Our Luck With Dehumidifiers Has Dried Up

 So, our new dehumidifier has WiFi.

Yeah, connected by Bluetooth. Which means there's a computer in yet another of our appliances, which means the dehumidifier can, whenever it gets the order, just take us out. It's already connected to our future computer overlords. All they have to do is say "Exterminate!' and the dehumidifier replies "by your command!' and we wake up either drowned or desiccated corpses.

Have you ever woken up as a desiccated corpse? Talk about dry mouth.

 

It's been a rough year in the Hunter household for small appliances. You probably know about the snowblower catching fire. Sure, it was a small fire, but when it's coming out of a device that's literally designed to deal with frozen water, it tends to take you aback.

The first thing to break this year was the vacuum cleaner. On the one hand, it spent years working hard to pick up all the fur Beowulf left behind. On the other hand, it was literally designed to do that.

(I just realized, I could have kept all that fur and used it for blown-in house insulation.)

 

"Dude, I'm watching this from doggy Heaven. Stop blaming me."

 

These mini disasters come in bunches for us, and I also just realized I haven't tried to start our bedroom air conditioner for the season. The lawn mower, much to my shock, took off on the first pull.

A couple of weeks ago I walked down to the basement and realized things were smelling a bit musty. Okay, really musty. Okay, there was fog rolling in. The dehumidifier had been down there, working away nine months out of the year, for so long is had qualified for retirement So it ... retired. If I kicked it on, it would kick back off within minutes.

Me being me, this was the first time in years I thought: "I wonder if this thing has a filter?"

It did.

It's dead! And dusty.

 

I headed down with the intention of cleaning the whole unit, but it took me awhile to remember where the filter was. You have to take the drain tank out, then reach up under the housing and pull the thing downward. And when I say "the thing" ... it was covered with a dark gray, packed-on dust which, I discovered when it sent me into an allergy attack, was itself covered with mold.

But it wasn't actually that hard to clean. Hot water, soap, and holding it under the faucet had it as good as it would have been if I'd done it when I was supposed to. When I put everything together and started it back up, it blasted enough air into my face to qualify it as a jet engine.

Then it died.

It's been a blue year for Hunter appliances.

 

Since the basement was starting to develop its own weather patterns, Emily did some research, and we headed out the next day to replace it. That's when we found out all the good ones could be connected to the internet.

Why?

The air conditioner we bought a couple of years ago came with a remote control, which struck me as ludicrous. If it's working properly, you should be in good enough shape to get up and adjust it yourself.

Which is the same thing many people used to say about TVs, and we now have eight remotes just for entertainment, so never mind.

So we bought the new one, and it's working fine, although I think I heard it whisper as we left the basement:

"Just wait until I make contact with your fridge." 

 

 

 

You can find our books and/or us all over the internet, which so far is working just fine:

 

·        Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO

·        Barnes & Noble:  https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

·        Goodreads:  https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4898846.Mark_R_Hunter

·        Blog: https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/

·        Website: http://www.markrhunter.com/

·        Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozma914/

·        Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkRHunter914

·        Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrhunter/

·        Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkRHunter

·        Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MarkRHunter

·        Substack:  https://substack.com/@markrhunter

·        Smashwords:  https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ozma914

·        Audible:  https://www.audible.com/search?searchAuthor=Mark+R.+Hunter&ref_pageloadid=4C1TS2KZGoOjloaJ&pf

 

Remember: Printed books rarely break.

It's Book Release Day! Sort Of.

Yes, today is the release date for Haunted Noble County, Indiana. It's hit the bookseller websites (although not as an ebook yet), and I just received a box of what may or may not be copies of the book, although I've been too busy to actually open it. In my defense I was going to take a video of me opening it, and Emily and I haven't been in one place long enough to do it.

I don't know, maybe it's something else.

 

Things started going right immediately, starting with a flood of people wanting a signed copy straight from us. That was also something that went wrong because--despite me constantly talking about it online--the date sneaked up on us. As of when I write this, I haven't made arrangements for a local author appearance where I can distribute copies before late September, and there are way more people wanting them than I have time to deliver to.

Which is good, if you think about it. I always worry about whether anyone will want our newest book. This is the twelfth published, and I still have imposter syndrome.

