Archive for March, 2010

Try this at a party.
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Her name wasn’t always Anne, and this is a long, strange story. (more…)

My kids are cracking me up today:

“Have you wished in my wishing well yet?”

“Why no I haven’t. I didn’t know you had one. Will you show it to me?”

“Well SURE! Don’t forget your quarters.”

“My quarters?”

“Well, people usually throw money into a wishing well, but I don’t want random coins. I just want quarters.”

“Hmm, I don’t know that I’ve got any. Let me check.. ah, yeah just two pennies here. Do you accept pennies?”

“Sure we do!”

“Oh good.”

“But only for wishes that won’t be granted.”

You might know I’m going back to school full time trying to (finally) get my degree and fill in any gaps left in my education and self confidence. But I thought my web design class would be more of a review than anything, since I’ve been designing websites and reading design related blogs for quite a while now. In some ways it has been, but I’ve still learned quite a bit. And the lessons that will stay with me best have little to do with xhtml and css. (more…)

If your garbage disposal stops working, particularly if it’s been working fine and then one day simply dies, you just might be able to fix it yourself with the press of a little red button. Who knew?

Just like your hair dryer, garbage disposals have a GFCI: a circuit interrupter that shuts the device off if there’s a safety issue. If that safety issue was just a fluke, resetting the button will do the trick. You should be able to find the reset button just underneath the disposal. Just make sure the normal on-off switch is set to ‘off’ and that there aren’t any spoons in the sink, so you won’t have any surprises when the disposal starts running again.

Is this common knowledge? Well, my friend didn’t know, and had gone 3 weeks thinking her garbage disposal was broken before I fixed it tonight. I wouldn’t have known had my brother not told me. And he didn’t know before either: he figured it out when installing a replacement disposal for his mother-in-law, who’d gone without for ages.

So if you didn’t know, well, now you do, and knowing is half the battle. Maybe someday it’ll save you or a friend the cost of a new disposal or visit from a repairman.