Ty’s Weblog

Kate and I just finished.  No spoilers.  But, wow.  Well done Jo.

423 pages done today.

361 more pages to do tomorrow.

No spoilers here, but it has been quite a ride so far.

Kate just got home with our Harry Potter books. We’ve decided to start on them first thing in the morning when our minds are a bit fresher.

Well, I finished my reread of the first 6 Harry Potter books last night. So now I’m just waiting for Midnight Saturday morning when we’ll get our hands on book 7. In the meantime, I’m pretty much avoiding as much Internet and television as I can in an attempt to not be spoiled on what happens. I got spoiled on book 6 from people maliciously posting spoilers for reasons I can’t quite understand. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with people posting spoilers, I even read spoilers about some things sometimes. My problem is when people post them in an attempt to spoil people who don’t want to be spoiled. They should be well labeled as spoilers and not reveal anything unless you want the information.

In any case, I’m avoiding things like Digg and Slashdot till I’m done with the book, and I’m also avoiding mainstream news sites and television that wasn’t TiVoed before this week.

Kate is going to a Midnight launch party Friday night, so she’ll bring our copies (yes copies, you don’t expect one of use to wait for the other to finish do you?) of the book home after that and we can get started. Focused reading time will ensue. We’ll be letting the kids watch a lot more TV and play more video games than we normally would, we suspect, in an attempt to get through the book before we have to emerge into the real world on Monday. It should be pretty intense.

It’s been a long ride. I have to admit to being a little bit nervous about it ending. So many long series have disappointed me in the end, I just hope it doesn’t happen with this one.

So Wednesday evening, Kate notices that the AC unit outside it making some strange noises. It had stopped by the time I got home though. Later that evening it started up again. From the racket it was making, there was clearly something wrong with the fan.

Thursday morning we called up the contractors who had done the AC work on our house. They said they would be happy to come out and take a look at in… on Tuesday. This has always been a problem with them, so we decided that was enough for them.
To the Yellow Pages! We found R.A. Dobson Heating and Air Conditioning. They were able to have someone over to the house later that day. Sure enough, the fan was busted. Replacing the fan and the blades (which the broken motor had caused problems with) and the top of the AC unit (which had a big crack in it) was going to cost over $1000, all that money and we’d still have a 7 year old AC underneath it, which seemed likely to give out in a few years anyway. We decided to go ahead and replace the whole outside unit. While we were doing that, we decided to replace the inside stuff also, just to keep everything in sync age and tech wise. By replacing both, we were able to move to a Puron based AC, which we felt good about also.

They came out this morning to do the install. It took them pretty much all day of course. That includes having to run a new line from the outside to the inside since the new unit required a larger line. That was kind of nice though, since the original line was run very badly and was really in the way where it was. The new one looks much nicer. The new AC looks much nicer also, and as a bonus, is much quieter.

We were very happy with the service they gave us. They gave us a quick turnaround and did an outstanding job on the installation. The house has started to cool back down slowly, we should be much more comfortable tonight than we were last night.