Another Trip to Town

Did I just say . . maybe yesterday . . that I’m not going back to town til after the first of the year? I lied.

It was no one’s fault. I think I’ve mentioned that we had two ceiling fans that quit working within weeks of each other. In one extra bedroom, we have a queen size bed and that’s where I sort my yarn when I need to spread it out because Boots is in the sewing room and spreading yarn out in there is a disaster. It’s rare that anyone sleeps in that room but if Vince goes to bed early and I stay up late, I usually sleep in the extra room because when I go in there, trying to get Rita situated in her bed, and then me crawling into bed, I usually wake Vince and he has a hard time going back to sleep. I used to sleep in the extra room a lot because he snored but with his CPAP, he doesn’t snore at all and I love the quiet rhythm of the CPAP. Also, if it’s going to storm, one of us . . I don’t know why I say that because it’s always me . . sleeps in the extra room. Rita panics with thunder and there’s no use in both of us staying awake all night. Vince will usually keep her in the master bedroom because there are fewer windows so she doesn’t seem to hear the thunder as much.

But, the fan in that bedroom has gotten noisy. The last time I slept in there, I was up a dozen times trying to get it to be quiet . . I failed! So, we went to Home Depot looking for a fan. That’s about the only place around here to get a fan. Because our house is so dark, I wanted a fan with really good lights but so many of the fans have tiny little bases on their bulbs so that means tiny lights and even with LEDs, there’s not much brightness. Add to that a frosted or yellowish globe and I’m needing a flashlight in there even during the day. So, we were looking for a 52″ fan, with four lights, with clear globes, at least medium bulbs and a remote. I’m not sure what the people were thinking when they built this house. It was in 2006 so it isn’t like it’s a 1900 models before electricity! We have very few electric plugs and the light switch in the extra bedrooms is just a single switch so you have to pull the chain to turn on the light. I do not like that so I thought the remote would be great.

Within about the same time frame, the fan in the other extra room just stopped working. The light still worked. It acted like it wanted to work but it just wouldn’t get going. That’s the room where I lay out the wet knitted items to dry and a fan is necessary in there.

We kinda forgot about needing fans til I spread out the two cowls yesterday and tapped the fan switch as I was walking out the door . . and nothing happened. Vince went in and messed with it and got it working on a very slow speed so we decided first thing this morning, we were going to buy a fan.

Looking at fans online last night, I realized that, at least for the fans in the price range in which we were looking – not expensive – you could have a remote OR a wall switch. I want a wall switch because I was thinking I’d keep the remote by the bed and I don’t want to mount the remote by the wall switch . . that wouldn’t even work because the remote does all the controlling. There’s always the problem with me being me and I would probably lose that remote and then what would I do?

So, we decided we could rule out the remote.

About five years ago, we had an electricity come to “fix” the fans. I thought he was going to run a second wire so we’d have a double switch at the fans – one for the light and one for the fan. NO! He put in some kind of gizmo in place of the one switch and one button controlled the fan and one controlled the light but even if I turned the light off at that switch, it still blinked so all night, the light was blinking unless I got up and pulled the chain to turn the light off so then, the switch didn’t work and I’d have to pull the chain to turn the light on, then turn the wall switch on so it was worse than it was before we paid the electrician to fix it!

Yes, we needed new fans and we probably need a new electrician too.

We bought fans today and tomorrow Vince is going to put up at least one of them.

We used to have Alexa and some Dots. There was a Dot in that room and I could turn the bedside lamp on and off with that. But, we had to stop using Alexa because our internet was so bad and it took up bandwidth that we didn’t have.

Now that we have decent internet, I got a Google Nest Hub so while we were out, I decided to get a mini hub and put it in the bedroom so I can turn the bedside lamp off and on so, if in the middle of the night, I have to go in that room to sleep, I can just say “Hey Google, turn on the lamp” and not have to walk across the room in the dark or have to mess with doing whatever it takes to turn the fan light on.

We went to Walmart . . Vince needed something. It was crazy busy in there. The streets were crowded. Home Depot was crowded. I do hope I’m not going to have to go anywhere else any time soon.