Archive for category Family

Duct Cleaning — A Cautionary Tale

Jun 4

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | 1 Comment

Unless you like trying to get your duct cleaning company to pay for a blown furnace circuit board, make sure you keep your condensate line clear and check it often after you get your ducts cleaned.

We had our ducts cleaned at the end of April, which they do by cutting holes in the ducts near the plenum chamber and running a vacuum to pull everything from the vents back to those access ports. What they are supposed to do is to put an inflatable pillow behind the access port so dust and debris doesn’t get pulled back into the chamber and settle on the A-coil.

Well, these guys didn’t do that. We had about a month of cool weather following the cleaning where we didn’t need to run the air conditioner, so it just sat there until the first hot day. In the morning, the air was blowing nice and cold, but by afternoon it was just blowing warm air through the ducts. When I got a service technician in, he noticed a thick slurry of dust and debris plugging the condensate line. The water had overflowed and dripped throughout the furnace, shorting out the control board and leaving a nice big black scorch mark.

It was a $600 repair, and the duct cleaning itself was around $650. I’m currently working with the duct cleaning company to get reimbursed for the repair — I don’t think they’re going to see much profit out of this particular job.

Tags: Basement, House

Thomas’s Birthday Party

Jun 2

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

Two weekends ago we had Thomas’s ninth birthday party. We recently joined the new Lifetime Fitness here in town, and they have a party package, so we decided to give them a shot. Although the kids had fun, I’m not sure I’d do this again. We got the use of an aerobics room to eat pizza and cake, which was fun — the kids ran around and played in the big open spaces and had a good time. After that they all went out to the pool.

That’s a story in itself: when Robin had set up the party originally, they had said that the outdoor pool would be open the weekend of the 29th. The party was the weekend of the 22nd. So you’d assume we’d be in the indoor pool. When we got there, everyone was outside and we were informed that there was no choice; the party would have to be outside. They did scrounge up some sunscreen, since no one had brought any. Unfortunately, it was not waterproof or water-resistant, so we ended up having to go get our own from the car.

I supervised Katherine most of the time while the other kids all swam around in groups and played. We had a bit of an issue when we couldn’t remember how many of Thomas’s school friends actually showed up for the party; Robin thought there had been only four, and I only remembered three. We could only locate three in the pool. To resolve the issue, we wanted to get the release forms from the party, but the three staff kids (and I do mean kids; they had to be just 15 or 16 years old) had not been thorough about getting the forms signed, so that wasn’t conclusive. They also hadn’t been paying much attention during the party, being much more concerned with flirting and talking amongst themselves. Anything we wanted to have done we had to push them into doing, and they spent no time actually playing with or leading activities for the kids despite the fact that their presence was required for the duration of the party.

We left with a pretty negative impression of the Lifetime Fitness party setup; I think next year we’ll go back to the Matt Ross community center or try another set of activities.

On the plus side — as I said, all the kids had fun and we got some great pictures. Here they are!

Tags: Birthday, Thomas

(Short) Hiatus

May 28

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

Sorry for the lack of updates this week. We’re leaving town for Memorial Day, so I probably won’t post again until next Wednesday. I actually have quite a lot to report, including Thomas’ birthday to our air conditioner woes and Katherine’s adventures in “cooking”, but I need to get the pictures downloaded first, and get my life back under control.

Have a good weekend!

Tags: Holiday, Meta

Racquetball Results

May 24

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

The Corporate Challenge racquetball tournament was fun, but went down pretty much as I expected. I had a great first match, defeating my opponent 15-2, 15-5 and pretty much controlling the pace of the play.

The second match, against the doubles champion I mentioned below, didn’t go so well. He annihilated me in the first game 15-0 with a level of power and accuracy I’ve simply never faced before. He hit one backhand passing shot that I could theoretically have gotten to, but by the time I could get my racquet around on it the ball was already past me. I’ve never faced someone who could shoot faster than I could react — reaction time is kind of my thing in racquetball. Not against this guy.

I don’t know if it was fatigue or charity — probably a little of both — but I did manage to score 5 points against him in our second game. I suspect that if he had gone full out he’d have held me scoreless in both games — he was that good.

I had my folks down for the weekend as it was Thomas’s birthday, so my folks and Robin and Thomas got to watch me play. Thomas was pretty pumped afterwards and wanted to hit the ball around some, so we did. He’s got good natural talent; it didn’t take long for him to be hitting the ball pretty reliably with the racquet. We’ll have to see about getting him some lessons at some point.

Anyway, it was fun and very educational. Mainly what I learned is that I need to step up my playing a lot if I want to get to a point where I can even make this guy break a sweat against me. Maybe when I get 100% confident in my knee again I’ll try to sign up for another league.

