DYI, and various levels of success

My dryer stopped working yesterday, about 5 minutes into the load. It was overheated, because the exhaust duct between it and the wall had somehow broken. I'm not sure when that happened, but from the looks of the duct tape and the lint stuck to it, the pipe had been broken for a while. I was envisioning having to pay somebody too much money to come out and fix it, and really didn't want to do that.

In frustration, I wedged myself behind the dryer and took the various parts of the exhaust duct apart. It turns out that the elbow joint had snapped at some point, so I went to the Mecca (AKA Home Depot) and bought a replacement part. It took some jimmying, and a flurry of F bombs, but I got the thing back together in one piece. $3.90 and an hour's worth of work? I'll take that over paying a repair man any day.

That may have been the end of my success.

I had myself a serious fit of giggles this morning. I'd finally finished painting the bedside table that I've been working on, and went to install the glass (fake crystal) drawer pull. It was so big against the little drawer, it looked like the whole table was going to topple over from the weight of it. I'm a big fan of all things sparkly, but this was ostentatious. I see now that I'm going to have to scale back.

I've got an aphid problem in my house. A friend of mine told me of a great way to get rid of them, where you soak a few cigarette butts in water, and then spray the plants with the water. Apparently, the nicotine kills them dead; so I decided to give it a shot. I asked a coworker who smokes for a few butts, and he came back a little later with 4.

I don't mean to trash smokers, but I can't believe the stench. In fact, I don't understand why I never noticed it on him. The 4 butts were wrapped in a paper towel, but the smell around my cubical was immediately overwhelming. I put them in the sandwich container from my lunch, but the smell was still there. When I left the area a little later, a friend told me that she could still smell them on me. When I came home, I had to throw my knapsack in the wash, and the sandwich container in the dishwasher. Even so, I could still smell smoke for hours.

Ultimately, I put the butts into a big container of water (about a gallon) and left that downstairs in the basement. After a few days, that water is the colour of weak tea. I suspect that it's ready to use on the plants now; but frankly, I'm not sure I'm prepared to spread that smell around. Right now I'm thinking that the aphids are preferable.

The kid who does my shovelling for me doesn't do a very good job. He's a 13 year old kid, so I'm not entirely surprised. However, for $50/month, I don't think that I'm unreasonable to want him to do a good job. I've gone over a few times and asked him to redo/fix his work, and hoped that he'd get the idea for what I expect. Not so much.

It has really warmed up over the last couple of days, and the snow is starting to melt. I thought I'd take advantage of it to go fix the sidewalks. He'd shovelled a path along the walk, but had left a foot on either side instead of shovelling from edge to edge. (The snow he'd left behind was 18" high and encrusted in ice.) He's also stopped about 6' short of the end of the sidewalk, before the alley. Cars had driven over that area, and left the snow packed down .

Considering how out of shape I am lately, fixing this was really hard work. I was out there for almost two hours, before I finally got it done. What really annoyed me was that his mom came out and was working in her yard. She saw me working, and never did anything.

I'm not a parent; but if I knew that somebody was having to work as hard as I was working to fix something that my child had been paid well to do, I'd be telling that kid to get their ass out there and help out. She did nothing. Even worse, for the last 15 minutes that I was working, the kid came out to wait for a ride from his friends. He watched me work - never said a thing - and made no effort to assist. I've already prepaid him for January, but I think I'm either going to do my own shovelling in February or hire somebody else.