Saturday, January 24, 2009

No privacy



In case anyone wondered what it's like to take a bath with a houseful of foster kitties...

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Expedition



Honey, I got the mail!

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Bigs and littles

The event of the day was a home energy audit, one of the services provided by the gas company where a guy with ever so many more handyman skills than have you comes to visit your house with an infrared camera to show you where all the air leaks and other heating inefficiencies in your house are and glibly describes 40 different ways to fix each one.

Most interestingly, I discovered that when the temperature is 18 below 0 all you need to do is walk around the house with your hand out to identify all the same sources of heat loss.

No, really, this was a useful thing to have done, and I learned a lot. Probably the most important things were that the biggest source of heat loss in my house are all of the cannister lights (20? 30? 40?), and that I really need to clean the metal filters in my electrostatic furnace filtering system more often than, say, every year or two.

After we brought the house back up to a comfortable temperature (part of the process involved sucking all of the warm air out of the house with a blower fitted into the front door), I turned the furnace off again so that I could clean the filters. They looked like dryer lint catchers, no lie. Unfortunately, I forgot to take photo documentation, so you'll have to take my word for it. They have been delinted and are in the dishwasher now. Hopefully they will be dry before it hits 30 below tonight.

While the house is cooling off, the "Beaches" are popular with the resident catlets. I thought this tableau was striking enough to cause me to break my temporary vow of blogging silence.

Here we have a big stripey and tuxedo on one side of the bathroom sink:



And little stripey and tuxedo on the other:



Adorable.

Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Ennui

Blogging is temporarily suspended. BTW, I put the Christmas tree away yesterday, when finally someone managed to knock it to the floor. Bleak, interminable midwestern winter ensues.