Not A Pool Post

For the first time in three years my "Honey Do" list is empty. Yesterday I replaced all the smoke detectors in the house. Which should have been a trivial task, except for they don't make the brand we had up with it's proprietary connector anymore. Which meant all of them needed to be rewired. Fun stuff. Here's where I add that I am insane and didn't bother to cut power while I was doing this. The trickiest part was the interconnection wire. That's the wire between all the smoke detectors that sets them all off if any one of them goes off. All I can figure is since I was putting up a different model other companies must not conform to a standard for that line (since when I removed the first one and connected one of the new ones they all started going off). So this meant disconnecting all the old ones and wiring them up without the interconnection wire, then going back and doing the interconnection wire last. This took longer than I expected though since evidently there was one in the garage I didn't know about and I was setting off all the other detectors because that was one was still on the grid. I should point out that only the new ones started going off when I would connect the wire, but the old ones were silent (luckily Ginger eventually pointed me to the location of the one I missed and everything was good after that).

Now while the Honey Do list is "officially" empty, I know for a fact there are a couple more things on the list that haven't formally made the list yet. One is to replace a weather strip type deal on the bottom of a door to the deck. Another is to finish weeding out that area where I got the poison ivy a couple weekends ago. I'm thinking I can do the first one at some point, but the latter is going to take a while before I feel confident enough to do it (and it's not like I can wait until winter since the poison ivy seems just as bad if not worse when it's 'dead').

One other non official item on the list was a new computer for Ginger. Even though her computer stopped rebooting for a while after the last time I took it apart and put it back together, it's been slowing getting back into the mode where it reboots constantly. So today I decided to just yank out everything and put it into a new case, because I'm still convinced it's a short somewhere or potentially one specific piece of hardware (since it used to always happen when using Firefox I suspect it may be the wireless network card, that'll be the next thing to go if this plan doesn't work). On the positive side for the first time in a long time Ginger's computer case is all together and doesn't have part of the side missing where you can see the inner workings of the computer. Once it was up and running in a new case, we managed to go for a full day without a reboot, but she still wants a new monitor and is looking at some type of flat screen. We just need to find something semi compatible for with the POS video card she currently has (I think it's an old ATI All-In-Wonder card, and I mean a really old one).

Speaking of Ginger, she spent a lot of time today moving stuff around. I've gotten somewhat used to this. It happens a couple times a year where she'll just decide she doesn't like the way things are laid out in the house and suddenly everything needs to be rearranged. Today we moved her computer desk (but not the computer) into the guest room so that she would have more room in there for her stamping / scrapbook stuff. This meant moving another table from downstairs up to the bedroom office area to hold the computer. And we ended up rearranging stuff in one of storage closets also. The positive side to all this is that she apparently intends on using all that stamping stuff she's bought.


Today was the last day our neighborhood pool was open and we didn't go. I tried to get the kids to go, but they didn't want to. All Quinn wanted to do was go back to the park and play tennis. So I took him while Ginger and Catherine stayed home in the nice cool air conditioning. When we got there Quinn ended up finding two balls outside the courts and you would have thought this was just the best thing that ever happened. No one was there when we got there, so it's not like anyone was coming back for them (he says in a half hearted attempt to justify taking them).


Playing tennis with Quinn involves a lot of him hitting the ball wildly and you chasing his shots. I was able to get to most of them and hit them back, but we both ended up getting pretty hot. Quinn must react to heat a lot worse than me and more like Ginger, because he was completely red after only about thirty or forty minutes of playing (and it was only in the 80s today, so it was pretty mild considering some of the temperatures we've had recently). After we played some we ran by Target and picked up a real tennis racquet for Quinn (he had previously been using one of my older racquetball racquets). To say he was thrilled about this would be an understatement.


This of course meant that we had to play some more tennis in the driveway once we got home. While we were at the park a guy showed up while we were playing to practice on a half court wall deal, so at home Quinn would hit balls against the garage door emulating that. Not sure how long that activity will last before Ginger puts the kibosh on that (probably right up until he hits one of the lamps or something is my guess).