Brad's Cactus Shack

On Monday, the company that owns my apartment dropped off a dehumidifier for me. It’s a nice LG model with a digital display and all kinds of features and options on it. Our hope is that sucking the moisture out of the air will eliminate the occasional giant splotches of mold that occasionally show up in the bedrooms.

I immediately turned it on and let it run all day. I set it at it’s lowest setting, which was 35% humidity. The highest setting is 75%. It ran continuously all day, and after 8 hours I dumped the water out of it. It was about 1.5 gallons of water. That’s a lot of water to be sucking out of the air! The next day it ran all day again, and I dumped another 1.5 gallons into the sink. Yesterday it ran all day and I dumped another 1.5 gallons.

I’ve never used a dehumidifier before, but the amount of water it’s sucking up seems insane. The guy who suggested getting it said it had a large water container in it and I’d probably only have to empty it every few weeks. If I ran it all night too (I don’t because it’s loud) I’m sure it would completely fill the water container inside of it every day.

I’ve been told by a couple people now that my apartment feels damp, kind of like a basement. Probably because my floors are all concrete, instead of being raised off the ground or having a basement like a normal house.

Is 1.5 gallons of water a day normal for a dehumidifier? Anybody know? Anyone know what setting I should have it on? Is 35% too low? I’m hoping it’ll start to slow down after another day or two. It can’t keep sucking more than a gallon of water out of the air forever, can it? What’s bad is that we haven’t had much rain in weeks now. Hardly any at all. So is it going to get even worse once it starts raining nonstop like it usually does?

In other news, the kids and I had a fun week in Idaho. We saw Evan Almighty, went to the lake for a day and did a lot of other random things. And I got a new laptop! After 7 years of using the same old HP, I finally got an upgrade. It’s an Dell Inspiron E1505. It’s got an 80 gig hard drive, 512 megs of RAM, built in wireless, a DVD burner, and two 1.73GHz processors. It came with Ubuntu installed on it but I added Windows XP to it so now it dual boots. I’m waiting about another year to start using Vista since it sucks right now.

It’ll be so nice to have a laptop that I can take out of the house. The battery on my old one kept dying so it doesn’t last more than a couple minutes on the battery. This one lasts about 4 hours on the battery, plus I’ve got a spare battery for it. So 8 hours of laptop for me with no plugging in!

I went and saw Knocked Up tonight. It was girly but I really liked it. Snuck into Spiderman 3 afterwards, but only watched a few minutes before leaving. I decided that I couldn’t bear to watch the entire movie just for the few action scenes that I wanted to see again.

After the movie was over, I listened to Tom Leykis whine on the radio about what a terrible movie it was for 2 hours. He was upset that the girl didn’t get an abortion and that the guy had anything to do with her after getting her pregnant. Tom is entertaining, but he seems to think that anyone who doesn’t live life just like him is a moron. Which means no children ever, and as little responsibility as possible. I’m bored out of my mind enough as it is, only having my kids half the week. I would hate being Tom.

I don’t know what it is with me and flat tires lately, but my bike’s tire is all messed up and needs to be replaced. I think I put a little too much air in it yesterday, which split the side open. I noticed this while biking to the post office this morning to pick up the box of cool stuff Trevelyn sent me. Again. This time I got a Kirby Gameboy Advance game, which the kids are excited about. And lots of other weird, random shit. Thanks, Trevelyn! I also mailed Trevelyn a box of stuff while I was there.

And I received my copy of It’s Not News, It’s FARK. I read a few pages of it while I stood in line at the post office and it didn’t seem too bad. Not that I have high hopes for it, but it might actually be an okay book.

I made this blueprint of my house with Punch! Home Design Architectural Series 4000. Last week, out of complete boredom, I just started measuring all the rooms in my house. It lets you walk around your house in 3-D too. You can even add furniture, lighting, electronics, etc. But I didn’t get that fancy with it. Here’s some comparison pictures.

It’s not perfect, but I didn’t spend much time on it. I used this software to map out my house in Illinois too, back in early 2000. Colleen’s sister and I spent days measuring the house, inputting everything into the computer, doing the landscaping, and even adding a lot of the furniture into it. Both floors, the basement and the yard. It looked awesome. Then, several weeks later, Colleen decides to “clean” my hard drive up and deletes the file because she didn’t know what it was. Gone forever. She did that like 3 times during our marriage. She loved cleaning the hard drive and deleting important shit. I lost more data from her routine cleanings that from all the hard drive crashes and corrupt CDs I’ve ever had. Being single rules.

Speaking of my house, I’ve been looking at a lot of apartments these past couple weeks. I kind of want to move, but then I don’t. I found a few apartments within an acceptable price range. But none of them had central air. I love my central air. “No pleasure, no rapture, no exquisite sin greater… than central air.” Plus I have cheap rent. I’m too busy this summer to move anyway. Maybe in the fall, though.

I found a nice 3 bedroom manufactured home for $600. But it had a lawn. A big lawn. One thing I love about this place I’m at now, aside from the central air, is that there’s no yard. I hate mowing lawns more than anything. It took over an hour every week to mow that lawn in Illinois. That’s one thing that I’ll never miss. If I get a new place, it’s gotta be an apartment building where they do the yardwork for me.

I had a giant Pepsi at the movies tonight. I gave up Pepsi about a year ago and rarely drink it (or any other caffeinated beverages) anymore. I only got Pepsi tonight because they only offered water in tiny bottles. And I just couldn’t stand to have them fill up the Pepsi cup with water when it was $5.00. It was exactly $10 for a medium popcorn and medium drink tonight. That’s a lot of money, even for a movie theater. Isn’t it? I don’t think I paid nearly that much in Illinois. So I had a lot of Pepsi. And I’m guessing that’s why it’s 2:00am and I’m not tired at all.

