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Hey Zanni, if you live in one of the six southern parishes. call 1 888 blu roof and they will tarp your roof.
 
My house roof is fine. The shed for the well pump has some holes. I need to replace the she's anyway. At my friends house now waiting on a package delivery.
 
Got up early & cleared out ruined stuff from the freezer. Scrubbed the freezer inside & out. Figured out how to remove & put back shelves, got stuff I missed last time I cleaned in a rush when it was hot. Also finished cleaning out the fridge (mostly). I still need to rinse out the icemaker cutter thingy. I couldn't wipe it out like the rest of the stuff bc I need to spray it with water. Need to soak the tray that goes under it as well.
They put up a new pole this morning & we got home this evening (went to hang out with friends & eat). Power is now back on but landline is still out.

One of the places we went to grab take-out from, I kvetched about losing everything in my fridge & the smiling clerk told me she lost her entire house bc it was in one of the lower areas where it flooded. There I was worrying about losing some food & she's homeless. Homeless & still going to work & acting like nothing is wrong. I felt awful for her. So many people lost their homes. A few years back we had the worst flood in 20 years. I was here for both floods & they sucked, but this flood was worse than both of them. The water still hasn't receded around the river & houses are still underwater.

My late friend's house flooded as well.

I'm trying to plan out how to fix the wiring up for my pump shed. I couldn't quite trace the source of the power. I saw an outlet & light in the generator shed & a cable going out the back of the shed. I followed it & it wrapped around the side of the shed & looped back to the junction box I replaced. One cable went in but two came out. First one went to a GFCI outlet on the lean-to & then to a light. Second one goes into the pump shed to a non GFCI outlet. I'm trying to remember the order, but I think the cable for the float switch comes out of the adjacent junction box that is inches away from the outlet box. I think the purpose of the outlet box is to have more room for the wires as the ones for the pump are larger gauge. From the box a cable goes to the float switch and two separate cables go out from there to the piston pump and the jet pump (it's possible one orange cable goes directly to the jet pump from box but I have to go look in the daylight). From the inside junction box, a cable runs a few feet to another non-GFCI outlet. There are all sorts of defunct cables that are no longer connected & it's an ugly mess in there.

I want to streamline it and make sure I have the right sort of cable for a wet environment, right gauge, & streamline it so I don't have so many junctions. I also want to replace the two outlets with GFCI. I think it's just a good idea to have semi-outdoor ones in a wet area be GFCI.

I forgot to take a picture of the junction box I replaced, but I have the GFCI outlet that it links to as well as the lamp.
pumpshedelectric1.jpg
Then inside there's the outlet & another box gray cable is one going in from the outside. Yellow goes to junction box. Orange comes out of junction box to switch and the jet pump as far as I can tell. Black tape is the T-Rex tape I used to patch the roof.
pumpshedelectric2.jpg
pumpshedelectric3.jpg
 
There's a lot of stuff in there that is no longer in use but it never got removed. I want to turn off the breaker & pull out all the older stuff so it's no longer in the way & causing confusion about what goes where.
Power went out again around noon but came back on a little over an hour later.
My body aches from cleaning yesterday (and sitting on a hard cooler to reach into the fridge/freezer). My bronchial tubes feel like garbage from breathing the damp air from before the power was back on.
I want to curl up and sleep but my brain isn't letting me rest. I know I need to go get more groceries but I'm worried about more outages. I think it was a maintenance outage bc I was told the entire town to the south of us lost power too.
Tomorrow I hope to get up early so I can go vote (early voting starts tat 8am). I'm hoping there won't be a lot of people there.
I'm going to have to use the internet to call in a repair order from AT&T bc landline is still out. With as much as they are charging for it, I should get $ back for it being out. They need to improve their system so it doesn't go out when the water gets high in some areas bc it happens constantly.
I need to figure out what gauge wire is in that shed. I know we have one piece of 8/2 w/ ground to go to the piston pump but I think the rest is either 10 or 12. I suppose I could figure it out with a wire stripper... The good news is, my connection in the junction box seems ok so we might not need to take it apart & trim stuff up.
Should I replace the blue boxes with waterproof outdoor rated ones or is it not worth the expense?
 
I noticed water at the bottom of the frig for several day now. I would take a towel and soak it up. but now i realized something is wrong. I suspect that the drainage line from the evaporator is blocked with ice. So i used my wife's hair dryer and warmed it up. I also went down to the bottom of the frig where there is an evaporation pan. which i cleaned. when i was down there i noticed all of this black dust bunnies. so i went and got my shop vac and sucked all that i could see. My shop vac is a good rigid one with suction and blow. so i said lets see what happens if i put it on blow. Incredible all this black duct bunnies can out. I mean like two gallons worth . Give this a try at your house but be ready for a lot of dirt and duct.
 
I think I could probably get a large human-sized pile if I collected up all the dust bunnies in my house.
 
