Furnace Failure

Over the past weekend we had a small issue with our furnace.  The furnace had gone out overnight so that when I woke up Sunday morning and it was only 60° in the house.  This has happened before, and because of the issue we had with the air conditioner over the summer, I know the furnace is old and needs to be replaced.  It has happened before ( a couple of times last year, maybe a couple of times the year before that I can recall) and usually when it does happen, I just need to go reset it by flipping the breaker off and then back on.  So I did it and about 30 seconds later, the furnace was going. 

Unfortunately, it happened again on Sunday night/Monday morning.  When I got up to get ready for work, I went downstairs and reset it again with the breaker, and put calling someone to come take a look at the furnace on my list of things to do.  I was busy at work all day Monday and didn't get a chance to call, and since the furnace was running I thought no problem, I'll call as soon as I have a chance.  So Tuesday morning when I got up for work it was down to 59° in the family room, and I could tell as soon as I got out of bed.  Luckily, it reset again as soon as I flipped the breaker off and back on, but I made sure that I called Tuesday morning to have someone come out and check things out.  Luckily the place I called was able to send someone out right away.  When they guy looked at the furnace he apparently knew right away things were not good.  The verdict is that we need a new furnace.  I am pretty sure that when we moved in the paperwork we had said it was installed new in 1991, which then puts it at almost 22 years old.  The service guy said he could replace some part that it needed right away so that it wouldn't keep going out, but it would need to be replaced. 

So now we have things scheduled to have the furnace and A/C replaced in a couple of weeks.  Even the small repair he did isn't perfect as we could see the thermostat showed the furnace was on and running but there was no warm air blowing out, and when I went downstairs to check on it, it wasn't running.  But after a bit of flipping switched on and off, it kicked in.  So I guess we are getting lucky.  I look at it like at least we can keep it going until they can get it replaced.  It wouldn't have been very good if it had just up and died and left us without heat at all.

Fall Concert

I almost forgot, Alison had her Fall concert for school about two weeks ago.  It was really a fun program.  It is one thing that I think her music teacher does a lot better than the music teacher from Riverside did (no offense to the Riverside music teacher).  This years program was an old time radio show.  Since Alison is on the chorus, she sang a lot more than just her class would have done alone.  Then again, there are probably less than 10 kids in 5th grade who are not also in the chorus, so it was essentially all of the 5th grade anyway.

I would have posted the video clips but the clips are each about 15-20 minutes long.  Maybe I'll post one later.  They show was circa 1943, and even included commercials that they would have played at the time.  And the songs they did were also the songs that they would have played on the radio in 1943.  Alison even got a little solo part in Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy. 

UPDATE:  Sadly, I just checked and my videos are too large.  In order to upload them to Vimeo, I'll need to do some editing to cut them down.  I'll try and find some time over the weekend, so check back.

Water Main Break

On Monday Kris got home from work and had a big surprise waiting for her.  There had been a water main break across the street from our house.  The village utility workers had been there and had it fixed by the time she got home, but the street in front of the house was covered with water and mud, which then got into the driveway.  As soon as she got in she had to flush all the pipes in the house. 

The guy across the street has the approach to his house all dug up.  They actually filled the hole and paved over it with blacktop instead of concrete.  That would be driving me insane, not to mention the fact that the grass would have been all dug up around it as well.  Luckily it didn't burst in front of our house.

Happy Anniversary

On this day 21 years ago, I had gone out to a bar with my roommates for the night.  We used to go to one particular bar on North avenue in Milwaukee called Judges.  There wasn't a whole lot to do there.  They had a couple of TVs and played my kind of music, but not much else.  So we were there watching basketball and playing darts.  That night my friends and I were throwing darts and a couple of girls wanted to play the winners on the board (which was me and my friend). 

In between watching the basketball game that was on and going to get pitchers of beer, these girls were cheating when our backs were turned.  We ended up losing the game, which was something that was very uncharacteristic for us, especially losing to a couple of girls.  And that was one reason we knew we had been cheated.

Well, those girls ended up hanging out with us for the night and because one of them had a drink dumped on her jacket, I let her wear my UWM Rugby jacket home.  As most people know, that girl is now my wife.  She'll tell you that we were just that bad at darts, but don't believe her.  We were cheated.  But on this day 21 years ago we started our journey together, sort of.  It took me a month to get her to agree to go out with me, but I landed her.  And it never would have happened if we hadn't run into each other on this day in 1991.

Corrupt USB Drive

I had a very long day today between getting the lights up outside and working on the computer.  I had picked out a few possible pictures for our Christmas card this year and was sitting down with Kris to pick out which one we would use.  She asked about whether we had a picture of the girls together from the first day of school.  I did, but I had put it onto a USB drive for storage, as I have with all of our photos from about the last 5 or 6 years at least.  So I got it out, plugged it into my laptop, and a message pops up saying that the drive is not formatted, do I want to format it now?  Well, I know for sure what happens when you reformat something, so I knew things weren't good.

