Making a phone call: A travelogue

Phone calls can be a bit of an adventure at my house.

I have no land line - just my Verizon cell phone. Verizon's service was fine for the first two years I had it, so in September 2007 I signed up for another two-year contract. In December 2007 I moved into my new house. Problem.

Apparently I'm on the very fringe of Verizon's service area, and reception varies from day to day, or even minute to minute. Over time, I've established a progression of where I can go to get a signal.

Tonight, though, topped all previous calls in that it took seven tries (I think it was seven) to complete the conversation with a friend.

As with all calls, I started here:

Standing by the kitchen sink (sorry for the blurry photo). The old standby. For some reason - my guess is that topography allows a kind-of-clear shot from my kitchen sink a few miles to a distant cell tower - this one spot works about 75 percent of the time. Movement must be kept to a minimum, to avoid angering the cell phone reception gods into dropping the call. Step a few feet, and you're done for.

But the kitchen sink spot didn't work tonight, so I took the phone upstairs into the soon-to-be-finished bedroom:



It's high up in the air, and lags behind the kitchen sink only slightly in cell phone reception. It lagged again tonight, as the second attempt got dropped.

So, to the back door:


The third stop is to step out the back door. Get out of the confining walls of the house, and let the cell phone wave particles roam free, or do whatever it is they do. But tonight, another no-go. Third strike.

I closed the dog in the downstairs bedroom to keep her from getting into the kitchen garbage, and headed out to the big basswood tree in the middle of the yard:

This is another usually reliable spot, but gets bumped down the list for being outdoors and a good 50 feet from the house. Last summer I leapfrogged the first three spots and headed out to this tree when I got chased by a pit bull and called the sheriff to report it. I didn't want to get cut off while on the phone with 911 operators. But tonight? No-go.

Next stop: the kind-of-dying walnut tree:

This big tree stands at just about the highest point in the yard - by yard, I mean the grassy area of my property; getting to this tree doesn't require going "in the woods." This walnut is way out of its natural range; it was planted by the previous owners about 50 years ago. It's having some troubles now, maybe due to some drought conditions the past few years. In any case, it's another good place to try making a call. Before tonight, this was as far as I ever had to go to complete a call. Before tonight. The fifth try failed.

On to the back driveway:

The back driveway is kind of self-explanatory. It leads from the yard to the little town road at the back of the property. It's at about the same elevation as the walnut tree, and it provides easy walking to try to find a signal. I broke new ground in having to go there tonight for my sixth try. No good: I could never get a call to go through.

I was kind of running out of property at this point, and was in uncharted territory for finding a signal to tie up the loose ends of this call. I headed down the back driveway, turned left into the woods, went about 25 feet and walked up a short rise to this:


A fallen tree, suspended about three feet in the air. I grabbed some neighboring, still-alive trees to balance myself, and climbed up. It sort of wobbled a bit, but I dialed again and... success! The best signal yet. The conversation was completed, and I jumped back down and headed back to the house.

I'm thinking of switching to another carrier when my Verizon contract expires later this year.

Laundry night derailed

(Warning... kind of gross photo below)

I watched Lost tonight, then got ready to do laundry.

My laundry set-up is a bit unusual. The water from the first rinse is pumped into an adjacent sink, where it is stored and can be pumped back into the washer for a second load. If it's not needed, there is a little pump that pumps the water up into the outflow pipe out to the septic system.

On Monday I did one load of laundry, and left the unused water sitting in the sink for the past couple days.

Tonight I went down, saw the gray water and decided I didn't want to reuse it after two days, so I flicked on the little motor and the sink started to drain as I sorted clothes. After a couple minutes, I heard the suction sound that indicated the sink was empty, went to flick off the pump and saw, to my horror...

Nooooo! 

I knew there were mice in the basement - they had scarfed up some spilled dog food before I had a chance to clean it up, and thwarted my attempts to catch them in a live trap. I wanted them out... but not like this. My used laundry water became a water-filled pit of doom.

So I've hit the brakes on laundry night, and I'm stalling and stalling going back down there to deal with the carcass. I know it's just a mouse, but I'm squeamish about these things. I'm about to go out to the garage and assess my garden tools to see what might be the least-gross way to get this thing out of the house. Garden shovel into a box into the trash container outside is the likely choice.

I'll never be able to look at the laundry tub the same way again.

Cooped up

It hasn't been above zero here since Monday night. I haven't left the immediate area of my house since then - just twice-a-day walks with the dog (we've kept them short; even she doesn't really want to go out), going out to get the mail and take out the garbage, and a few other trips to the garage.

I wish I could say I've gotten a lot done around the house. I've done some projects, but not a lot. I did find out that my dog really, really seems to like Fritos. She's been clinging to her crate a lot again, but the sound of a crinkling Fritos bag (more so than other "food noises" - I tested) brings her running.

I'm a little worried about my car starting on Thursday when I'm forced to head into town for work. I think this is the coldest weather it has been in, and the battery is getting old. I guess we'll find out tomorrow.