Tags: Racquetball

Qualified!

May 19

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | 2 Comments

I won my match against Stan, so I will be competing in the Corporate Challenge racquetball tournament for the first time in at least 3 years. I’m looking forward to it, despite the fact that the opponent I’ll face in the second round (if I get that far) is a former national doubles champion and plays singles at the nationally-competitive level as well.

So unless he shows up injured, or drunk, or (hopefully) both, or he’s been fired or is out of town the day of the tournament, I’m not likely to last beyond the second round. But I am looking forward to playing against someone at that level of skill. It should be very educational! Probably humbling, too, but certainly educational!

Tags: Racquetball

Who Moved Robin’s Cheese?

May 17

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Family, Humor | 3 Comments

The upgrade to Windows 7 has been mostly straightforward, but while getting rained on at Thomas’s soccer game on Saturday I got a text message from Robin:

I HATE THIS NEW OPERATING SYSTEM!

It seems that in the process of installing Windows 7 and reinstalling iTunes that her music files got moved around to various unintuitive locations. While I feel that iTunes and, frankly, myself deserve as big a share of the ire as Windows 7, it was Windows’s overintelligent search algorithm that actually drove Robin off the edge.

She was trying to set up a Gmail account for Thomas, not realizing that he was too young to qualify. After attempting and failing to set up the account, she found herself locked out of several pieces of Google functionality, so she thought Google had dumped a cookie on our machine that was blocking functionality. She tried to search for “cookie” on the Start Menu search field, and although it searched within Outlook for every cookie recipe email we’d ever received, and gave her an option to clear all cookies, it didn’t actually show her any individual cookies. It took me about 5 minutes of trolling through 3rd level menus in IE8 to finally locate them and confirm that there wasn’t a rogue cookie.

I’m firmly of the opinion that Windows 7 is the best O/S Microsoft has come out with, and I think it’s great, but I think I’ve got some work to do yet to clean up and relocate some files before Robin gets truly comfortable with it.

Tags: Computer, Robin

Spinning Up on Racquetball

May 12

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | 2 Comments

I’m back on my feet, my knee is getting better all the time, and it’s Corporate Challenge time! I’m not sure where last year’s representative Scott went this year; I was expecting to have to face him again. Instead I am playing a couple of guys I’m less familiar with.

I had my first match today. The guy I played, Brett, was a very good player. He’s a lefty, with a very powerful forehand smash and a pretty good backhand. As long as I drove hard for the balls and remembered to shoot to my forehand (which is far from natural for me) I had good success. When I tried to play my standard game, shooting down the left side, he’d put shots away with regularity.

I beat him in straight sets, but he was a great sport and we had a good time discussing our strengths and weaknesses after the game. It’s fun to play someone with a radically different style than you’re used to, and since I basically only play one guy anymore, everyone has a radically different style than I’m used to.

Next up is Stan, and if I beat him I get to play in the actual Corporate Challenge tournament for the first time in at least 4 years.

Tags: Racquetball

Baby Katherine

May 10

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

It’s not a secret that Katherine is jealous of baby Jonathan. She certainly makes no attempt to hide it. In the first days after he came home she would make an extremely obnoxious noise when he was nearby, and was prone to telling us “Down baby! Down baby!” when we carried him. There’s still quite a bit of direct jealousy, but currently her preferred expression is to try to emulate him. Well, either that or to say “No baby cry!” when he’s being fussy.

She started her emulation process by trying to climb into his high chair, which didn’t work particularly well. She then moved on to his Boppy seat, which she can just barely wedge herself into. She also spends a lot of time in the rocking chair in his room, which is where Robin nurses Jonathan. Lately she’s been trying to swing in his motorized swing. It has a weight limit of 25 lbs. — she’s 45. She’s now also developed a fake “baby cry” that she uses when she’s playing sometimes.

Yesterday she tried jamming herself into Jonathan’s rear-facing infant seat. She was able to do it — by squeezing her knees up to her head. Robin took the opportunity to fuss over “baby Katherine” and put Jonathan in the booster seat, which greatly amused Katherine.

I’m just concerned that we’re going to find her lying in his crib, or trying to put on one of his diapers one of these days.

Tags: Jonathan, Katherine

Lost Domain

May 8

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Family | No Comments

Due to a SNAFU with Namecheap, I lost my domain for a day. Combined with a power outage due to a storm here, we were left with no webpage, and when I got the computer back up, still no webpage and no mail forwarding. So I quickly re-upped the registration and got everything set up, but I had lost the post I’d sent to my email account. I should be able to retrieve it tomorrow.