Monthly Archives: July 2014
Making New Friends . . .
We all headed out about 11:30 this morning to have lunch with C. A. Newsome, an author-friend of Nick’s who also happens to be one of Jan’s favorite mystery writers.
After a stop at Chase Bank, we met Carol Ann and her friend Marianne Shelton, at Ruth’s Parkside Café, an upscale restaurant located in the old American Can Company building.
Originally built in 1921, it was abandoned in 1978, and stayed vacant until bought up in 2005 to be developed into loft apartments. It reopened in 2011, with apartments ranging in size from a 615 sq.ft. 1 bedroom to a 1513 sq.ft. 3 bedroom, and from $610 to $1480. And it must be very popular, because at this time, no units are available tor rent.
The food was good, with Jan having this Orange Szechwan Stir Fry,
while I had the Half BLT with a bowl of their delicious Savory White Bean Soup. Very good. Finishing up, Jan and I shared a piece of really good Chocolate Gooey Cake.
Jan had a great time getting to know Carol Ann, who as I said, is one of Jan’s favorite authors.
Carol Anne, in the center, above, with Marianne to the left, has written three books in her Dog Park Mystery series, with a fourth on the way. Jan has all three in Kindle format, and has read them several times. She really enjoys Carol Ann’s well-written characters, especially the female serial killer in the first two books.
And right now, A Shot in the Bark, Book 1 in the series, is FREE, and the other 2 are only $3.99. You can get all 3 below.
And they’re also available in paperback. Check’em out.
Finally saying our goodbyes to Carol Ann and Marianne after a great lunch and get-together, we drove around for a while checking out the many neat old buildings in the area, before heading a little further north to make a stop at Half-Price Books, pretty much our favorite used book store.
After wandering through their stacks for almost an hour, we headed next door to the Kroger’s for a few things before starting back to the park. By the time we were passing though Harrison, OH, right on the Ohio/Indiana border, we decided it was a good time for a Dairy Queen visit, to get our ice cream fix.
After our DQ stop, we took a back road out though this really beautiful countryside before our return to the park.
Tomorrow looks to be a rainy stay-at-rig day.
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Thought for the Day:
A true Redneck thinks that the National Anthem is always followed by “Gentlemen, Start Your Engines”.
Nick Fixed It !
A few of our blog readers are having problems reaching the new blog. It does seem to affecting mostly people who are reading the blog using readers of some sort, not directly going to the blog through their browser.
Nick says some people have a problem getting his blog on readers also, so at this point all I can recommend is to use a browser to read it, or just sign up to receive the blog by email.
On a better note though, several blog readers say that the new blog now looks better on their iPads and other tablets, so that’s good.
One downside for me with the new blog is that I can no longer use Microsoft’s Live Writer to compose and post each day’s blog. But my new blog host requires an sFTP (secure FTP) connection, and Live Writer doesn’t support that. Hopefully one of these days, Microsoft will get around to fixing that, but I’m not holding my breath.
So, in the meantime, I have to upload the blog and the photos separately. But in doing this, I was very disappointed in the quality of the photos. They looked much worse in the blog than they did on my computer.
But I finally figured out what was happening. If you use the Media Library loader within WordPress, it recompresses the already-compressed .jpg files, really messing up the photo quality. But I found a ‘Add to Server’ plugin that lets me sFTP directly to the Media Library without using the built-in loader.
Problem solved.
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A little before 8pm Nick called me over to help his neighbors, Larry and Linda Merritt, with a water heater problem. So I grabbed my voltmeter and headed over there. Turns out they had just had a new Attwood until installed and it didn’t seem to be working on either gas or electric.
The first thing I noticed was that the water heater was hot. All the pipes, the temp/pressure relief valve, everything was hot to the touch, and hot air was coming from exhaust vent. But no hot water was coming out of any faucet. I turned off the electric and turn the gas on, with no result. The gas part never ignited. But my thought at this point was that maybe it wasn’t starting up due to the fact that the water was already hot.
My next thought was that either the new unit wasn’t plumbed correctly, or the mixing valve on the back was misadjusted and only letting cold water through. Along the way Nick had noticed a valve switching between ‘Normal Operation’ and ‘Water Bypass’. It was set to ‘Normal Operation’, but Nick decided to try it in ‘Bypass’ mode.
And that fixed it. Nick fixed it.
At first we thought it was either labeled wrong or hooked up wrong. But when I fooled with the knob, I discovered the knob could just be pulled off and put back on pointing in any direction. Which appears to be what happened.
So that took care of the problem. And once we used some hot water and cooled down the tank, the gas part ignited with no problems.
Good job, Nick.
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For dinner Jan made up a skillet of Cheesy Macaroni and Beef with Beans and Habanero Rotel. Very, very spicy and very, very good, along with garlic French bread.
Tomorrow we’re heading into the Cincinnati area to have lunch with one of Nick’s author friends who lives in the area. Really looking forward to it.
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Thought for the Day:
“If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins.” – Benjamin Franklin
