Thinking about a Couple Songs Tonight....

Yes, I have a couple oldies songs running through my head this evening.
One of my favorite songs that I used to play in band class was "Stormy" 

And yes, we sure had "stormy" weather here in Wisconsin today.....  about 3:30 the skies turned black, the winds started to blow and rain began.  Wheeeeeeee  this pic is taken right from the front steps of our house.

It got dark so fast, and there weren't any warnings yet on the tv. I was surprised.  So I pulled in our American flag, shut all the windows and waited for it to hit.   It was getting very hot and humid and windy. Steve was on his way home from work in the middle of it.  I was getting worried when he was late (he was stuck behind finishing up something at work)

The next song is a variation of "The Night The Lights Went Out in Georgia"  errrr Chilton?
Then the power went out.  All over town!   Seems a big tree went over some lines and started on fire, so over 2,000 homes were without power as the storm rolled in.  I checked the WPS website and said it would be repaired as soon as possible. But no real time frame.

When Steve finally got home, there was a lull in the rain.  So we grabbed our uncooked dinner, our laptops and cell phone (which also doubles as a mobile data hotspot) the doggers and their dinner dishes.... We went on out to the motorhome in the back yard! Just as we got into the motorhome it started raining again.  We made a good choice to run when we did.

We have four deep cycle marine batteries of power stored and fully charged from the solar panels, and we could kick in the generator if need be.  Steve settled in playing his favorite game of cards on his laptop while I was cooking up supper on the propane stove. I was able to recharge our lagging cell phone battery as well as plug in our laptops to power up. The doggers thought we should be going somewhere, and were a bit confused.

We decided to settle in for our next song:   "I Love A Rainy Night"  

The rain came down for a while, and we ate our dinner and watched the storm pass on the tv weather stations. We had radar tracking on the laptop and the weather station on the tv to follow along. Soon it was over and the sun came out again!   The power didn't come back on yet, so we stayed in the rig.  The dogs had now figured it was fun time camping and cuddling and snuggling. Could the next song be Donny Osmond's "Puppy Love" ???

About 7 pm my friend Sarah messaged me that the power was back on.  Sooo the next song of course has to be the gospel hymn :  "I Saw The Light"  as we craned our necks out of the motorhome side window to see the back porch light come on. 

So we moved kit and kaboodle back into the house.  

sooooo along comes John Denver, singing

"Back Home Again"

The house was pretty stuffy and hot being closed up all afternoon and evening.  It was hot and humid outside.  So we kicked on the central air to cool it down.  We started thinking it was time to get the little window air conditioner unit for the window upstairs installed for the summer. 

See, last summer we figured out even with the central air running in our house, on hot evenings we weren't getting cool enough temps up in our bedroom.  With the thermostat on the main floor, of course it was cool down there as cool air travels downward... and the heat stays in the upstairs bedrooms.  Even with shutting all of the registers on the main floor, it was not enough to boost the air to the upper floors.  We have to run it at a considerably low temp setting on the AC thermostat downstairs for a long time to push the cool air upstairs.   And by morning the downstairs is freezing! 

I asked Steve to think of a song now with something "cool"  in it....  all he could come up with is "Long Cool Woman in A Black Dress"   oh geesh! 

Our solution was to buy one small window air conditioner for the bedroom.  But since our bed is right near the two front windows, it would be blowing right across us, not to mention the noise factor.  Our creative thinking caps figured out to install the small window air conditioner unit in our closet!  Yes, our big walk-in closet has a window.  Imagine that, in a 100 year old house, to have a window in a closet?  (also the grandtot's bedroom closet has a window too) 

If we keep the closet door open at an angle to blow the air into the bedroom, we are comfy and somewhat peaceful without having the noisy unit right next to the bed! 

And that brings us to our next song.....  "Up on A Roof"   because Steve has to crawl out of our bedroom windows to get on the front porch roof to remove the outer storm window. It's the old fashioned kind that has to be removed from out there, not inside like the rest of the windows.  Once he removes that, he is able to install the unit from the inside.  

Once he got the outer storm window off, 

he passed it through to me waiting inside. 

Then he came inside to remove the trims and remove the lower pane of the inside window.  We discovered last year that the closet window is so small you can't leave the lower pane in an upwards position, the AC unit won't fit.  So it takes a real re-vamping to get this to work. 

Carefully he lifted the ac unit into place 

and I moved over to hold it there as soon as I snapped this pic. 

I was the person handing the tools and holding the unit in place while he put the trim boards back on. Now he had to put the large support board on to make sure that it never falls out the window and rolls down off the porch roof! 

See how this configuration works now?  The noisy unit is in the closet window, and if we leave the closet door open on an angle, it helps the flow to come into the bedroom.

The unit even has a remote that has a mode called "feels like" which you can set a comfortable temp on the remote and set the remote in the portion of the room you want that cold.  Then the AC unit runs until the right temp is sensed by the location of the remote, not over in the closet.  Neato!

Curtain back in place,

all done! 

While Steve was out there, he decided to clean all those danged whirly bird helicopters out of the front porch rain gutter.  All of the rest of the gutters have covers on them, just this one and the garage are the older open type and need to be cleaned.  Paula Freund who grew up in this house remembers having to clean out that gutter, and in later years they send her son out there through the window to do it for the grandparents! 

so that brings to mind David Grays "Gutters Full of Rain" 

 Out he crawled back on the roof to scoop out the gutters....

they were all wet and goopy and full of saturated helicopter mush! 

Mr Zoom Zoom didn't even wait for me to get him a small trowel 

or to fetch a set of work gloves.  

He used a plastic bag on his hand and scooped them out, 

tossing them to the ground below! 

That is another job well done

around Our Old House! 

He safely got off the roof and back in the house, 

all in one piece.  

Whew! 

Tomorrow I will write up a blog about our weekend fun and the baby shower at our daughter Heather's house on Sunday.