Before Spring Break started, my ninny self was at war with my brave soul over driving into DC to visit sights with the kids. Everyone around here tells me, “Drive to the Springfield station and take the Metro.” We did take the Metro on the 4th of July and with the cousins at Christmas, but the thought of going alone with 4 kids and one of them not getting on or off the train was too much for me worry about. So, my brave soul declared that I had driven in a country where they drive on the left, I had driven in countries where I couldn’t read the street signs. I certainly could drive into DC. I researched to find parking garages available and printed out my google map. Monday morning we set forth. I made good time driving to the city because I was able to take the HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) lane. I’ve had a HOV for years and just never knew it. I managed to cross the Potomac safely and then promptly missed my turn. The problem with following a google map printout is that if you do something wrong, you’re out of luck. There are no directions on how to get back to where I had been previously. So began our DC scenic tour. The advantage with this tour is that you see the Capitol from all sides. I’d drive around awhile, take a few turns and then “Look! There’s the Capitol!” I’d drive around some more, take a few turns and then “Look! There’s the Capitol” I’d drive around again, take a few turns and then “Look! There’s the Capitol” The kids soon lost interest and I soon lost all concept of NE, NW, SE, and SW. Somehow I eventually managed to find the parking garage (car park) (Just for you Juliet) and I let out a yell of triumph until I read the sign that said it was for monthly parking only. No worries, I had written down the location of another one. It also said monthly parking only. At this point I started to pray. Thankfully, a few blocks down, I found a daily parking garage and pulled in with a sigh of relief and a prayer of thanks. We had an enjoyable time at the Smithsonian museum of Natural History looking at dinosaur bones, stuffed mammals, and the hope diamond. I made the drive home without any mistakes and went to bed feeling quite confident. So, I woke up thinking…I’ve driven to the Smithsonian, I can drive to the zoo. Once again I had my google map and once again I started out at the tail end of morning traffic. I should have turned around when I saw I95 at a standstill. There had been an accident two exits north and everything was backed up. I’ll take the alternate route, I decided. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one to consider that option. It took me twice as long to get into DC and when I finally crossed the Potomac, I promptly took a wrong turn at the Lincoln Memorial. We then got to see the Washington Monument from all sides. It is inevitable that I have to make the wrong turn several times until I can convince myself that it is the wrong turn. Connecticut Ave just ended and I was on 17th street. I didn’t want to be on 17th street, the zoo is on Connecticut Ave. “I’ll make 4 rights and Connecticut Ave will not stop at the statue of the guy on the horse,” I said. As Connecticut Ave ended again and I was once again driving down 17th street, my brain finally worked out that I was going the wrong way. If I am at 1000 Connecticut and I need to go to 3000 Connecticut, it might be best to drive in the other direction. I arrived at the zoo two hours after I had started out. The drive was only twice as long as it should have been. Parking at the zoo is extremely limited and they warn you that if you don’t arrive early enough, you won’t get a spot. I drove past several lots that were full and came upon a lot with available spaces. There was a woman about 9 cars ahead of me arguing with the attendant. He got mad at her and sent her and the next 5 cars away. He then listened to something on his walkie talkie and then let the car two ahead of me drive in the lot. At this point, he was busy talking on the walkie talkie and the guy ahead of me and I decided it was best not to make eye contact and drive ahead and hope for the best. We got a spot. The kids liked the Amazonia building, the gorillas climbing on the cables strung over the zoo, and the panda. I took one wrong turn on the way home, but we once again arrived home safely. Tomorrow we are going to attempt the Cherry Blossom Festival. I am quite certain that at some point tomorrow I will declare, “Hey Look! There’s the Capitol!”
The chimney sweep arrived yesterday to insure I wouldn’t burn down the house. My brother-in-law, Rich claims that if you burn your fire really hot, you don’t ever need to clean the chimney. I’m quite certain that this philosophy works well for Rich, but I figured I better not chance it. The chimney sweep cleaned the chimney and the stove, put a cap on the chimney and closed the downstairs damper. He had to sell me on the need for a cap, so he kindly explained all the reasons why I should have one (birds, rain, dead animals). I think it was the dead animals that convinced me. (I wonder how Santa will get past the cap.) I tried to pretend I knew all about chimneys, just like I know all about pellet stoves. It’s easy to pretend when I keep my mouth shut and don’t ask questions like…”Why do you need a damper? How do you know if the damper’s open or closed?” Some things are best googled, but then google keeps forever track of your ignorance. Now my chimney is cleaned to go along with my clean gutters. A few weeks ago, I was laying flat on the roof of the sunroom pulling debris from the gutters. Josiah looked out the upstairs window at me and said, “They should have a show called extreme cleaning.” I used a ladder to clean the gutters on the front of the house and for the gutter in between the sunroom and the garage, I hung out of my upstairs window with a broom. The back of the garage thwarted me, however. Either I or the ladder was a foot too short. You can keep your opinion on that to yourself. I could have climbed up onto the garage roof from the front and walked over the peak to the back, but the garage roof is a bit steeper than the sunroom roof. I stood on the ladder thinking about it for a few moments while images of me falling off the roof filled my head. In the end, I decided a clogged gutter wasn’t worth a broken leg. It had been a bit of a chore for Josiah and I to drag the ladder through the hedge at the front of the house for gutter cleaning, so I decided to cheat on the Christmas lights. Gabe and I wrapped the lights around the porch rail instead of hanging them from the gutters. I am quite certain that next year that will not be an acceptable option for my dear husband. He so loves to hang Christmas lights. They put him in such a Holly Jolly mood. The kids and I also managed to bring a tree home and set it up. It’s amazing how good a tree looks when you can hang ornaments on the lower half. Between babies and cats, you forget what a fully decorated tree looks like. So, I’m almost ready for Christmas. My brother, Mike and his family will soon be arriving to spend Christmas with us. He claims that it is ok to just turn the rugs over for them. So, although my house may be a complete mess, I’ll have a clean chimney and almost all clean gutters to show him. I’m really looking forward to spending time with my brother Mike. It’s always nice to have family visit, especially when they happen to be a foot taller than me.
