Not only is the NFL cashing in on the most talked about famous people romance since Ben-ifer (Ben Affleck & Jennifer Lopez.) Amazon Prime Video is trying to capitalize…
Here is a screen grab I snagged while looking for something to watch yesterday:
We had a fairly new Keurig K-Supreme coffee maker.
The first time the descale light illuminated I tried using white vinegar to do the job. It must have done some good, but it didn’t last as long as expected. So this time when the light came on I ordered the 3-Month Maintenance Kit from Amazon. Yesterday I did the descaling.
(Side note, the directions listed on the box on how to do this say to follow the instructions on the bottle, but there are no instructions on the bottle.)
After following the instructions I found on keurig.com I successfully ran the descaling procedure. Only trouble was that the brewer failed to restart afterwards. A search online said that I might have over heated the thermostat and I should wait a couple of hours and try again. After 3 hours the brewer would still not turn.
I then found a YouTube video on how reset it. After spending twenty minutes opening up my relatively new brewer I found the thermostat and no amount poking with a bent paperclip would reset it. I ohmed it out and it read as infinite, so I had no choice but to go out and spend $150 on a newer brewer.
Rest assured that next time the Descale light illuminates I going back to white vinegar. It may not last as long, but at least it won’t fry the thermostat.
I hope…
Donna and I have been a big fan of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s show on PBS called Finding Your Roots for quite a while. While it is fun to dig into the family trees of actors, musicians and other famous people, it always come with an interesting history lesson that a member of their family was directly involved in.
Because we have a subscription to Peacock so we can watch bicycle racing we were pleasantly surprised to stumble on a show on it called Who Do You Think You Are?. It is pretty much the same thing as Finding Your Roots except is from NBC and sponsored by Ancestry.com.
The PBS version is a nicer shop to watch because there are no interruptions for commercials and it will usually follow both sides of the person’s lineage back. The NBC version usually just picks one branch to chase back and while we don’t get commercials (we subscribe to the add-free level), we still get the 4 or 5 interruptions, with the title cards where commercials were, along with some sort of “cliff hanger” before and the repeat of when we get back.
After watching the 6 episodes of Season 1 of the show on Peacock and because the copyright date at the end of the last show was MMXX (aka: 2020), Donna asked, “I wonder if they are going to make more?” So I headed off to IMDB to see if there were any more. Turns out there are 85 total episodes over 12 seasons of the show. Not only that, but the “season 1” we watched on Peacock was actually season 12, the last one listed on IMDB.
A bit of poking around led to the discovery (pun intended) that the show aired for several years on TLC. Wait a minute, I’ve seen TLC listed on the Discovery+ streaming service we also subscribe to. Sure enough, we could watch more of the show, Discovery+ had seasons 4 thru 10. We had already seen 12 on Peacock, so where were seasons 1,2,3 and 11?
Adding up the total episodes from each season listed on Discovery+ for seasons 4 thru 10 comes up at 49. I then counted the episodes on IMDB for seasons 4 thru 11 and the total episodes was 49 again. The seasons on IMDB and Discovery+ didn’t line up, the quantity of episodes per each season were different and some shows were listed in different seasons.
So I tried a third source, Wikipedia. I counted episodes from season 4 to 10, because this source called season 11 what IMDB called 12 and Peacock called season 1, confused, me too. Anyway Wikipedia’s total was 52! I went through the list and found the 3 missing episodes, J.K. Rowling, Minnie Driver and Jim Parsons.
Also on Wikipedia I learned that seasons 1, 2 & 3 of the show were originally broadcast on NBC. Hello? Peacock is the streaming arm of NBC, why aren’t they available there?
This is a photo of 1/2 of our stair railing between floors. If you scan along the balusters (or pickets or little vertical stick thingies) from right to left, notice the last one on the left. It is upsidedown! We have lived in this house for a little over three years, meaning we have gone up and down the stairs over 2,000 times each and never noticed this. Until yesterday…
Sometime in mid January when I pulled the clothes out of the washer they were exceedingly wet. Figuring that the load was unbalanced I spread the clothes around evenly and ran the “Drain and Spin Cycle.” It didn’t help much. Because we do just one load a day and have the time we just started allotting 75 to 90 minutes for drying instead of the typical 50 to 60.
Was our 3-year old washer broken already?