Flat tire this morning. Cars are evil. There was a nail in the tire and it was only $8.00 to patch, but he said I need to get a new tire very soon. Maybe I should stop buying used tires.

While waiting around at the gas station, I met a gold prospector on his way to California to mine for gold. He had a fold down trailer and a bunch of tools in the back of his truck. I didn’t know people still mined for gold like that. Guess I assumed that corporations owned all the mines. Either that or they were empty.

I cannot stop watching Freaks and Geeks. A friend introduced me to it last week, I downloaded it the next day and I’m almost finished with the entire season. I think I have 3 or 4 more left to watch which I’m sure I’ll finish this evening. It’s a great show, in an after school special kind of way.

I’m still really loving Flickr. I’ve uploaded a large portion of my 2005 – 2007 pictures to it and I’ve been obsessively geotagging them all. It’s weird to be able to click on a map of my neighborhood and see hundreds of pictures of some old lady’s garden and the inside of her house, a couple blocks away.

Today boredom caused me to attempt paperclip sculpturing…

It’s been a busy week, as far as I can remember. Kids and I went to see Shrek 3 over the weekend. I didn’t like it, but the kids did. I liked the first two movies, but this one was just weak in my opinion. We went Geocaching before and after the movie. One of the geocaches involved a mile long hike into the woods, a PB&J picnic on a log, and then another mile out. We actually met the guy who placed the geocache there. He was there checking up on it and noticed us taking it. He said he’d also been to our geocache before.

It seems like a lot more has happened in a week, but somehow I’m forgetting it all. Stupid memory. This morning I cleaned out my answering machine, which mostly had messages on it from 2005. I copied a lot of them to mp3, which is here. A voicemail that I left for The Mediocre Show was played on their show. Fast forward to 27 minutes and 25 seconds on this file:

http://media.libsyn.com/media/mediocreshow/mediocre95.mp3

Or just listen to the whole show. It’s one of my favorite podcasts. Oh yeah, Trevelyn from the PLA Forums sent me a box full of great stuff! A Pez dispenser, some PA lotto tickets (I haven’t checked to see if they’re winners yet), a Fon router, a telephone handset modified to work on a cell phone’s jack, a Verizon pay phone card, some blank (I think) magnetic stripe cards, a Rolex watch, a security badge and whistle, and just a bunch of weird miscellaneous stuff. Thanks, Trevelyn!

I’m using Flickr now for my photos. We’ll see how long that lasts, but that’s where I’m putting my pictures for now. Here’s my Flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/52904685@N00/.

Went out with Angela again last night. We went to play Bingo for several hours! It’s the first time since grade school that I’ve played Bingo. It was fun. A very fast paced game, though. Neither of us won anything but this old lady at the next table won 3 times. On her last win she got $1,000. After Bingo we went to a nickel arcade and played a bunch of games and won a bunch of tickets. She was a funny old lady and talked to herself a lot. After one of her wins she was counting all her winnings, saying “I’ve never seen so much money in my life!”

Today I sold buttons at the Corvallis flea market. It went worse than Eugene. I ended up making $5 or $6 for the day. Since my table was $15, it was a complete loss. Oh well. The good thing was that I had a fun time talking to the lady at the booth next to me. Her name was Suzanne. She took my number and said she’s going to call me next time she’s in Albany.

Tonight I’m going out to some bar & grill with Eva.

Yesterday I bought some plants:

The one on the left and then the cactus in the middle. The one on the right I got a few weeks ago.

My wireless security system sucks. It’s always losing the connection to the sensors, so the alarm can’t be set. Luckily, there’s room for 2 hard-wired connections. So I disabled all the wireless sensors and I’m only using a hardwired door alarm on the back door. I’ll add the front door later. I made my own door sensor! I put two screws into the part of the door frame that you can’t see when you shut it, then wrapped wires around them that go to the alarm. Then, on the door, I attached a piece of metal that contacts the screws when the door shuts. I used a piece of metal from the battery compartment of some random electronic device, which is perfect since the metal pieces are made to stick out a little so that they touch the screws securely when I shut the door. If any of that made any sense.

I also moved the main alarm component out of my office and into the hall. Today I’m going to install a new plug in the ceiling (above the ceiling tiles) to plug it in. And a phone line too, so it can call my cell phone when the alarm trips. Guess I’ll just sell these wireless sensors on Ebay since they all suck.

Been cleaning my desk and reorganizing Quickbooks all morning. Last night I watched Stranger Than Fiction. It definitely wasn’t what I expected. I was expecting another zany Will Ferrell movie, but it wasn’t a comedy at all. It was great and I was impressed. Everyone go watch it.

Emily put some cool stickers on my salt/pepper shakers:

Also, Payton helped me make a video for this Gizmodo contest. If I win, I get an $1,100 HD camera. Since I don’t even have a video camera anymore, that would rule. The contest ends this Thursday. Here’s our entry:

Also, here are some outtakes from that video.

Went to Subway for lunch, checked on our Geocache and hung around the house the rest of the day since it’s been raining.

Almost ran over this hyperactive puppy yesterday as I was coming home. I got out and caught him, put him in the car and pulled into my driveway. Gave him some water, but didn’t have any food I thought he’d like. I walked around the block with him, hoping the owners would spot him. Talked to some lady about him and she decided to take him from me and said she’d put up posters for him. Too bad I didn’t have the kids last night. They would have had fun with him. But I’m glad I didn’t have to keep this thing overnight.

Other than that, yesterday was boring and sucked.

UPDATE: Hyperactive Puppy Video!

Here’s a picture of the longest game of hopscotch ever. Emily and I did this at the park today. All the kids who tried it ended by saying, “Ow! Ow! My legs hurt!”

This picture is 200 x 5752.