New wood stove, long awaited, Installation!
Rock N’ Ponderosa {aka Nancy’s Place} launches
Tuesday, Oct 13
For Oct 12 CPAP. Reported figures. 6 hrs 19 min with AHI=1.27 Events: 8 H, 6 RERA. No major mask leaks (max=19 L/min); no oximeter.
Today was an exciting and long day. It started late yesterday with a phone call from the installer of our new stove. He was checking to be sure he had everything needed – and to ask to come early so he could finish and get back to see his girl (6th grader) participate in track and field. I had to leave at 8:20 in the morning but I did get to see the arrival – greeted by Annie and John at the back of the house. My 2 photos from early Tuesday:
John took the next 3:
First the stove, still in its protective cradle, sits on the dropped tailgate of the trailer.
The next is picture is of the “Stair Climbing Hand Truck.” The wheels slide up and down and allow an easy movement up and down steps. In our case there was the move from the lawn to the concrete patio, and then from there up and into the house. This machine makes the difficult, easy.
The next photo shows the stove within the stone-tile lined alcove.
He had already rebuilt the “support box” – that is just above the ceiling and firmly attached within the attic trusses. This box protects the ceiling and anchors the insulated and triple wall pipe (through the roof). Black pipe – from the stove – will go into the support box from below. From the web, here is what the support box looks like in new construction. The 4 red stars show the wood supports that need to be added, and to which the black metal is anchored. The set-up built when the house was constructed was not the correct size. Those four pieces had to be removed and reset with the new dimensions. He managed to do this while standing on a ladder and working though the existing hole in the ceiling (drywall). We never had to enter the attic, although we did have to go onto the roof to add the new pipe, collar, and cap.
When we fire the stove up in a week or so, we’ll show the ash drawer, fans, and other stuff. Oh, and flames. It has a glass front. We are curious about this, so will investigate.
Back to Nancy’s day: I took my laptop to town because I’m having trouble with (I think) a worn USB port. One has to take the computer to the store so as to enter the queue. Then it takes its turn, but mostly waits on a bench. It was not ready until evening, so I got it at 6:00 p.m. [on my way to play music at Hearthstone, with The Connections]. The computer crew also fixed a few other things that made it run better. Cost: $43.
Back to morning. I took a large container of chocolate chip cookies I made last night to the retired geographers meeting starting at 9:00 a.m. We had a guest speaker, Jim Pappas, on his month in Greece. Mostly, he was living with relatives in Athens, walking around the city, driving to other places with a nephew, and going on a ferry around many of the nearby islands. It was an interesting discussion for an hour. I left at 10:30 for my drive to a doctor’s appointment in Yakima. John was home assisting with the stove installation. I made it to my appointment and was called in rapidly, but then had to wait 1/2 hr for the doctor to come do the 12 minute (or less) laser treatment on my right foot’s toenails. From there I went to Costco. Gas was ONLY $2.15, and it is $2.34 for the lowest in Ellensburg. Most station are $2.52. The price of oil is going down. What’s up? (I think our cost in Ellensburg is excessively out of line for the region!) Our towns are less than 40 miles apart. [John says: It’s complicated and involves geography and politics.]
I was driving John’s Subaru and not my own, and with the road noise and radio reception not that great, I listened to Trisha Yearwood’s CD all the way down and back. I missed having the Satellite radio (Sirius XM) in my rig. His car needed more gasoline than mine, so that’s why I drove it, and got just a little over 10 gallons, so that was a decent savings. Picked up a few things at Costco, and decided to use a $10 gift card (won at the senior center bingo, I think) at The Olive Garden … nothing (that I wanted) can you get that cheaply for lunch, so I had an appetizer of mushrooms stuffed with seafood. The mushrooms came with very nice bread-sticks, which John and I shared with the leftover mushrooms the next evening for dinner. He fixed up the bread-sticks with butter and Parmesan cheese after halving them. Still the total was $9.19. Wow. I will not go there again; not if I’m paying. I think it has been 20 years since I ate at one. They are celebrating their 25th anniversary this year. Home by way of Super One for my pharmacy needs, and a call to the computer guys alerted me it was not ready to pick up. I went on home, arriving about 4:00 p.m. but just rested and turned around and went back to town for playing music. On my way, I grabbed a dozen marked-down fancy donuts after I stopped and picked up my computer.
Wednesday, Oct 14
For Oct 13 CPAP. Reported figures. 7 hrs 5 min with AHI=1.13 Events: 8 H, 5 CSR, 12 RERA. No major mask leaks (max=10 L/min); no oximeter.
