Camera was next to go

I am in the same situation as de-Intimidator -no pictures.My digital camera has bit the dust. I have an old (ie few features) camera that Gerry gave me. I want to do some research to get one that works well with my level of expertise or lack of it. I am thinking no SLR for me.

Tonight Gerry and I are going to Akron First Night. It is family oriented event with about 75 various performers scattered around a six block area downtown. They vary from individual guitar players, the Steel Drum Band of the University of Akron, Irish dancers, a group of four who sound a lot like the Beatles, and blues singers.

Inspired reading

I found a new (to me) web site that has some great reading. People are asked to write what they believe in a concise, positive way. http://thisibelieve.org

Food and Family

Christmas for us this year was a flurry of activity. Renee Michelle and Andrew arrived on Friday, December 18, just ahead of the largest blizzard in 70 years, that pretty much parallelized the East Coast. My new kitchen range was installed just in time for her flurry of cooking. Highlights of the cooking from my perspective were: 1) chocolate mousse and two pies made by Andrew (peach and cherry) 2) home made noodles from Renee Michelle's pasta maker, peanut noodles and carrots with herbs, 3) turkey cooked in oil by Gerry (this needs some fine tuning, mainly not being cooked for as long), 4) great homemade eggnog and veggie pizza by Stacey. If any of you are asking what I did, the answer is WASHED A LOT OF DISHES. Actually my new dish washer was up and running so that really helped.

Another tradition we have is to have custom made pizzas at Shawn and Stacey's on Christmas eve. I bring the home made pizza dough and she provides the toppings.

There will be pies

This week I have gone to several appliance stores looking at electric ranges, spent a lot of time on line reading reviews and discussing the info with Gerry. I am ready to purchase it tomorrow. Since I am buying locally, I should be able to pick it up early next week. I will give details when I actually have it in my kitchen. My son in law can breathe easier because it looks like he will have his pie :) What he does not know is that I bought several homemade apple pies from a fund raiser. Of course they won't taste like my homemade ones, but he can conduct a taste test. Actually since he is such a great s-i-l I will bake one from scratch too.

Next project is to finish the holiday letter and finish decorating. Here is my sincere wish to the appliance gods - please don't let any other appliance die!! Actually there aren't too many left to go.

The world of appliances

Today I am going to look at the positive side of events. It took Gerry another 10 hours (at one crack) to completely disembowel the furnace and put it back together. The positive is that we learned it is not worth keeping as a back up to our geothermal when we get it and it is now functioning fine which is great but has a lot of rust in its innards.


The same day, our oven quit functioning. Instead of even allowing Gerry to start tearing into it, I am looking for a used one on Craig' s List. Since we are going geothermal, it will be electric instead of gas. I don't know if I mentioned this previously, but our dish washer (which sounded like a jet plane taking off) left bits and piece of food everywhere. On Saturday I bought a new one. No repairs allowed on the old one either. So the positive is an electric stove and a new dish washer.

It's cool in here

Last night our furnace fan was running nonstop with no heat coming out. So Gerry spent five hours working on it, with me sitting in the basement with him to encourage him. He finally located the switch that was not functioning and the cause of it burning out. I went on line to check the cost of labor of HVAC repair labor. At least $100 an hour. So, dear Gerry, $500 would buy a used motorcycle would it not? Did I actually say that? Today I am trying to order the part, but in the mean time, we have to manually start it each time. What does a person do who cannot repair their furnace or have the extra $500 to pay someone? I think Gerry enjoys figuring out how these things work. The only problem is getting up the next morning and going to work when he has been up until 1:00 am. Thanks honey!