model our unit is – perhaps he can at least find a new filter for it.  I mentioned to him that I am just soaking it all in plain water and have put vinegar on the list to buy tomorrow (shopping run – especially for Thanksgiving items).  He reminded me (that is the polite to say what he did) that we had bought a half gallon of it.  OH!  That means it is on the floor of the pantry closet – did not think to look there as looking for a quart or so bottle!  There is was.  So I paused mid writing this post to redo the soaking of all the parts in a proper mixture of 1 gallon water to 1 cup of vinegar.  Hopefully this will get rid of the gunk – though I doubt it.  

THOUGHT OF THE WEEK -

Try to remember to get needed seasonal things done on time.  Holiday decorating we remember to do, but this sort of grunge stuff we don't want to do and forget it has to be done until the last minute.

Most thing such as this I have a reminder in my computer calendar – set to repeat for 5 or 10 years at time – so I don't forget, but as everyone else I tend to use the “snooze” on the reminder – and not for minutes or hours.

COVID 19 #28 FOOD SHOPPING

 Another week gone by  - and I am a day late, my apologies.  

We went on one of our Covid food shopping sprees yesterday.  The shopping took about 3 hours and then wiping down and storing the items another couple of hours when we got home.  We last went food shopping in mid January on a similar adventure.  We have been doing our food shopping trips to a Walmart Neighborhood Market.  The Walmart stores around here are much smaller than elsewhere and have only small food departments not the large supermarkets that Walmarts have in other area.  Walmart has among their other chains, one called Neighbor Market.  These stores are supermarkets and pharmacies and what is normally carried in stores such as this – not the big assortment of items carried in their regular stores.  This particular Neighborhood Market is their highest grossing in the US and has been turned into a “retail lab” to find out why – I could tell them why without all the work of making it someplace I really don't want to go, it is the only Walmart supermarket in the bi-county area! The Neighborhood Market is 2 miles along the road from the local regular Walmart near us (where we get our prescriptions) – so it is sort of an add on to the local regular Walmart.   We did fill in bread and some items once or twice between January and now at our local Walmart when we went to renew prescriptions or needed something right away.  

When we started doing these food runs last May (2020)we were not as organized as we thought and yesterday's trip was actually the most organized and relaxed of all our shopping trips since we started staying at home last March (2020).  I am guessing that I have written about our first trip – by the time we were done shopping husband felt so bad that he had to wait in the car for me while I checked out – we later figured out it was due to his blood sugar having fallen from the (negative) excitement, his panic, and the sheer amount of running around we had done.  

After our third shopping trip I figured out that what we needed to do was to make TWO shopping trips at the same time.  First we go into the store and buy all the items we need which do not have be kept cold – canned and jarred foods, boxed foods, bagged foods, cleaning supplies, OTC medications, soap if we need, any office supplies and such.  We then check out and bag all the items – we have to bring our bags or buy paper bags from the store due to a change in law which went into effect in the middle of the pandemic and the paper bags they have are small.  I bring A LOT of bags and pre double bag them.  We take the bags out to our car, in this case our van as our car is in for service for over a month as they cannot figure out what is wrong, and our van is better for this anyway as it holds a lot more.  We then locked the van and took our cart and more bags back into the store.  We then bought all of the cold items – refrigerated, meats, and frozen items and then checked out again.  We even remembered to use 2 coupons for several dollars each – sent to us by a manufacturer due to a problem with a product a few months ago.  By the time we were done we had 16 double bagged bags plus 2 (not really) “gallon” pails of ice cream.  Amazingly we were not exhausted and not yelling at either as we have been on these food runs in the past.  Two good is that I drink as little water as possible with lunch as I don't want to have to visit the ladies room in a store right now and – husband finally realized this – he has to eat enough for lunch before we go to have enough glucose in system for his blood sugar not to fall while we are out.  We also go around 2 pm so the stores have smaller crowds in them – people working, children coming home from school etc then – easier to move around and almost no line checking out – plus not as many people means more space between us and them right now.

When we come home we wipe down most items with alcohol on paper towel.  I say most items as some items are double packaged – such as dry cereal in a bag in a box or fruit bars which are individually packed in a box – with these items we open the outside packaging and dump out the inner packages instead of wiping down the outer package and toss the outer packages right away.  It is an exhausting process and I came up a way to make it a little less.  Since I don't have to worry about canned and jarred goods being out as they will not attract bugs or other vermin, I leave the cans and jars in their bags and set aside the bags until later in the evening.

This entire process took us about 5- 6 hours this week not including later wiping down and storing the cans/bottles.  But we won't need to food shop again, other than some fill ins for about 2 months.  Why do we do this?  Well, we don't want to go out more often than we need to.  Hopefully by the time we need to do a full shopping trip again – it will be safer for us to do so, especially as we should get our second vaccinations next week.  

THOUGHT OF THE WEEK -

How organized are your shopping trips, especially now?  Do you buy only items which are needed (to be honest we were doing that  before “stay at home” came into being and I did not like it)?   Do you plan ahead to make sure that you don't run out of things?  Do you make a list as you run low on food and related items so you will know what you need.  (Since we started doing these food runs I actually inventory everything we have and make a list in computer spreadsheet than sit with husband to decide what and how much we need to buy of items – also since stay at home, I sort the list by, more or less, which aisle in the store the items we need are in – and print out the list of what we need to buy and take it with us.)