@Rusty My governor just posted a link & mention of the Blue Roof thing & told people how much time they had to call in to get their roofs tarped.
The good news is, while my bro & I were at the grocery store Mom called to say that the storm turned east & won't be hitting us now. I hope it doesn't change again. This changed our shopping plans so we got more cold stuff.

Btw, has anyone heard from Gary? It's been a long time since he's posted & I'm still worried about him & his wife.
 
@Rusty My governor just posted a link & mention of the Blue Roof thing & told people how much time they had to call in to get their roofs tarped.
The good news is, while my bro & I were at the grocery store Mom called to say that the storm turned east & won't be hitting us now. I hope it doesn't change again. This changed our shopping plans so we got more cold stuff.

Btw, has anyone heard from Gary? It's been a long time since he's posted & I'm still worried about him & his wife.
I think we pissed him off when he said his wife was going through all the tests and our arm chair quarterbacking didn't help. I sent him a private message a month or two ago, he hasn't replied. I sure hope the DR figured out a treatment and I hope he finds his way back someday.
 
I don't know if he was pissed off so much as frustrated with the whole situation & feeling helpless. He was doing all he could & while he did express frustration, I think it was more out of stress than anything else. I do hope everything turned out OK. I'm worried that it didn't & he couldn't bring himself to post anymore or that something happened to him. Crossing my fingers & hoping he'll come back with good news some day.

Meanwhile, I had a lazy day. Had bad abdominal cramping that went all the way through upper & lower in waves that was not very fun at all. Had to take a Naproxyn for the first time in weeks. Cooked for Mom, played online games with my brother, and messed around with some of my sketches in MSPaint. My guest bathroom sketch was bugging me bc I did the tub all wrong in terms of perspective, so I fixed it. Probably still not great, but it's an improvement. Changed some of the decor a bit. I was going to take the mirror that came with the vanity for the guest bathroom to put in my own bathroom but I decided it wouldn't look right so I am making my own mirror for my bathroom & will put the other one with it's vanity. It has a little shelf on the bottom. I will need to fix a crack in the wood (when I was attaching the shelf, the wood inside one of the bullseye rosettes cracked) on the mirror, but it should be otherwise fine. I will put the medicine cabinet on the opposite wall & have a little shaving station for my brother-- outlet up high & a shelf for his shaver and a wastbasket below to catch the hair. That way he won't be shaving hair off into the sink. Right now he uses a small mirror on the inside door of a storage cabinet in Mom's bathroom.

Given the measurements, I've also determined that there probably won't be room for little shelves on either side of the toilet beneath the space saver (but I will have to see when we actually get to the placing fixtures part). I changed the drawing of the toilet to look more like the one we will put in (with the tank that has angled sides) & added a TP holder with small shelf. I changed the vanity light to 2 bulbs bc that is what we bought for the room (on clearance).
First pic is the original with just the tub fixed (before I had it narrower at the front/closer part & wider at the back).
2nd is the updates.
bathroomplanfancy1.pngbathroomplanfancy2.png
 
Cutting up a tree with a chainsaw. I think I am too old to be doing that.
 
Took mom for a doctor's appointment, picked up her RXs at the pharmacy, shopped for groceries (with Mom in the riding cart). Spent awhile looking for her bc she zipped off when I went to call my brother to let him know the power company was allegedly sending someone out to do a repair but they never showed up. Lady on the phone gave me attitude. I told her I had reported the security light out over 3x and the last time they said they would put in a repair order. I told her it had been out since August & we're still getting billed for it & that I'd told them back in August that it was out. She asked where it was & I said "It's hanging from a tree next to the pole". I'm getting seriously tempted to get a ladder of some sort & set up a solar security light up on that pole (but not quite as high).
Last night I had 7 cats and 1 dog piled on me bc it got down to 51°.
 
Started in on scraping off the popcorn on the living room ceiling and fixing all the bad tape joints. Also going to skim coat the walls. Had a close friend come down with Covid so I'm suppose to quarantine for 14 days.
 
@zannej:

The power company around here has poured a ton of resources into social media in the last few years, hiring a whole social media team and redoing part of their headquarters building for them. The social media team's reports were always signal-boosted to the whole company too. (I was a contractor for that company in a different line of business and I still got the social media team's reports in my email every week.) If your power company is following a similar trend, Twittering at them might unfortunately be the best way to let them know both about the power issues and about the bad service.

WRT your friend and his fiance, at least your friend knows about those mental health issues up front before he signs up for "until death do us part"! Some people don't find out until after the fact that they're going to be getting a big heap of "in sickness", and mental health is a hard one because there aren't resources for spouses the way there are for things like cancer.
 
slownsteady I'm going to try and stay active thru all of this. worse part is that I walk 5 miles a day and was told not to leave my property . Neighbors are going to think I'm crazy walking around my house 800 times a day.
 
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