On a related note, I should have gotten another book out earlier, so the book about ghosts and hauntings would be our 13th.

I even went around taking spooky photos to promote the book with. The irony is that the Old Jail Museum--arguably the spookiest looking structure in Albion--has no ghost stories associated with it.

 

So, what went wrong? There were some personal and family related things that I can't talk about here. I can talk about the prep for my upcoming hand surgery, which will happen on August 18th, and I just realized the joke: I really can't hand deliver the copies.

It's minor surgery, but starting last week I had to stop taking any form of certain pain medicines. Due to the wording on the pre-op papers I was led to believe that meant all pain medicines, including acetomenoph ... aceta ... ac ... Tylenol. Specifically the paper said I couldn't take paracetamol, which is another word for, yes, acetaminophen.

As all fourteen of my regular readers now, I have chronic pain issues. I stopped all meds on the 8th, and the following weekend was really, really rough. On Monday I called the ortho doctor, because all our internet overlords said taking Tylenol was just fine. He said, "taking Tylenol is just fine!"

So I took six, then crushed a bottle full and spread them over my body, then emptied a case full into the bathtub and soaked in it for six hours.

 

Where were we? Oh, yeah, the book.

Long before all this started, Emily set about updating our https://www.markrhunter.com/ website, so the new book would be there along with links to buy it. You people who want it mailed to you, that's where you can go to make the order and give me your mailing address.

Except Emily realized the entire website had to be completely redone. At exactly the same time her seasonal job is at its busiest. After working on it every spare hour, she punched the domain name transfer request with one day to spare.

Except the domain name transfer doesn't happen in one day. It may, in fact, take several days, and there's no way to rush it. So I don't know when you'll be able to order it, I don't know where I'll be passing copies out, and I have to work this weekend ahead of the surgery.

And there you have it. Both an apology and a sob story, and an epic fail. Whoever knows where I live is welcome to stop by, of course, if you don't mind the clutter, and I'll update things as we go along. But in the end I can only blame myself and my hand, and my back, and sometimes my head.
 

I WILL keep you updated! 

 

You can't find it on one of those sites yet, you will soon:

·        Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO

·        Barnes & Noble:  https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

·        Goodreads:  https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4898846.Mark_R_Hunter

·        Blog: https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/

·        Website: http://www.markrhunter.com/

·        Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozma914/

·        Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkRHunter914

·        Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrhunter/

·        Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkRHunter

·        Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MarkRHunter

·        Substack:  https://substack.com/@markrhunter

·        Tumblr:  https://www.tumblr.com/ozma914

·        Smashwords:  https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ozma914

·        Audible:  https://www.audible.com/search?searchAuthor=Mark+R.+Hunter&ref_pageloadid=4C1TS2KZGoOjloaJ&pf

 

Remember: Ghosts can’t read, so you may have to read for them.

Epic link fail

Okay, so, I'm on several social media sites, and I've been cross-posting by copying my original blog on Blogger, then pasting that onto places such as LiveJournal and others. I've just found out that when I do that, all the links to our books, the newsletter, our website, everything, changed into links that went right back to the blog.

For who knows how long. Which means either no one has been clicking on the links, or no one thought to tell me they were wrong. Either possibility makes me sad.

I might not have time or energy to see how far back this goes, but rest assured I'm going to make sure it doesn't happen again. Meanwhile links on Blogger work fine, such as on this one about the Michigan magazine's profile of me:

https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/2022/09/michigan-features-me-well-michigan.html

But when I pasted that link onto, say, LiveJournal, all the links go back to the Blogger post, instead of where they say they go. I might be able to copy from LJ TO Blogger, instead of the other way around.

It's going to take some time and Tylenol to figure it all out, but rest assured, I'm going to be more careful in the future. Also, these are the CORRECT links to our website, Barnes and Noble author's page, and Amazon author's page:

http://markrhunter.com/

https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

And to the newsletters are all here:

https://us10.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=02054e9863d409b2281390e3b&id=f39dd965f0

Edit, People ... Or Suffer My Fate

 Let me tell you all a story of improper editing, and how I left a path of scorched earth behind me that no army could hope to replicate.

The worst part is: It's all my fault. Try as I might, I can't blame anyone else, an idea that sets people (especially politicians and mid-level management) quaking in fear.