Power outage

The power went off tonight, somewhere around 6 p.m.

I'm obsessive about power surges ruining my computer - even though I use a protective power strip, I unplug even that when I'm not using the computer - so the fact that everything flicked off when I was online caused me immediate concern.

My house is in some disarray, but fortunately I remembered that I still had my winter storm survival pack assembled - and it contained a headlamp. I dug it out, checked around the house (the dog got scared and left the comfort of the recliner for the cocoon-like safety of her crate), and then did about the only thing I could do - bury myself under some blankets, turn on the battery-powered radio and read by the light of the headlamp.

I thought about how much my life requires electricity - especially in winter. No power means no heat (the furnace and space heaters are all I've got), no water (the well requires electricity, though I always keep some pitchers / jugs filled for these situations), no cooking. I think I can manually open the garage door, but even that would require some figuring out because it's attached to an automatic opener. At least my neighbors have a fireplace that can heat their house, so I know I wouldn't freeze in a prolonged power outage - though my house's pipes would.

After maybe 15 minutes, the power came back on... and a couple minutes later, it went off again. Another 15 minutes and it came back. It's been hours now, and no further issues.

I'm not sure what caused the outage - no snow today, relatively warm weather. In any case, the house is warm, the dog is back on the recliner and the computer seems to be fine.

Stuck on the roof

The roof repair set-up, December 2008

I have discovered a lot of quirks about my house over the past year. One of the first, and most enduring, is the "whirly" vent atop the highest part of the roof, and the difficulty in dealing with it.

Soon after I moved in, on a windy winter day, I heard a high-pitched shrieking noise while upstairs in the house. I went outside, and discovered that the whirly vent was squealing like crazy, audible well down the road from my house.

It was winter, and cold and snowy, so I thought I'd try living with it. But one night in the upstairs bedroom with that vent shrieking all night long was enough - I had to fix it.

That's when I discovered the difficulty in accessing the vent. The problem could not be fixed from inside, and there was no attic access anyway. The front pitch of the roof was far too steep to climb, so the only other place to place a ladder on the ground and get to the top was on the east side of my house. That involved taking the extending ladder I inherited with the house (i.e. an unfamiliar item), extending it to its full double length, and going up more than two stories.

On a bitter cold winter day - temps in the double digits below zero - I found myself with time and energy, and I couldn't take the howling any more. I bundled up, got the ladder set up, and went for it.

As I got to the top of the ladder - like 20 feet up - I tried to make the swing from ladder to roof. My bulky overcoat got caught, so I took it off and threw it to the ground. The ladder kind of slid from side to side, but I got up on the upper roof. I had a can of WD-40 and sprayed around the various moving parts of the vent, but I soon found that did no good. I just could not access the needed areas without taking the vent off - and I didn't have the tools.

I went back to the ladder to start the climb down, and in the course of kind of testing its stability, it shifted and the "locks" bracing the upper part of the extending ladder disengaged. It was not safe to climb down - I had no idea if the upper portion would support me, or collapse when I put my weight on it. I was stuck - and I had discarded my wind-breaking overcoat.

I assessed my options. One was to jump to the lower roof about where the ladder is in the photo above. But there was limited room for error - if I slipped (the roof was icy then), I risked tumbling off that roof and to the cement sidewalk below.

Option two involved jumping off to a larger area of the lower roof where there was a thick blanket of snow - to the left in the photo - but I had to clear the main power line to the house. But I worried - would I electrocute myself if I brushed against the power line?

Right before heading out, I had for some reason decided to grab my cell phone, and I got it out and called my dad, 400 miles away. He assured me that the line was insulated, and I would be fine if I brushed it.

So, I psyched myself up for a few minutes. I had to jump - there was no other option. Well, I guess I could have called the sheriff - but I imagined that call getting heard by the local media, and me being featured on that night's TV news.

So, I took a few steps and leaped - and emerged unscathed. The snow cushioned my fall. I crawled under the wires and got into the house through the upstairs window.

-----------------------------------------

Well, I was back down - but the vent was not fixed. A few months later, when it was a bit warmer, I bought a new whirly vent - which meant I had to get back up on the roof. This time, I tried the approach pictured in the photo:

- Single ladder set (precariously, given the roof pitch) from lower roof to upper roof - stable enough for me to climb up, but not to get down; no extending ladder issues. 

- All tools pre-placed on the upper roof, so I don't have to carry anything with me up the ladder.

- In the absence of snow, a big pile of foam, quilts, blankets, insulation, etc. placed in the "landing zone" to cushion my jump.

It worked - the vent was replaced, and no injury to me.

I had hoped that would be the end of my roof adventures for a while, but recently I noticed that the new vent wasn't spinning - which, from what I know about whirly vents, means it isn't venting the attic properly. So, I got the old vent, which I had saved, doused it with WD-40, made the epic climb up to the roof and did yet another switch.

It's spinning fine, now - and no squeaking.

The end. Wow, that was a really long story about roofs.