A little grass on your leg?

Lawn equipment.

It's expensive and kind of annoying to use. Stupid 50:1 mixture of oil with gas! I have to have a jerrycan just for the frikken weed wacker?! A device whose sole purpose is to vibrate my arms to sleep?

At the end of the day it's really all just an elaborate way of getting grass on your leg.

Lust for gold or born neutral?

A series of unfortunate events led us to suspect that our 240v oven outlet was borked. Trying to measure if it was alive with a multi-meter proved frustrating as it's very hard to get the tiny multimeter prongs to make a connection without pulling the outlet off the wall and touching the wires directly. To make matters worse we weren't quite sure what results we should get (other than that probably some of them should not be zero!).

A quick trip to Home Depo (thankfully quite close!) yielded a nice explanation, a diagram of what our results should be, and two reusable multi-meter prong extensions. Just ram into 240v outlet, grab both at once, and enjoy the ride! Hopefully by recording this on the blog we'll have a nice reference in case any of our other appliance outlets seem borked.

Multimeter with Optional Prong Extenders

Apparently these are the results one should get from a 240v outlet:

Expected Results

Despite some degree of nervousness about ramming wires into a 240v outlet, we decided to try to test our outlet. Using our shiny new prong extenders we found that our outlet gave the right results between live/live, live/ground, and gave about 7v between live/neutral. We neglected to measure neutral/ground. The correct live/live result may explain why our electrician thought the outlet was operational - he probably didn't check every pair.

We chatted with the Home Depo electrician once again and speculated that neutral might be charged, that wires might be stripped too far and arcing, or ... something. If neutral was charged we'd expect to see 120v neutral/ground. Once home again we tested again and this was our final result:

Actual Results

Neutral to live OR ground giving roughly zero seemed to strongly suggest that the neutral wasn't connected to *anything*. To confirm this we finally took the step we'd been avoiding all along and ripped the damn outlet out. As one might have expected we discovered a white wire (std color for neutral) kinda chilling on it's own:

The multimeter results are 100% correct if you touch the white wire directly when neutral is desired. Sadly we didn't quite manage to fix it as the screw to loosen to slide neutral in seems to be completely stripped. Fingers crossed the electrician makes it in today to fix the bloody thing and we actually have a working oven (gas range part is fine) again soon!!

Much ado about bbq

As Sears has helpfully delivered us a non-functional range that they can't seem to get repaired (so angry...) we decided to re-order our house purchase plan a little and buy a grill before anything else. Grills come in excitingly large boxes that (luckily) just barely fit into a Subaru ;) For reference, the recommended solution if your grill doesn't fit into your vehicle is to rent the tool van ($20ish) NOT to pay the delivery fee ($60+, with some useless multi-hour deliver window).

Despite having the handy-person skills of an 11 year old we opted to assemble it ourselves. The hardest part of assembling a grill is peeling off the "easily removable" plastic protective sheathing. This stuff would probably withstand gunfire and with a few angled layers might hold off a shaped charge. We literally spent half the assembly time trying to pull the stuff off! After some time at this, plus a few visitors, and other random interruptions the grill was assembled and ready to connect to the gas.

Lucky we had a natural gas outlet installed on the deck right? - we can just plug the hose in a cook! Well ... almost. The picture below shows the enormous quick-release connector that came with the grill (bottom left) along side the one installed on the deck. The hose from the grill fits the gargantuan quick-release NOT the rather smaller connector on the deck.

Not to worry; we'll just unscrew the quick-release that is currently installed and screw on the new one. Sounds promising except that unscrewing the current connector is freaking difficult without bending the heck out of the system. It is also challenging when you don't have a suitable wrench. No problem, we'll just go to Home Depo to get a wrench and some of that freaky teflon tape stuff that encourages the connections not to leak gas.

The Home Depo staff examined a digital photo of the system alongside the giant connector, assured us they all screwed onto the same size adapter, and sold us the requisite tools. Feeling handy we headed home, struggled mightily to unscrew the tiny quick-release without completely destroying the gas outlet assembly, and a few choice cusses later got it off. At this point we learned that both the quick release and the threaded female connector on the smaller quick-release are smaller. Contrary to Home Depo staff expectations it seems multiple sizes are in use. Our natural gas outlet expects 3/8" whereas our giant unit has a 1/2" female threaded connector. Further cusses. OK, off to Home Depo again where staff helped us locate the two shiny bits on the right:

Further wrenching and cussing rammed it all together and produced the final masterpiece below:

Thankfully after all this the barbeque works perfectly and produced some rather outstanding striploins on its first run - complete with spiffy cross-hatch grill marks and all. So good!

No Purple Poodles!

It seems that as a duplex we are a strata council. Today we made - officially - our first and probably last ruling:

No Purple Poodles

This proclamation was officially inscribed into the documents for the sale by our notary :)

Teaset of Survival

Our Chinese teaset has survived  travel wrapped in brightly colored hand-towels and apple-wrapping-foam (see Leaving Xi'an) from China to Canada, living in a garage and last but not least the moving truck to reach our new place without a single breakage! Pu'er, here we come :)

Moved In!

This is basically done, right:

We figured things were ready enough so after a savage clean we started moving odds and ends Saturday the 15th, movers came on the 16th and the 16th was our first night in!

Rod's favorite feature by a rather wide margin is the smartbox connected to ethernet outlets in five rooms.

This is so awesome we actually already wish we'd had even more put in!

A key to move-in success turns out to be paper-that-smells-like-cheese. Keeps movers from having to track dirt everywhere ;)

In order to get things moved in fast without tracking in too much dirt for most items we had the movers carry stuff into the paper-covered area and then Rod would run the box to the appropriate room for Pavan to begin to unpack. It turns out moving the boxes in takes far less time than unpacking them so everything rapidly began to be covered in boxes:

In the end the mother-in-law suite wound up being about the only place not infested with boxes:

A fence has miraculously appeared too:

As we moved the gardeners were busy installing little trees and shrubs so now we seem to own a row of small trees too.

So nice to finally move in!!!

Best sign ever!

Although the deal is not 100% completed until the other party takes possession and all that we were very excited to see this sign go up:

It was literally gone before we even got so far as to post it on the MLS!

As an added bonus it seems we are throwing in this lovely shopping cart!

Less excitingly we're evidently in the eternal 'almost done' phase and have thus not quite moved in yet. We probably could if we really had to but we are electing to wait rather than rush in early.