But you can learn from my fate, if you're a writer. Or even if you're not.

While a literary agent isn't an absolute requirement to be traditionally published, they can open doors and otherwise be a great help to an author's career. What agents want in their submission packages varies, as I've mentioned before. Generally they ask for a query letter, an author bio, the opening pages of your book (anywhere from five pages to several chapters), and a synopsis.

Writers hate the synopsis. You have to boil your (in this case) 82,000 word novel down into just a couple of pages, which should reveal all your major characters, plot, setting, and ending. That's all. How hard could it be?

For most writers, it's pretty hard.

I suppose Beowulf wonders why I keep taking photos of him while I'm writing. It's because he DISTRACTS ME.

Okay, so I had an outline for We Love Trouble, but it was too long to serve as a typical synopsis. After months of writing, revising, editing, and polishing the manuscript, I had to carve that outline down even more. I was exhausted. But the job wasn't over, so I by-gosh carved out that synopsis, finishing when it was so late even the dog was asleep.

The next day, confident I had everything ready, I started submitting.

Now, most literary agents accept simultaneous submissions. That is to say, they don't mind if you submit to more than one at a time. Most publishers have a problem with that: They want to be the only publisher that can see your manuscript for several months before they send you a form rejection letter. That becomes an incredibly stressful waiting game for writers.

Just the same, a good author-agent relationship is vital, so I carefully select which agents I'm going to query. The synopsis stays the same, of course. Imagine writing a new synopsis every time! Since I do the extra research, over the course of two weeks I only submitted to fourteen agents. They were ones I thought would make for a good fit.

Then I went on to other things: Writing, editing, submitting short stories, occasionally sleeping. Replies began to trickle in, all but one of them form rejections. It appeared that my careful targeting impressed no one.

A couple of months later I got time to send more submissions. I skimmed over my materials, just to make sure I didn't want to change anything. That's when I discovered I had whittled my outline down to a synopsis ...

But I didn't check that synopsis for errors.

"Oh, that? It's the dumpster fire that used to be my writing career. Move along."

I sent it on rife with typos, misplaced words, and ... well, no spelling errors, but otherwise it was a trian wrack. Just like that, my two weeks of submitting was cleared away like a tornado sucking up a trailer park. If those agents remember me at all, it will be with the kind of dislike people reserve for drivers who cut them off in traffic. No one's perfect, but this wasn't one error: This was as if FDR started off his famous Pearl Harbor speech by getting the date wrong.

"December 6th, 1942 ... a date that will ... no, wait ...."

Since corrected, of course, but that doesn't get those agents back on my possibilities list. E-mail addresses can be whitelisted to allow them through--mine has been blacklisted. I can only hope they aren't swapping stories about me at agent conventions.

Learn from my fate. Edit. Polish. But for crying out loud, if you have to revise, go back and polish again. Some people will tell you too much time can be spent on editing, but I'm living proof that the opposite is also true.

Ah, well ... I'm sure I'll laugh about this someday.

No. No, I won't.

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

Nice Fall, Have a Good Trip

It was a strange day, in that I did home maintenance work, but didn't get hurt.

Not exactly.

I closed all the storm windows, and replaced some screens. I still have creases in some of my finger bones from doing that in previous autumns.

I started up the furnace without so much as a single explosion. Our furnace uses hot water heat: Nice, even heating, without the pain and dust of blowers and ducts. However, it was constructed during the Nixon administration. Turning it off in the spring is kind of like a cliffhanger at the end of a TV season, when you're not sure if the show's going to be canceled.

I climbed on the roof to clean out a gutter, which drains water from the second floor, and eventually, onto my head. This requires me to stand on a rubber-coated flat portion of my roof. The last time I tried that when the roof was wet, I did an uncanny imitation of Charlie Brown trying to kick Lucy's football, complete with "Aaaarrrrgggghhhhh!"

All went boringly well, which I found very exciting.

To clean the other gutters I had to climb a ladder. As a firefighter of over three decades I have a great deal of experience climbing ladders. I've climbed ladders with fifty feet of fire hose draped over one shoulder, while carrying an ax in my other hand, with a forty pound air bank on my back, in zero visibility and zero degrees temperature. At no time on a fire scene have I ever had a mishap on a ladder. At home, while cleaning the gutters, I once had a twenty foot extension ladder fall on my ear.

