Tony Yarusso's Blog

So, as I mentioned I've been taking off wallpaper glue.  While that in itself is not nearly interesting enough to write about, yesterday's events while doing so may be.  Since I had been doing the main part of my parents' room, the CO detector that usually lives on one of those walls was unplugged, and when I finished that and moved on the the bathroom I plugged it back in.  A little while later I walked by, and it read 17ppm (normally it should be 0).  Slightly confused, so I checked the one in the basement: 7ppm.  Okay, somethings not right here.  Called Dad on his cell, while he was driving back from Winnipeg.  He didn't know why they would have a reading, so now I have to contact the fire department.  Find out that it's after hours for the non-emergency number, so I have to call 911 to reach them.  Sheriff shows up, closely followed by firefighters, who happen to have nifty handheld CO detectors to check it out with.  Fully-suited guys tramp around our house for a while, fail to find any significant readings of their own, and suggest that the detectors may simply be too old and need replacing.  Okay, that's better than the alternative (i.e. Tony's been working in a semi-toxic environment for the last six days).  Also on the plus side, we gave the neighbor kids some free entertainment, because who doesn't love a fire truck?
Then there's today.  Plans had been made to have some of our relatives over to celebrate my grandpa's birthday.  The Rude`s were going to bring over a partially made cake, and bake it here, and my mom was going to make homemade ice cream in the electric ice cream maker from the HM auction (which incidently was purchased by Kayla's homeroom).  This afternoon, our power goes out, in accordance with its usual hobby of doing so now and then.  So I got to make another phone call, this time to Xcel Energy, to get yet another big, fun truck out to our house.  My mom was a bit irritated when she got home, because the electric stove and ice cream maker aren't going to work too well without electricity.  So various scamperings to cover that, including my dad stopping at Fleet Farm and buying a generator (finally, we've been discussing it for years).  Fortunately, the power ending up coming back on ~45 minutes before the guests arrived, so that was good.  Don't worry about the generator though; I guarantee this won't be the last time our power takes a vacation.