Did a few last minute things on the computer before I set it to do its chkdsk. It actually had been started yesterday evening by the computer guys who fixed my USB port and ran other disk verification routines. I only needed to initiate it by doing a restart on my system. Chkdsk was set to clean up my disk storage. I started the program as I left at 11:00 am today. It ran until 5:00 p.m. In case you are wondering what this is, I have Windows 7 as the operating system on my laptop, and it includes a disk-checking tool called CHKDSK, which is similar to the “scandisk” tool from older versions of Windows. This application scans hard drives for errors such as lost sectors, bad sectors, and corruption – then isolates them. One result is that it speeds up the computer processing time. For the record, its performance has changed, noticeably.
I went to the Food Bank for music, and carried 25 pounds of Honeycrisp apples for dispersal at the Food Bank to those in need. I also carried another box to the senior center. I participated in the SAIL exercise class, and members of my class took most of the box of apples. Then went by my friend’s house to clean up her cat’s litter box and get her mail. On home to take care of things and rest, because I was hurting from all the recent activity of cleaning up the den.
Before I left, I wrote our provider for the computer disk space for the blog and for our web pages. We mentioned previously in the blog the need for changing our domain from ellensburg.com and from ccsoe.com. Today that change happened.
The blog is accessible simply by typing in
rocknponderosa.com
No longer will people have to login with a username and password.
Our web pages will be hosted on the same domain – but with a longer address for each. Anything from the past will be there, such as this from 2013,
http://rocknponderosa.com/nancyh/SilverFrost2013.html
Late afternoon we had a nice long telephone conversation with John’s sister Peggy in Ohio, and Pat, 1st cousin once removed***(see below), and her hubby, Ken, who were visiting from PA for a couple of days. I should have called Pat’s mom, Ethel, on my minutes that restart the 18th of every month on my landline allowing me 120 minutes, but we were too swamped on the next 3 days to get together by the phone. John did not come in until after dark, and that is too late to call back to PA.
That chart is from here:
http://www.irish-genealogy-toolkit.com/family-history-chart.html
Thursday, Oct 15
For Oct 14 CPAP. Reported figures. 3 hrs 57 min with AHI=7-35 Events: 27 H, 4 CSR, 2 OA, only 2 RERA. No major mask leaks (max=15 L/min); no oximeter.
I don’t know what is going on. I need to see if I can get my Oximeter working again now that my USB port was fixed yesterday. I thought it was the connector cord, but perhaps it was not.
Today was music at Dry Creek/Brookdale assisted living home with only 4 guitars, one singer, and me on fiddle. We did all right, and had an appreciative audience. We received many walk-up thank-yous from the audience, and also got many comments upon leaving, from residents already out in the vestibule. Receiving their thanks makes it worth the effort. One woman said, you give us something to look forward to each month and it is such a nice change of pace.
Friday, Oct 16
For Oct 15 CPAP. Reported figures.8 hrs 12 min with AHI=0.24 Events: 2 H, 20 RERA. No major mask leaks (max=18 L/min); no oximeter. Surely makes one wonder the extreme difference from yesterday, even though I was having trouble with my mask and finally took it off after 4 hrs.
Finally, I cut John’s hair this morning. Long in coming, and only took 20 minutes. A bolt fell out of the stool and a connector cracked. I think his clean up of the kitchen and repairing the barber-stool took longer.
I have done a few easy chores, but I sat most of the day. I was somewhat wiped out I guess from the frenzied cleaning before Tuesday morning, then a long full three days after.
This morning, John managed to figure how to put photos and text onto our new domain for the blog. It will be accessible, as mentioned before, via rocknponderosa.com
We are going to make a sign for the entrance gate with Rock N’ Ponderosa either incised into a log or as raised letters on a big plank. We’ll pass on the fancy laser cut “metal art” name with scenery – See this – unless people send lots of money.
Now my chore is to figure how to do a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) of HyperText Markup Language (html) files up to the domain so I can send links and information there. I failed on my chore on my first attempt Friday. Unfortunately, the name and password for the new domain I do not know, and I have to have that to create the pass though of the files.
[John says: What?]
Here is an example of one web page that used to be on ellensburg.com [such as all our Greetings (annual) are for several years, skipping some]. This is one for 2014 that only a few of you have heard about. I was waiting to notify people when our location domain changed. This is for the year of 2014 annual greetings.
http://rocknponderosa.com/nancyh/2014Greetings.html
We skipped 2013, so don’t look for it. There are ones for 2012, 2011, and 2010, however. Until Nov 1, 2015 all our old ellensburg.com, or our old blog entry will work, but then it’s toast. That means I have to notify everyone of the change. Although anyone going there today will find John’s TEST of the new link from the old. It seems to work for the limited experiment we can do here at home. Seems best, then, just to leave the page there as is to forward people to the new until the end of October.
