Random Tuesday Morning Thoughts.

--The house lights were flickering all last week. The lights would dim, then suddenly brighten. I had the power company send out a guy to check the supply, and he showed me that the power coming to the meter was solid. I called out an electrician, and the guy fixed the loose screws to the common/neutral line in my breaker box in about 5 minutes flat.

--Two days later, we realized that my fancy double convection oven doesn't light up, power up, or anything, anymore. I've thrown every breaker, but that's not the issue. Need to check power to the oven, but my multimeter is dead. We're hoping that there's a fuse in the oven that I don't (yet) know about.

--Remember how I needed to get that furnace vented so that I could run it? Well, I finally got an HVAC guy to come help me. Turns out that the double-walled stovepipe stuff that I had wouldn't mate to the extant stuff, so I don't feel too badly about not being able to do it. The guy who did it for me used some skills that I was unfamiliar with heretofore. He offered to help me for free. I gave him $100. It's the holidays, and he's out of work.  Now I've got heat. That furnace is amazing.

--We had been heating the house on colder nights with the application of space heaters. This kills me, because they're 1000 to 1200 watt money-burning machines, as opposed to natural gas in the furnace. But here was another thing that I wasn't really aware of until the heat was connected: I felt like a bit of a failure. Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs puts "Shelter," and "Warmth" as pretty basic needs, and I felt like I had failed my family in that respect, until the heat was turned on. Here in Texas, the winters are pretty mild, and with the insulated attic, it was pretty comfortable in the house, until, at last, it wasn't. It's funny how you don't realize that something is really bothering you, until it's fixed, sometimes. Like an irritating noise that's just insinuated itself into the background, so that you're shouting over it.

--The tile is 2/3 done. My wife is irritated that I'm such a perfectionist. But she's not doing it on the night that I work. We should have it grouted and sealed by Christmas.

--Last night I dropped by the house for lunch, and found that my wife an the girls had put up a Christmas tree. We hadn't bothered, with the living room floor in such disarray. My wife said that the lack of a tree was her own source of angst about being a bad parent. Funny what chews at you. It hadn't bothered me, much.

--Both of the girls have strung Christmas lights in their bedrooms. It's charming, but I couldn't sleep with those on. At least they don't twinkle.

--We had amazing fog last night, as the warm rains left water on the ground and cold front rolled in. I had a lady ask me about how to get to Amarillo, and I told her to just stop and spend the night in Wichita Falls. Visibility is miserable, and the weather only gets worse as you get to the Panhandle. She said that she and her beau were pressing on. I wished them the best of luck.

--Someone dropped off a bunch of .30-'06 cases at the PD for whoever wants them. Most of them have been reloaded before, and some probably several times. I shall have to check the casewall thickness before using them. I think I got about 90 of them, mixed headstamps. I'm going to throw charges and load a bunch of .35 Whelen. I've got an itch to get back to shooting that, again.