Leverage

Every few years at FAR Manor, one of the A/C units begins a horribly loud rumbling. The first time this happened, the wife called an HVAC dude to see what was W0RnG!one… turned out a mouse had hopped into the squirrel cage and got centrifuged to death.

The same thing happened again, not two weeks ago. An adult mouse weighs maybe 2/3 ounce on average, and that tiny bit of weight in the A/C motor can shake the whole freeking manor! Talk about leverage…

We've run out of money, and the wife continued to complain about the noise, so I got Mason to come upstairs with me on Saturday afternoon as the gofer. I had hoped the A/C fan was horizontal, and would let me easily remove any obstruction or imbalance… but no. It's vertical. I had Mason fetch me a mirror, but realized I could use my phone (with flash on) to see what and where I needed to grope with my gloved hand.

Rubber gloves highly recommended

After a couple attempts, I removed the imbalance and dropped it into a garbage bag before putting everything back together. And lo and behold, no more shaking or rumbling.

Ew. Major ew. But dealing with the (increasingly infrequent, thank God) Charlie accidents is little better. I hope Mason is learning how to fix things on his own, too. He has grandiose ideas of how he and his friends are going to live in style, but any money you save on a service call is available for fun stuff.

EDIT: And you can dang well bet, I treated myself to a bowl of Extreme Moose Tracks after that. I deserved it.

New granddaughter!

 Check out G3, for lack of a better blog-name right now…

I haven’t seen her awake just yet.

Man, it's so hard to remember how tiny they are when they’re newborns. After hoisting Charlie all the time, she’s like a feather. But that won’t last long.

AJ is (so far) very much the Big Sister, and even a little territorial. Charlie thinks she’s fascinating, and gets excited when “the baby is coming to our house.”

By the by, my skin isn’t blotchy. There was sunlight coming in through the window to my right, and between it and the overheads the shadows got funky.