I looked online for what might be the issue with the machine and there were at least a half dozen reasons. I tried the first two. Rerouting the drain hose to go straight up immediately after exiting the machine instead angled like I had it with no change of clothes wetness. Dumping some liquid plumber down the drain pipe had no effect. The rest of the suggestions involved opening up the machine to check pumps and belts or troubleshooting the electronics.
We could replace it with the same model for just under $600. But did we need to? The extra 20 or 30 minutes really wasn’t a big hardship, except for possibly adding $10 bucks a month to the power bill. Maybe we should have a professional come look at it.
This Tuesday I called a local appliance repair place and set up an appointment to have someone come look at the machine next Monday. It was $95 for the house call, but then at least we could see whether to fix it or buy new or just live with it.
Wednesday morning when I washed the bath towels, the bath mat and our sheets, they came out of the washing machine just like they used to 2 weeks ago. Huh? So we rounded up some more stuff to run another load. Those too came out fine and everything came out of the dryer in the usual hour-ish time frame. The next day’s load, same thing, we were back to the normal wash day timing. I called and cancelled the appointment.
The weather was nice enough today that we drove the Miata to take Donna for her physical therapy appointment. It was even warm enough that we dropped the top for the leg home.
About twenty years ago we discovered Easyclip glasses as a replacement for having a pair of sunglasses and a pair of glasses. Somewhere around a decade ago I moved to photochromatic lenses because I was tired of having to put the clips on and off. Donna still uses the magnetic Easyclip style because she hates the time lag when when moving from shade to sun and vice versa.
Two weeks ago when Donna went to put her magnetic clip-on sunglasses that came as a set with her regular glasses they weren’t where she expected them to be.
We looked everywhere for them. All her jacket pockets, her purse and the knapsack that acts her alternate purse. We checked in all the nooks and crannies in the interiors of the Miata and the Mini. We looked on the floor and every horizontal surface around the house, from the dresser in her closet to desk in the living room. We asked at our favorite coffee shop where we were the day before if anyone had turned them into their lost & found. They were just gone.
We hightailed down to Rite Aid to get an aftermarket set of clip-on sunglasses. They are spring loaded instead of the magnetic, but the fit is pretty good and were a darn sight cheaper than getting a real replacement. The only thing we could figure as they fell out of her pocket getting in or out of the car somewhere during our running around the day before.
While doing laundry today, what did I find at the bottom of the dryer after pulling out all the clothes? Right, her Easyclip sunglasses!
Had they been in a piece of clothing that got washed two weeks ago and the magnetic part stuck to somewhere inside the dryer drum? I find that that hard to believe, we do a load of laundry almost everyday and a couple times a week we two loads, those clip-ons would have appeared before now.
This was eerily reminiscent of the Easter Miracle of 2018.
Last month when we got home from Santa Fe the desktop PC was dead, so we bought a new Dell and that was delivered 2 days later by our friendly FedEx man. I was kind of surprised that a signature wasn’t required, maybe it was under a certain price point because I really didn’t spend that much on it.
When it arrived I did the usual hard drive dance of removing the old ones, plugging in the old main drive to copy stuff that I wanted, removing it and then adding the old second drive that holds all our documents to the new machine.
Because we were in a hurry to get it, I picked one that was in stock, so it wasn’t customized in any way. While swapping around hard drives I noticed that there was a spot for an optical drive. It even had what looked like a precut punch out hole in the front if you wanted to add a drive. Although I can’t remember the last time I actually used an optical drive, there is still a stack of writeable DVDs in a desk draw somewhere around here. I did have the drive that was in the non functional desktop, so I thought why don’t I put it in the new Dell.
I went online and found the right part number for the optical drive cover and found out it was a mere $3.99 and that included the FedEx shipping. While searching I found a couple of Dell community forum posts that lamented the Dell didn’t actually sell optical drives for this model desktop. Which is funny because not only is there the cut out on the front panel there is an obvious spot to slide a drive in the case and the cabling to plug it in right there.
I ordered the optical drive face plate and three days later there was the FedEx guy on my porch again. But if I wanted him to hand me the small box containing my order I had to sign for it! Seems kind of backwards doesn’t it? I didn’t have to sign for the $800 dollar computer, but I did have to sign for the $4 bit of plastic…