Pit stop

Nothing like a little computer glitch to take me out of the game.  It isn't serious and I hope things get back to normal soon but getting along with a strange back-up computer, no matter how well it works, it still a bit disorientating.  Doing a blog post every day WILL turn a man into creature of habit and those habits are not especially easy to disrupt.

Our carbon-footprint-reducing house projects did not make a lot of progress this summer. My partner broke her arm this spring so was MIA for couple of months.  She is critical because she is the painter.  I have a bunch of relevant homeowner skills but painting is NOT one of them.  Then we decided to rescue windows that had been varnished instead of just painting them.  This involved a lot of tedious hand sanding, bleaching out black water stains, and sanding some more.  Of course, the side facing out still had to be painted so we were actually doing a two-toned finish job.  It was more like performing a careful restoration on a valued old piece of furniture than rebuilding some 55-year-old windows that had suffered from neglect and Minnesota winters.  We have been especially happy with 3M's line of green sandpaper and the low-gloss, low-volitile, water-based, clear, urethane version of spar varnish.  They look great but we will see if we really fixed the infiltration problems.  This obviously doesn't fix the problem of a poorly-performing weather envelope but it's a start.  And it's alright that we haven't rushed into the big insulation fixes because getting it right is more important that doing it now.

It is probably a good thing that I have had these distractions over the past few days because when I watch utter morons actually shut down the government because they can no longer win elections, I am reduced to sputtering rage.  Not good for the ticker, and not good for my writing.  I like to think of myself as a reasonable, rational man and the shutdown of a democratic government over a triviality like beginning to address much needed reforms of health-care delivery is not a rational or reasonable thing to do.  Besides, Charles Pierce has it covered better than me anyway.