John cleaned some in the big old shed (a real mess after the squirrels loaded the insulation with walnuts, and all came tumbling down) and came up with a couple of wood-framed antique maps. We have no memory of getting these. Must mean we have too much stuff. I imagine I picked them up at a yard sale, but normally my memory is good. Right now, neither of us has a clue.
His computer just crashed while he was working on a document. It will not restart. That means we are out of luck and any work on the blog until the middle of next week – or maybe not.
We shall now have a late dinner of a pot roast John made today.
Saturday, Oct 17
For Oct 16 CPAP. Reported figures. 7 hrs 39 min with AHI=1.44 Events: 11 H, 4 CSR, 10 RERA. No major mask leaks (max=20 L/min); no oximeter.
Early morning we went grocery shopping and to deliver a giraffe horse (stuffed door draft remover) to a family in town. Try this in an images search – drafty door blocker stuffed – . The receiver is a non-traditional student, majoring in Geography at CWU, with 3 kids, one a running start student. The item was too cute to be kept in our dirty house (we used an old shirt), and we are planning to replace the door so it will not have the space at the bottom, allowing the influx of air.
Besides going to 3 different grocery stores, we stopped at Bi-Mart for bolts. John’s making a cart (photo next week) to carry the Pella Patio Door on from the car-park shed to out in the rear to enter where the wood stove was brought in. I have been trying to locate some manpower to help him.
After thinking his computer was toast, he turned it on tonight and it came up. We do not have a clue what happened. He tried the same thing, including unplugging from the wall, yesterday with no luck. Just a blank screen. He had not tried it in 24 hours. He wondered about it running hot because of dust. Before turning it on he vacuumed the dust from the air vents but still needs to open it up and blow the dust and moths out. Once started he deleted 2 programs that came with a copy of ‘WinSCP Setup’ I had asked him to put on his computer. A third one he kept. He thinks there are too many things changing all the time (multiple automatic downloads and so on) to pinpoint the cause of a glitch. So, move on.
I left at 12:55 for town for several drop-offs. To one person I took a box of National Geographics and a selection of science-type magazines. They are to be used in a Discovery group for youngsters to teach science. On my way to play music, I stopped to take care of things at Rosewood for a friend who is traveling out of state. Once at Briarwood Commons Retirement facility, I carried in my stuff and an Easter basket full of Honeycrisp apples for the table.
For the entertainment before eating, we had 4 guitarist and me, on fiddle. One of our members brought his son (guitarist who played with us), and his wife, a singer. After our 23 songs for the group, the couple sang two beautiful songs. The audience was thrilled. The residents had fixed a great green pea soup with carrots and ham. It was not as thick as often such soups are. They had also fixed two types of sandwiches and many desserts for us. I did not need to eat any supper tonight. They said leave the apples but take the basket home. Darn.
I had to stop and pick up some stuff we forgot this morning and some ice cream because we had not taken a cooler with us. On my way home, I dropped off another box of materials to a former geography colleague that she can use in teaching her classes. It was a couple of years of Aramco Worlds, a very nice publication.
Tonight I received on Facebook the fantastic news from CA that our co-owned Brittany’s mom, Ginny, won a 5-point major in an Open Gun Dog event at the S. San Joaquin Valley Brittany Club field trial. An impressive win! with 26 dogs entered. That’s half the points required for a Field Championship (FC), and she already had 2, so needs only 3 for her FC. Earlier, I received photos from Jeri Conklin, of our Brittany, Daisy, who is training to be a gun dog and doing quite well on her education required for holding & retrieving, and from Karen Barrows in Oregon with a first placement on her T’Quila–who has our Brittany lines behind both sides of her pedigree. So, we consider her one of ours.
Left is Ginny with her blue, Daisy on whoa, watching bird fly, then the retrieve, and right is Karen Barrows stacking T’Quila beside 3 of her recent ribbon placements. Blue are 1st place (with field points) & gold (bronze) is 3rd. (2nd is red & 4th is white)
It started raining ever so little about 10 PM.
Sunday, Oct 18
For Oct 17 CPAP. Reported figures. 8 hrs 1 min with AHI=1.62 Events: 13 H, 4 CSR, 14 RERA. No major mask leaks (max=15 L/min); no oximeter.
We slept in until after 8:00 a.m., and it is either still or again raining. John took Annie our for about ½ hour, fed hay to the horses, and puttered about some. The NWS (Nat’l Weather Service) thought the rain would go away, then changed their mind. Now at about 3:30, we have cool temperatures, clouds, drips off of things, but no rain. The wind is shifting from out of the NW to more just west where there is dry air. That might not get here until Monday night or Tuesday.
Hope your week was fine.
Nancy and John
Still on the Naneum Fan