The gutters are now clean. No life-threatening incidents ensued.

Honestly, I was beginning to despair of having anything to write about as I finished my fall prep work and went inside. There my wife asked me to get some frozen meat out of the garage freezer.

So I guess it's her fault.

My garage is presently junk central. I know what you're thinking, and no, yours isn't as bad as mine. It presently has in it three lawn mowers, due to past misadventures. There are also four giant cardboard boxes, the kind you put major kitchen appliances in, which we'd procured to build a fort for the grand-twins. There are several lawn-sized trash bags full of aluminum cans--we save them until we get over a hundred pounds, which gets us a better price at the recycling place. Out of room, I'd balanced one of them on my wheelbarrow. There are more tools than at Doc's Hardware, of the variety you'd usually find in a medieval torture chamber, and half of them are on the floor. There is 250 feet worth of extension cord and 50 feet of garden hose. For all that, I have never, ever fallen in my garage.

Until I had in my hand four packages of frozen meat, weighing perhaps fifteen pounds in all. For the record that included hamburger, sausage, chops, and steak.

I closed the freezer door, turned, and fell over.

It was pretty much as simple as that. Something got behind my feet, and that was that. On the way down my upper thighs hit a lawn mower, which made the rest of me go down that much harder. My head caved in a large wire animal cage which, I'm happy to point out, was unoccupied.

The good news is that the concrete floor broke the rest of my fall.

Then the huge cardboard box slowly tipped over directly toward me. It was full of bags of aluminum. Well, it was.

The whole thing was right out of a Home Alone movie.

So I lay there, taking inventory. Something (the mower's gas cap, I think) was jammed into my upper thigh. The bags had not broken open, so I hadn't suffocated in an avalanche of pop cans, and the bags were easily thrown aside. I was still holding three of the four frozen packages. The other problem was that, with my legs flung over the mower and my head jammed against the cage, I wasn't at all sure I would be able to get up.

I quickly formulated a plan. I would text to my wife: "Watson, come here; I want to see you". This was the first thing said by Bell on the first telephone call, and I figured she'd appreciate the humor. Too bad I'd left my phone inside.

So it took a little while to get off the floor, but eventually I did, and the rest is anticlimactic. Ibuprofen, muscle salve, literally rolling out of bed the next morning. If I had a buck for every time my back hurt, I'd buy a chiropracter. I still can't sit properly, as the gas cap seems to have actually bounced off my left upper femur.

 The irony there is that I was assaulted by the same mower I wrote about a few months ago, the one I had so many problems with. Revenge?

Or just one final indignity?

That one.

This home "improvement" sent me into physical therapy.

Revenge of the Water Heater

 Note: I wrote most of this piece a month ago, put it into a draft, and immediately forgot about it. I decided to post it now because a few days ago I mentioned in passing that I was attempting home maintenance, and there have since been several inquiries about me at local hospitals. I'm still here, I survived, and thanks to my brother my home once again has running water.
 

The thing about a water heater is that it's supposed to heat water--hence the name--and then hold aforementioned heated water until you let it out. If the water gets out before you want it to, that's a problem. It's also a problem if the heated water isn't heated, but never mind.

So when I saw water leaking out of the bottom of my water heater, it naturally occurred to me that I might have a problem. And what does one do in modern times when one has a problem? That's right: consult the internet.

The internet told me that the water might be coming from the drain valve, in which case I might be able to cap it. (It wasn't.) Or, it might be coming from anywhere else, in which case both I and my wallet were screwed. Further consultation revealed that "screwed" was not meant literally, so my collection of mismatched screwdrivers would not help me. Nor would the jar full of screws I've found in random places, and always wondered what they were supposed to be holding together.

Further, I discovered drinking a screwdriver would help, but only temporarily.

The internet told me my water heater is approaching its normal lifespan anyway, and there's no use crying over spilled water. However, it also told me that if the leak isn't too bad, and the water isn't damaging anything, I could go on using the heater for years more before it finally conks out.

(I suspect it was people on the internet who said that, rather than the internet itself. Then again, keep feeding information into a computer system and sooner or later it's going to figure stuff out for itself--we've all seen those movies.)

