|
|
|
Bittorrent Jeopardy! and Indian food
Saturday, April 18 2020
There was an inch or two of snow on roofs and deck railings this morning, though it hadn't managed to accumulate nearly as much on ground surfaces. Gretchen's leg (or some related muscle) was causing her pain again today, so after Saturday morning coffee, I took the dogs for a walk. As usual, I brought my camera and manage to take a picture of a woodthrush, an indicator of unfragmented forest.
Gretchen has been leading the effort of getting us a replacement anode for our new heat-pump-powered hot water heater, which recently started producing water that stinks of sulfur (likely due to its magnesium anode). Finding a replacement was made somewhat difficult by specs given to us by the company that had installed it. They claimed the replacement would need to have a diameter of 0.625 inches, but all the anodes we could find (including the aluminum-zinc anodes preferred for fixing our sulfur problem) were designed to screw into a hole measuring 3/4 inches. Did our particular model of water heater (a Ruud Prouh50 Ultra RU350 DCB) take an unusual size of anode? I tried removing the top quarter or so of the tank housing, which holds the heat-pump part of it, but it was too heavy or fastened with unseen screws. Further Googling led me to a page that suggested I just just remove the half-inch-deep top plate, which would give me access to a void where the anode nut could be seen. I did this and successfully found the nut, which looked to be a standard 1 1/16 anode nut, though it was difficult to get any of my sockets (and I have sizes in that range in both metric and standard) to fit on it, partly due to a plastic housing. The thread I just linked to suggests cutting part of that housing away with a Dremel, but I may not have to. In any case, we decided that our tank takes a standard anode, so Gretchen ordered one online. She was in the middle of an ordering jihad, also ordering a bunch of things from Target for the gentleman who will soon be living in our basement when he gets out of prison. I joked today that her preparations for his arrival remind me of the things an expectant mother would be doing. Gretchen asked if there was anything I needed, and I quickly thought of something: pajama bottoms. When working from home during an extended pandemic, they're the only kind of pants one needs.
The persistent cold meant that we were once again down to nearly the last of our indoor firewood supply, though Gretchen had a number of books to burn. So I processed a mid-sized log I'd managed to drag from across the Farm Road a couple weeks ago, giving us a few more days' worth of wood. This late in the season, we shouldn't really be burning much wood at all.
For "date night," Gretchen ordered carry-out dinner from the Mountain Gate Indian restaurant in Woodstock. She only ordered two curries: a chana shaag and a vegetable vindaloo. But she ordered six units of mulligatawny soup, since they were only $3 each, and that was the only thing she was really craving. Gretchen was desperate for alone-time, so she sent me to pick up the food (though I did bring the dogs). I had a neck warmer that to wear when out in public, though the only human I got near was the young fully-Americanized Indian woman who brought out my food (she wasn't wearing any sort of face covering).
I'd finally managed to download the two most recent episodes of Jeopardy! using Bittorrent (thanks to cptnkirk, the only one who uploads these religiously), so we had that to watch while we ate our food. This was the first non-shelf-stable Indian food we had eaten since actually being in India, three and a half months ago.
Today's woodthrush, in the swampy forest just west of the Farm Road about 2/3 of the way from Dug Hill Road.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?200418 feedback
previous | next |
