Thoughts Big And Small

Last Updated on: 30th July 2023, 06:58 pm

I had a few random thoughts that weren’t Trixie-related. Don’t worry, I can’t foresee this post being nearly as long.

In our house, we have a fan standing in the hallway near the entrance of one of the bedrooms. The reason it’s there is that’s the only room where we could put our air conditioner, so we need the fan to move the cooler air out to the rest of the rooms. For some reason, the fan we put in the hall has a high likelyhood of dying quickly. I think it’s because it gets bumped and kicked a lot. We don’t want to, but we hit it going in and out of the room, and when other blinks come over, they tend to hit it before we have a chance to warn them to “Watch out for the…bang! fan.” Sometimes it lasts for a year, maybe 2 but that’s it.

And that’s about as long as our last fan lasted. Mom and dad were down, and decided to help us get a new fan. And good lord, it was impossible to find a simple fan. It’s a fan. It needs to sit there and blow air, and maybe oscelate. That’s it.

But nowadays, fans beep! They have buttons and sleep timers and remotes! Who needs a remote control for a fan? Well, apparently, we do, because that’s the only kind of fan we could find. Part of it was a lot of places were all sold out of fans except for the fancier models. But I have had other years where I have had to look hard past all the fancy fans to get a simple one.

Oh well, now we have this tall fan thing that kind of resembles a gumball machine. It even has a setting that’s supposed to mimic natural breeze. How does it do this? It switches from high, to medium, to low, to off, to high, to medium, to low, to off. It stays at each setting for a couple of seconds. Wouldn’t that be way harder on the motor?

We have another kind of fan around the house. It’s this weird fan with a plastic blade made by Caframo. The blade isn’t covered by anything because it can’t really hurt you. So it just spins in the air. If you bump it, it makes this little noise and you jump because you weren’t expecting to hit a fan blade, but that’s all that happens. For some reason, I never mentioned its name to Steve before Tuesday, I just called it the psycho fan or the curtain-eatin’ fan because if it got turned and fell against the curtains, it would look like the blade was trying to eat them. Now that it has a company name attached to it, Steve has a horrible time remembering it, so he’s started calling it a Romero fan.

Anyway, I found out the coolest thing about them. As they get older, the blade tends to just die. It falls apart, causing the fan to hippity hop all over wherever you have it sitting, and you can’t use the poor little fan anymore. The motor is fine, just the blade is gone. Well, apparently, you can buy new blades for these things! I never would have known! I know that Home Hardware sells them for sure. So if you have one of these suckers, and the blade snaps, the fan is not dead! Just go get yourself a Caframo or classic fan blade and you should be good.

Here’s a question for blinks with braille watches. Do you know of any way to clean the surface? As you know, braille watches get touched, and they get touched whenever the person wants to see the time. So, you can imagine they accumulate a lot of oil, dirt, and other assorted goo on them. The thing is it gets in their so subtlely that I can’t feel it. I know my watch is dirty when my mom looks at it and goes “Oo that’s bad!” So, does anyone know of a way that I can clean it myself? I’d like to get the grime off before my sister’s wedding, and then just do it regularly in the future. A professional watch-cleaning is uber expensive, and I don’t think the insides need a cleaning. I would just like to get the skin oils off, and know they’re gone, since I can’t feel them. Grrr. Any pointers?

I’m still kind of in shock about this as I write this. Remember the family member who had his 90th birthday last year? Well, suddenly I find out he’s gone into a retirement home. I mean really suddenly. Mom and dad left to come to see my sister and I, and he was at home. While they were gone, he had called an ambulance twice because he felt short of breath and had chest pains. The hospital would look at him, find nothing wrong, and send him away. Now, mom and dad arrive back last night and find out he’s in a home! They say he sounds happy, but they haven’t seen him yet! I don’t even have details, just the barest of facts that he’s there now.

Holy crap. The logical part of me thinks that him being in a retirement home isn’t a bad idea for him, since he didn’t much like cooking, he’s felt sort of alone at the house, and now with these frequent chest pains, it would be good to have someone to call on to assess things and have it not require a hospital visit if it’s not necessary. I’m just kind of in shock at the suddenness of it. I’m always amazed at how fast life can change. One minute, everything is as you expect it to be, and the next, things have been turned on their heads.

Um, do I really want to end a thoughts post there? I really don’t have anything else to write about, but feel like I just took the thought train and threw it off a cliff. I hope everyone is well. I’m sure I’ll have something else cooler to say later.

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.