You may have noticed that I haven’t made any design changes to the blog lately. I’m actually pretty happy with my current design. The changes I’ve made recently have been transparent to the user. I’ve been focused on improving the blog’s position on Google search results. So I did some work on the keywords and description information in the header of the blog’s source code. Then I created a sitemap and indexed the site with Google. I’ve focused my efforts on queries for manry and manry family.
Today, if you Google manry family, the manrymission.com blog appears on page 3 of the results. If you Google manry the blog comes up on page 7. My goal is to make it to #1! So I need your help. You can help move manrymission.com up the Google ladder by searching for manry family or manry in Google and then clicking on the link to manrymission.com in the Google results. Google tracks the link you click in the search results to help decide a page’s search ranking.
Incidentally, if you Google Mugs Manry, manrymission.com comes up as the #1 result!
The entire time I resided in Australia, I was on the lookout for snakes. Australians are very fond of their venomous snakes. Abby and Gabe were the only family members to have a close encounter with a snake while we were there. We went to Phillip Island south of Melbourne and took a walk around a koala park while waiting to see the penguin parade that night. We were looking up in the trees at the koalas and not watching the path. Abby and Gabe were leading the way when Abby almost stepped on a giant black snake. The snake jumped straight up in the air 4 feet. Abby screamed and she and Gabe high tailed it back to us. The snake then escaped into the bush. Abby was the subject of much teasing after that. So, she was glad to witness what a ninny her mother was tonight. I was in the kitchen and turned around to see a small dark snake about 10 inches long and as wide around as a pencil slithering across the floor. I certainly had not expected snake encounters in Virginia, especially not in my house. I yelled, “SNAKE!”, and all the kids came to see. I decided to use the whisk broom to sweep the snake up and the dustpan to transport it out of the house. The snake was moving pretty quickly and was a bit hard to sweep into the dustpan. I finally got it and started moving towards the door. Just then, the snake decided to climb up the handle of the dustpan towards my hand. At this point, I screamed and dropped the pan back on the floor. Zeke was now crying hysterically, Abby was trying to comfort him, and Josiah was “back a safe distance” as he justified later. Only Gabe was standing at the ready to continue snake removal operation. Most likely because I stunned it, the snake got really still, so I swept him back into the dustpan and left it on the floor a few seconds. He didn’t move, so I told Gabe to hold open the door for me. After watching me throw a snake, Gabe decided it would be wiser to use the door stop then hold it open for his unpredictable mother. The snake was safely transported outside where everyone could comfortably look at it. It stuck it’s tongue out at us a few times which Zeke found quite amusing. Josiah googled snake pictures until we discovered it was a non venomous yellow bellied water snake. I pushed it off into the grass and am sincerely hoping it does not come back to visit.
In my family, there are two topics of conversation that are always relevant. One is any conversation that discusses the weather and the other is whether or not you have changed your furnace filter. The importance of changing your furnace filter is emphasized throughout this conversation and old anecdotes told about the daughter who didn’t know a furnace had a filter to change are brought up throughout. Having just purchased a home, the furnace filter conversation has taken place quite often. It is embarrassing to me to admit my ignorance of all things home repair. I do not know the answer to the simplest home repair questions. In years previous, my solution was to ask Dale to fix it and thereby cover the extent of my ignorance. With Dale deployed, my ignorance is now painfully obvious. The plastic bit that held a kitchen drawer in place broke, so I brought it to Lowes to get a replacement. They didn’t have the exact one, so I bought 4 different plastic bits in the hope that one would work. I then wedged myself into the bottom cabinet and attempted to screw the new plastic bit that looked most likely into place. The screw went round and round, but did not penetrate the back of the cabinet. I then shimmied back out of the cabinet and googled “do you have to drill a pilot hole before you put in a screw” - ignorant question #1. The answer to this appeared to be yes, so then I went downstairs to find Dale’s drill and stared at the endless array of drill bit choices and guessed that the drill bit should be smaller than the screw. I may have googled that ignorant question as well. Then I had to figure out how to tighten the drill around the bit and wedged myself into the cabinet again. I attempted to drill the pilot hole and the bit came flying off. Apparently, I hadn’t tightened the drill enough. When I finally got all the screws in, the plastic bit was crooked which made the glide not level, so now the drawer won’t close all the way. My next home maintenance failure was my attempt to put the air intake cover back on after I painted the hallway wall. The screws would no longer hold in the dry wall and I realized I would need to attempt a wall patch or mudding or some such home improvement task that I was ignorant of. Instead, I decided that if I slid it over just a hair, I could get 3 of the 6 screws to hold so that it won’t fall off the wall. I attempted to put a small piece of rolled up duct tape behind the top corner in an attempt to fool the eye, but that didn’t hold. So, the top is hanging out from the wall. When I put the air intake cover back on, the duct was filthy, so I was jarred into thinking about past furnace filter conversations. I then decided that it was best to get down to the basement and change it immediately before I called home again, so that I would have something new to say during the usual furnace filter conversation. Thankfully, the heat pump has a panel clearly marked filter. I unscrewed the panel and was shocked and dismayed by what I saw. The furnace filter was in pieces because it’s paper had gotten so full of dust and dirt. After I extracted all the pieces I could locate, I looked at the new filter. It had helpful little arrows and a single sentence “place arrows in the direction of the air flow”. Ignorant question #2 - Exactly which way does air flow through a furnace?
Yes nothing like an Organizational...