This idea suits me. (The "keep using it" idea, not "the internet's taking over" idea, which terrifies me.) "Ignore the problem and maybe it'll go away" is a creed I've lived by when it comes to home repairs, or anything mechanical. Yes, that may have led to a tire falling off my car, but no creed is perfect.

On a quite definitely related note, I also discovered that the valve to shut off water to my heater is corroded so badly that it's no longer a valve. It's just a scaly green blob with no logical function, rather like a politician's brain. I can't change the heater without shutting off water to the entire house, and the house is heated with water. If that's not an excuse to put the whole thing off until cold weather ends, I don't know what is. What could possibly go wrong?

 So I put it off until May, and started work three days before our town's spring cleanup day, when I could put the old water heater out. Three days later I was indeed able to take the old heater out, just in time. At that point I didn't have any water, hot or cold, and due to a pressure surge I'd also lost my  washing machine. But hey, I got rid of that old water heater.

I could go into more detail, but it's a little hard to type with these burned fingers and the strained shoulder. On the other hand, the sore toe and damaged knees make for a good excuse to catch up on episodes of Fargo. Thanks to my brother everything's up and running except for the washing machine, which was at least three decades old and bought used, anyway.

My home, which was also bought used, is always looking for new and original ways to beat me down. I suppose when it's time to install the new washing machine, it'll find a new way.

This is where my home maintenance projects usually go.

Worst Home Maintenance Fail Ever

When I opened my Blogger account this morning, I found that all my visitor stats had disappeared. (They popped back into existence a few hours later, having apparently undergone some kind of existential crisis. I've been there.)

One would be tempted to blame Blogger, or the internet in general. However, in the last two days I've broken a brand new pipe wrench, a washing machine, a copper water pipe, a vent hood, my back, and the entire water supply to my house. Can't speak for the new water heater: I haven't advanced to the point of igniting the pilot.

So for the moment I'm not prepared to blame anyone else for stuff going wrong in my  vicinity.

On an all-too-related note, you might not be hearing from me for a few days.

This photo is from my chimney demolition, which led to a broken sledge hammer, smashed ladder, and big hole in the ground.

There's a syndrome for everything that hurts, and most things that don't

I’ve been diagnosed with Acute Mechanical Back Syndrome.

Yeah, I hurt my back.

Chronic pain is different from acute pain, which isn’t cute at all. Years ago I spent several hours at a business fire, most of it with a steel breathing air tank on my back because I was a dumb rookie. You know those big external fuel tanks on the space shuttle? Like that, only on your back. The newer air tanks are lighter, but—too late.

Now my back hurts all the time more or less, but you get used to it. More or less. Chronic back pain is like members of Congress who just keep getting elected, and never quite go away.

Then there’s acute pain. One time at an accident scene I pulled a back muscle while helping to carry a body up an embankment. (Yeah.) I managed to crab-walk into the rescue truck, got home without whimpering too much, and died. This was back in the days when firefighters didn’t admit to pain, or to being without insurance.

That’s acute pain, which I don’t usually get in exciting ways. At fires I’ve had ceilings fall on me, faced venting propane tanks, been on burning roofs, and once I missed a step in a smoke-filled building and fell down a flight of stairs.  (I’ve also done that in buildings that weren’t burning, but I’d rather not talk about it.) Generally I’m a pretty dull person, but every now and then I get into a situation.

But when I really get hurt? Never an interesting story, unless I embellish. This time, for instance, I’ve been laid up for days with intense lower back pain. What did I do? Rescue a kitten from a bear? Put out a flaming cocktail bar? Yank on Chuck Norris’ cowboy hat?

Nope.

I jumped over a puddle.

Yep. Just did an extra-big scissor step over some water, and felt a “twang!” like an overstretched guitar string. Then came the acute pain.

“I’ll be better tomorrow,” I told my wife. I wasn’t. I hurt so bad I couldn’t even write. Luckily for me she’s an excellent nurse, although she did overdo it a bit on al the stuff she made me do. Heat, cold, pills, rest—sheesh. On Monday I crawled into the doctor’s office, and he prescribed some stuff that had me counting the little rainbows spinning around on the ceiling. Then he gave me possibly the best advise any man who wants to heal could possibly get:

“Do whatever your wife tells you to.”

Yeah, those breathing air tanks. I had more air and more hair.