I unplugged it and plugged it into Kris' desktop.  I got the same message.  I tried it in the kids' computer down iin the basement and the same message popped up.  When I checked the properties of the drive, it said there was 0 data written on it.  I knew that wasn't right because I had just transferred pictures to is about two weeks earlier.  So I knew there was still data on there, I just needed to figure out how to get it.

This was the start of a massive migraine for the day.  After about half an hour of googling for some sort of lead on where to begin, I had found some free programs that "guaranteed" to recover your data from a corrupted USB drive.  I ended up installing a couple and trying them out.  So while they were scanning, I went outside to get the lights set up.  Like I said, this was the start of a tremendous headache.  I think it was because I had two years worth of photos on that USB drive, and I was freaking out that I was going to lose them.  I had that happen a few years ago when I was transferring photos to CDs, and I deleted the originals thinking I had copied them to a CD for storage.  Well I either missed some and thought I copied them, or I thought I had a duplicate CD and threw it out.  Either way, I lost about 4 months worth of pictures, which included mother's day.  Kris wasn't happy at all.  So now I had three times as many pictures possibly on the chopping block.

After a break of a half an hour, some lunch and a handful of painkillers I came back to work on the USB drive.  Unfortunately, the "guaranteed" programs got me absolutely nothing.  So I started some more research.  After another hour, I managed to find another program that said it could get the data off of a corrupted USB drive.  This one however was a DOS program, and the reviewer said that many people felt intimidated by the DOS based program so they just skipped using it, but the reviewer went on to say it was the best one he had found.  So I gave it a try, and 2 minutes after installing it, I was watching the progress window listing the number of files recovered.  I let out a huge sigh of relief because I was getting my data back.  The program I got to do it was free, so maybe I'll throw the author a bone and donate $10 or something to him.  It's worth at least that to get all of our memories back.

Kris suggested that maybe wee should subscribe to Carbonite, or one of those other data backup services.  Again, with my luck in losing things (having computers crash and losing data) it might not be a bad "insurance policy".  I think I might look into it next week when I have a few minutes.

EDIT: It just dawned on me that I should list the name of the program in case anyone comes across this while looking for how to retrieve data from a corrupted drive.  I used a program called TestDisk and PhotoRecovery from a company called CG Security.  You can download it here.  I highly recommend it.

A Cat's Christmas

So, as long as I am on the topic of the Christmas tree, we have already had a couple of incidents with Samson and the tree this weekend.  He has gone under the tree and been swatting at some of the ornaments.  Luckily each time he has gone after them someone was sitting in the family room to chase him away.  I am worried that he will get a little mischievous while we are gone at work and end up knocking the tree over, or at the very least, knocking off some of the more fragile ornaments. 

It's strange because last year we didn't have these kinds of problems with Samson.  Yeah, he liked laying under the tree on the skirt, but he didn't try playing with the ornaments, at least not like he has so far this year.  I actually saw him lunge up into the tree after something.  Whether it was playing with the lights, or an ornament, I don't know, but we can't let him keep doing it.  Maybe we just need to get him more toys or something to keep his attention away from the tree.

Ready for Christmas

Every year, the day after Thanksgiving marks the beginning of the Christmas season obviously, but it also means getting our Christmas stuff out.  Usually it is the only time I have to get the tree up and decorated because as anyone who knows me realizes that with the number of lights I put on our tree, it take me at least a day to get it up and the lights strung, and then another half a day the get the ornaments on.  This year, I was planning on moving the tree to the front of the family room in front of the big window.  However, with the shape of the room and the arrangement of the furniture, it just isn't conducive for placing the tree there. 

Maybe next year if we get some new furniture and rearrange the set up, we can move it to the front of the room.  The problem now is the same as it has been the last couple of years.  The tree is too close to the thermostat so that with the number of lights I have on the tree (2000 this year) the extra heat generated causes the temp in the room to rise so that the heat doesn't go on at night.  That makes for a cold upstairs for sleeping, so we'll have to keep the lights off for a while later at night.  Mybe I need to star t looking at getting some LED lights for the tree next year.  The problem is that with the cost of a string of LEDs it'll cost about $200-$250 just for lights.

I finished putting up the few lights we have for outside today, so as it stands, I think we're all set as far as decorations go for Christmas this year.  Maybe I'll keep looking as we are out for better lights.  The ones we have now are getting old and I think will need to be replaced next year, so if I come across something that isn't to horribly expensive I'll get it and stock it for next year.